A friend of mine often responds to comments by the folks who so eagerly embrace defeat and embarrassment for America with his recollection of the Vietnam War, "Hell, we were winning it when I left..."
I've told the story here about students accepting the idea that we lost Vietnam badly. If Walter Cronkite said that Tet '68 was a massive defeat, it must have been so...but it wasn't. The NVN got their collective butts kicked from the DMZ to the southernmost tip of MR-4 in that week.
We lost 58,000 brave Americans over those years, but estimates for enemy losses range between 1.5 and 3 million. That's not much of a victory.
I don't know if I'm as confident at this gentleman regarding the capability of the SVN forces to withstand the North Vietnamese onslaught. The government was largely corrupt and the military leadership was only partially competent. Yet, it wasn't so much that corruption as the lack of promised support that caused the collapse. And it would be difficult to paint the aftermath as a desired outcome.
The "undeclared and un-winnable" mantra is still on the lips of too many in our government. We don't like wars and I'm not about to argue that we should embrace them. But there are things worth fighting for and there are forces in this world which should be defeated. If we fail to do those necessary tasks when we see them before us, then we are condemned to reliving history once again.
2 comments:
This is like saying the Japanese won the Battle of the Coral Sea because they sunk the Lexington.
It's Strategic Victories that count not the tactical ones.
Leadfoot
Mr Rasimus,
I liked what you said about things worth fighting for and things that should be defeated.
For that reason I have no time for critics of the Vietnam war. The communist manifesto, World wars 1 & 2, the communists annexing eastern Europe, the fall of China, the Korean war... critics would do well to reflect on what we were up against then.
In light of those times I do not believe that it was wrong for the US and NZ/Australia to be standing and fighting for democracy in Vietnam or elsewhere. In that sense I believe that such critics deliberately take the Vietnam war out of context. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford and indeed Nixon, for all their faults, were at heart basically decent men in my view. The US, like the British, has done so much for the world.
And to hell with those who claim otherwise.
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