Robert B. Abrams

...areas in Cambodia, which have been used for five years as bases for attacks on our forces in South Vietnam.

This past weekend in the Western White House in California, I met with Secretary Laird, General Abrams, and other senior advisors to receive a first-hand report on the progress of this operation.

Based on General Abrams' report, I can now state that this has been the most successful operation of this long and very difficult war.

Before going into the details which form the basis for this conclusion, I believe it would be helpful to review briefly why I considered it necessary to make this decision, what our objectives were, and the prospects for achieving those objectives.

You will recall that on April 20th, I announced the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 American troops from Vietnam within a year.

Now, with the rainy season now beginning, it will take the enemy months to rebuild his shattered installations and to replace the equipment we have captured or destroyed.

The success of these operations to date has guaranteed that the June 30 deadline I set for withdrawal of all American forces from Cambodia will be met.

General Abrams advises me that 17,000 of the 31,000 Americans who entered Cambodia have already returned to Vietnam.

The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions.

The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spiro Agnew to eat hog moths confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaeffer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.

I think you can learn a lot by studying history.

And I think one of the sad things is that we spent, I think, six years plus in Iraq forgetting the positive lessons that have been learned by General Abrams in Vietnam, which is that going to fight an enemy that hides among the people, the first requirement is to protect the people instead of body counts, instead of sort of indiscriminate slaughter.

People will start turning in intelligence, and when Abrams came to Vietnam, it turned around dramatically.

Then along come Petraeus and Mattis with more or less the same idea, and for a while, some of I don't want to name any names.

Some people in the Senate were mocking them.