Hawaii’s congressional delegation is cheerleading the war in Gaza while advising Israel not to make the same mistakes we made.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy — finish Hamas using Israeli Defense Force tactics, dropping 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated refugee camps — are eerily similar to our strategy in Vietnam.

Destroy the Viet Cong. No need to be fastidious about how it’s done. In Vietnam, half the population was V.C., but nobody knew which half.

The result of no strategy beyond enemy body counts was a humiliating defeat by an indigenous resistance against a superpower that put everything it had into the fight short of all-out nuclear war, including nearly 2 million draftees and 7 million tons of bombs dropped on four countries. Three million “untargeted” civilians died.

Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, who never served a day in uniform, patronizingly informed us that civilians die in a war. Subtext: Palestinian civilian deaths are not a problem.

Paul Pollitt

Kaneohe

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