Congress is set to reconvene and one of the biggest and most talked about items on the agenda is what is going to happen in Iraq.

According to an email I received from some veteran friends this week, the answer was already disbursed last week through a news release from Fred Barnes, the conservative columnist and commentator.

According to the release, if it is actually from him, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, President Bush is strongly leaning toward employing a strategy in Iraq similar to the strategy employed in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive of 1968 by Gen. Creighton Abrams, who succeeded Gen. William Westmoreland as the head honcho there.

Although completely ignored by the World Terrorist Media, and its local subsidiary, the American Terrorist Media, both then and ever since, Abrams' strategy was hugely successful at eliminating the remaining Viet Cong military and political elements, as well as inflicting massive casualty counts on the North Vietnamese communist army.

That strategy, which employed a defeat and hold approach, also gave the South Vietnamese the much needed time to establish a pro-democracy government presence in the cities and countryside.

I was there at the time, and I remember two things about the 1968-1969 operations in northern I Corps where the U.S. Marines were the dominant military force. First, there were vicious battles from the coast to the Laotian border from mid-1968 til February of 1969. Then, by the late spring of 1969, although battles continued, and were intense in some places, the North Vietnamese were no longer as strong or as widely dispersed as they had been a year earlier.

The reason is because more than a hundred thousand of their troops had been killed in that period, and the US forces had finally reached their peak strength of nearly 540,000, which gave us battlefield parity, if not outright superiority in the numbers department.

That enabled the US and South Vietnamese forces to not only defeat the communist armies in battle, as we had been doing all along, but also to hold the areas where we had been successful, thus giving the south the chance to permanently secure areas that previously had been under communist control.

We have been hearing for many months now that one reason why the sectarian violence continues in Iraq, as well as the operations against outside terrorists, is because American troops are spread too thin to hold the areas where they defeat the terrorists. Thus, as happened in Vietnam, as soon as Al Qaeda or whichever group of whack jobs is operating in an area can reinforce their fighting units, they come back and take over the area again, not because they defeat our troops, but because neither US nor Iraqi forces are there to oppose them.

You can't expect the local populace to have any faith in us or their new government if the terrorists can melt away whenever we show up in force, and then slink back in to wreak havoc on our supporters when we leave.

The way to defeat this tactic is to kill terrorists in numbers so large that it becomes impossible to reinforce, as we did in Vietnam, and to have enough American troops in place to hold the areas. This is not an indefinite fix. The ultimate goal is to have a reliable Iraqi Army in place to take control of liberated and pacified areas so we can leave with confidence that the area will stay secure.

Another facet of the Vietnam War that has been totally ignored by the ATM is that the South Vietnamese forces did become capable of standing their own ground, and they showed it in the spring of 1972 when the North Vietnamese communists launched a full-force, all-out invasion of the south and got their asses handed to them on a silver platter by the South Vietnamese ground troops supported by our air power.

This was all given away by the US Congress in the following two years, leading to the ultimate collapse of South Vietnam. There are still people in Congress who were leading the retreat, names like Kennedy and Murtha come to mind, and Kerry was lurking around there someplace although he hadn't been elected to anything yet.

You can bet these guys still don't want the world to know just how close the south was to defeating the communists. Because then they will have to face up to their complicity in the events that led to the four million or so innocent Southeast Asians, including Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who were butchered, not to mention the millions more who were enslaved, tortured, and forced to flee by the communists in the region.

If you weren't born then, or were just a child you probably don't remember hearing a lot about that because the WTM and ATM all but ignored it. Congress was only too happy to spend its time boosting then-president Jimmy Carter's "reforms" which led to such a disastrous period in US history that the voters kicked him out the very first chance they got.

But it happened, not because of failures by the US military, but because of the spineless, craven, cowardly actions of the US Congress that willingly handed an emerging ally over to a sadistic, brutal enemy, and then blamed the military, not to mention the Vietnam veterans, for the resultant catastrophe to cover up their cowardice.

This can and will happen again if we don't show decisively that we can and are winning in Iraq. So, as I said in a previous post, let's not tiptoe around this issue.

News reports today say that the Democrats in Congress already are planning to pull the financial plug on the War in Iraq, the same exact tactic they used to reverse our victory in Vietnam. These have to be some of the most traitorous, despicable individuals in our government, and they have to be stopped before they make sure that history repeats itself.

So rather than the "surge" of troops that the media is talking about, Come Big or Stay Home. Bring in a tidal wave of troops, a tsunami. Flood that place, kick the living crap out of any terrorist forces and any local militias that are supporting them or working against a unified Iraq.

History has shown that this approach can work, so let's stop screwing around and get to it. It's going to be damned hard for a bunch of dead terrorists or their supporters to take an area back after we secure it. Want a non-United States example of just how successful a determined army can be when it is unleashed against these terrorist monsters?

Check out Ethiopia. Took them less than two weeks to clear the scum out of neighboring Somalia. Remember that place, the one where President Clinton put our Army Rangers, Marines, and Delta forces in harms way, then didn't support them, and then cut and ran?

Remember Somalia, the place where the Humvee armor problems first surfaced but the Democrats didn't say a word about it until Bush got elected eight years later? Remember that place? Stop by some time in the near future. But be careful you don't bump into fleeing Islamo-fascist terrorists running like hell for the nearest border.

Oh, you may not recognize them as terrorists anymore. They were dragging Somali men off the streets a week ago if they didn't have beards and approved hair styles. This week they are shaving their own beards and trying to hide in the bushes.

Don't look too freakin' invincible any more do they?