19th February 2008, 3:21 PM
Great new editorial on the ridiculousness of the "We actually won Vietnam!" argument that the right has come up with (as you can see in this thread).
That argument, that we could have won, is absolutely absurd and totally wrong. I've tried to say that before here, but this says it even better...
This is important because of the kinds of things the Republicans (and John McCain) keep saying about Vietnam... it must be shown to be as delusional as it is (that is, the people who believe it believe it because they are willfully deluding themselves).
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor...o_vietnam/
That argument, that we could have won, is absolutely absurd and totally wrong. I've tried to say that before here, but this says it even better...
This is important because of the kinds of things the Republicans (and John McCain) keep saying about Vietnam... it must be shown to be as delusional as it is (that is, the people who believe it believe it because they are willfully deluding themselves).
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor...o_vietnam/
Quote:The revisionist approach to Vietnam
Email|Print| Text size – + By H.D.S. Greenway
February 19, 2008
FORTY YEARS ago this week, as twilight fell over the Republic of South Vietnam, I was lying on a stretcher in the rain outside a military hospital on a base near Hue. There were so many casualties that day that we had to wait our turn for overworked and overwhelmed doctors to attend to us. First came the wounded who could be saved, putting aside those who could not. Triage, they called it. Then came the lesser wounds, such as my own, which could wait their turn.
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The surgeon who eventually operated on me was furious - furious that he had been told to treat Americans first, leaving our South Vietnamese allies out in the rain.
It was the Tet Offensive, the turning point in the war. For it was Tet that brought the United States to sue for peace, and President Johnson to give up running for another term. Negotiations dragged on and on, and seven years later it was all over.
Today there is a school of thought that says Tet was a terrible defeat for the Communist Vietnamese, that it should never have caused us to flinch, that the war was basically won by 1972, and that if we had only stayed the course we would have won it. Henry Kissinger has said as much, whole generations of soldiers were told that, and, it seems, that many around President Bush believe it as well.
When Iraq became the quagmire it is, I used to wonder how we could make the same mistake again so soon. But then I realized that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were in the Oval office with President Ford when Saigon fell. Perhaps they, and the worshipers of American power, felt that, this time, we would get it right.
In a strictly military sense, Tet was a defeat for the communists. But as the Prussian military strategist, Karl von Clausewitz, said, "War is a continuation of policy by other means . . . a real political instrument." And politically, Tet showed there was no light at the end of the tunnel, and that to fight on in an endless war was not something the American public was going to stand for. Vietnam showed that we could win every battle and still lose the war. And if I am not mistaken, we have never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Lewis Sorley's book "A Better War" is the most persuasive account I've read advocating this revisionist theory. It is filled with statistics to prove its case. But let me cite two examples of battles that I observed. In 1971, operation Lam Son 719 was an attempt by the South Vietnamese, with American air power, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Sorley's statistics would have you believe that it was a success. But those of us who were there, and saw the South Vietnamese coming out of Laos beaten with their tail between their legs, know differently. Statistics seldom tell the whole story.Continued...
Quote:Page 2 of 2 --
In 1972, during the Easter Offensive, Sorley recounts how the South Vietnamese held the line on the My Chanh River, north of Hue, with the help of American fire power, but not American troops, who had mostly gone by then.
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I remember that night, with the terrifying sound of North Vietnamese tanks in the dark, and the calm voice of an American adviser speaking softly into his radio, saying, "Lend me your assets." And in the assets came, fighter bombers from Thailand, B-52s from Guam, naval gunfire from the South China Sea, and the South Vietnamese held.
But Sorley is too honest not to mention the other side of the story. The North Vietnamese failed to overrun the country, but the Easter Offensive ended with huge swaths of South Vietnamese territory lost. And the cease-fire that followed did not - could not - require the North Vietnamese to withdraw back across the border. South Vietnam, even with our air power, could hot hurl them back. Thus was South Vietnam fatally outflanked, awaiting the next offensive. And with the North Vietnamese there would always be another offensive.
Sorely points to the success of pacification efforts in the South. But when I drove through the Mekong River Delta, after the cease-fire that left opposing forces in place, village after village that we had on our maps as pacified had raised the Viet Cong flag. I met with a Viet Cong leader in the forest who told me that South Vietnam was a hollow shell that would soon collapse of its own weight. He turned out to be right.
In the end, the South Vietnamese leadership could not inspire the way the communist nationalists did, perhaps because the South seemed to be fighting for foreigners. For the United States, as for France before, it was basically a colonial war, not that vital to our national interests. For Hanoi, it was everything.
When the end came in 1975, and my helicopter lifted away from the American Embassy in Saigon, with the ammunition dumps blowing up in the gathering dark, I felt that we had betrayed our allies - not because we were unwilling to continue the war, but because we had gone to war there in the first place, unnecessarily and foolishly, understanding nothing, only to cause more death and destruction than could ever be justified.
There is little to be gained in saying but if only this, or only that. Constant surges won all our battles, but it was never enough for the South Vietnamese to stand alone. The revisionists have forgotten their Clausewitz.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.