How I began to teach about the Vietnam War

[FriendlyFire]

Nam .
In a word a botched military adventure

"from start to finnish, american leaders remained catastrophically ignorant of vietnmese history, culture, values, motives, and abilities. Misperceiving both it enemy and its ally and imprisoned in the myopic conviction that sheer military force could somehow overcome adverse political circumstances, washington stumbled from one failure to the next in the continuing delusion that success was always just ahead" - without honor - arnold r. Isaacs

 

[Agent327]

More like a botched political adventure.

This expresses my view of the war: "I began to teach a university course on the U.S.-Vietnam war in the late 1990s due to a lingering sense of civic responsibility (the younger generation should know about that war) and a more selfish idea that I needed to do it for my own peace of mind. Forcing myself to lecture about the war was a liberating experience as I began to find my own voice amidst all the books that have accumulated on the war. Many of the books follow a standard narrative exemplifying the axioms I discussed above, which I find unsatisfying. Many important topics are ignored, particularly the aspirations, plans, and actions of Vietnamese who fought for the hope of democracy in their land.

At a conference about that time, I met one such Vietnamese, a man who had served in various Saigon governments from the late 1950s to the early 1970s and who was subsequently imprisoned several years before immigrating to the United States. I had many questions I wanted to ask him, but he looked at me doubtfully and asked permission to pose a question to me first. His question was: "Do you think in that war we had a noble cause?" I was stunned by this unexpected question, but from the bottom of my heart came an answer that even surprised me: "Yes, I do." With that, the man's demeanor toward me dramatically changed to trust and openness. He explained that in his experience most American academics do not respect him because they believe that he chose to be on the wrong side of the war. Yet his only crime was to hope for a democracy in his country and to trust in the United States."
From the linked OP article.

Except, for the US, it wasn't a 'fight for democracy', but rather a 'fight against Communism'. This was the domino theory, and US policy in Southeast Asia made it work brilliantly. In the end, there was no right side - only a winning and a losing side.

Interestingly, in this entire military's narrative, there's no explanation why the home anti-war mood was able to spread to the military actually serving in Nam. That doesn't happen just because, it happens when a war is going badly.

 

[abradley]

More like a botched political adventure.



Except, for the US, it wasn't a 'fight for democracy', but rather a 'fight against Communism'. This was the domino theory, and US policy in Southeast Asia made it work brilliantly. In the end, there was no right side - only a winning and a losing side.

Interestingly, in this entire military's narrative, there's no explanation why the home anti-war mood was able to spread to the military actually serving in Nam. That doesn't happen just because, it happens when a war is going badly.

It's a long and twisted road, but, IIRC, there were few campus protests until Johnson change the draft deferment rules making it harder to get a collage deferment, then the campuses exploded, before that the students didn't care, they were safe.

Then it spread to the military because students got drafted, and media was fanning the flames.

 

[FriendlyFire]

It's a long and twisted road, but, IIRC, there were few campus protests until Johnson change the draft deferment rules making it harder to get a collage deferment, then the campuses exploded, before that the students didn't care, they were safe.

Then it spread to the military because students got drafted, and media was fanning the flames.

Nixon also change the tour of duty rules, forcing service troops into front line combat positions, as well as pushing through bombing attacks increased pilot (and civilian) casualties.

Between the media spin which painted an over optimistic and false narrative which was soon burst and the US carrying slaughter of civilians being displayed for the first time into home. Of course morale would fall and support for fighting the war collapsed. Then of course Nixon promised to end the war and extract the US instead hes escalation did nothing of the sort and US patience with mounting casualties ran out.

 

[abradley]

Nixon also change the tour of duty rules, forcing service troops into front line combat positions, as well as pushing through bombing attacks increased pilot (and civilian) casualties.

Between the media spin which painted an over optimistic and false narrative which was soon burst and the US carrying slaughter of civilians being displayed for the first time into home. Of course morale would fall and support for fighting the war collapsed. Then of course Nixon promised to end the war and extract the US instead hes escalation did nothing of the sort and US patience with mounting casualties ran out.

But why? Maybe because of people like:

My Vietnam Lessons
By David Horowitz
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/My Vietnam Lessons.htm
2003

The following is an excerpt from a chapter in the book Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, by David Horowitz:


When I see protesters in the flush of youthful idealism holding signs that proclaim “No Vietnams in Central America,” a feeling of ineffable sadness overtakes me. For 20 years ago I was one of them. In 1962, as a graduate student at Berkeley, I wrote the first book of New Left protest, Student,[1][1] and helped to organize the first “anti-war” demonstration opposing what we denounced as U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

In the mid-Sixties, I went to England and helped to organize the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which supported what we called the Vietnamese struggle for independence from the United States, as well as the International War Crimes Tribunal, which brought American war atrocities under intense and damning scrutiny but ignored atrocities committed by the Communist forces in Vietnam. While in England, I also wrote The Free World Colossus, a New Left history of the Cold War, which was used as a radical text in colleges and in the growing movement against the Vietnam War. At the end of the Sixties, I returned to America as an editor of Ramparts, the most widely read New Left magazine. Our most famous cover appeared during Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1972 for a second term. It featured a photograph of the My Lai massacre with a sign superimposed and planted among the corpses saying, “Re-Elect the President.”

Let me make this perfectly clear: Those of us who inspired and then led the anti-war movement did not want merely to stop the killing as so many veterans of those domestic battles now claim. We wanted the Communists to win. It is true that some of us may have said we only wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam, but we understood that this meant the Communists would win. “Bring the troops home” was our slogan; the fall of Saigon was the result.

There was a political force in American life that did want a peace that would not also mean a Communist victory — a peace that would deny Hanoi its conquest and preserve the integrity of South Vietnam. That force was led by our archenemy President Richard Nixon, whose campaign slogans were “Peace with Honor” in Vietnam and “Law and Order” at home. Just as we did not want honor that meant preserving the government of South Vietnam, so we did not respect law and order, because respecting the democratic process would have meant that the majority in America, who supported President Nixon and South Vietnam, would have prevailed.

Like today’s young radicals, we Sixties activists had a double standard when it came to making moral and political judgments. We judged other countries and political movements—specifically socialist countries and revolutionary movements—by the futures we imagined they could have if only the United States and its allies would get out of their way. We judged America, however, by its actual performance, which we held up to a standard of high and even impossible ideals. We were, in the then-fashionable term, “alienated” from what was near to us, unable to judge it with any objectivity.

Some of this alienation—a perennial and essential ingredient of all political leftism—could be attributed to youth itself, the feeling that we could understand the world better and accomplish more than our elders could. There was another dimension to our disaffection, however, an ideology that committed us to “truths” behind the common sense surface of things.

I myself was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and, therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed that they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to underdevelopment and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged. I believed that Marxist economic planning was the most rational solution to their underdevelopment and would soon bring them unparalleled prosperity—an idea refuted as dramatically by the experience of the last 70 years as the ancillary notion that private property is the source of all tyranny and that socialist states would soon become free.

On the other hand, the same Marxist analysis told me that America, however amenable to reform in the past, was set on a course that would make it increasingly rigid, repressive, and ultimately fascist. The United States was the leviathan of a global imperialist system under attack at home and abroad. Its ruling class could not afford to retreat from this challenge; it could only grow more reactionary and repressive. This expectation, wrong in every respect, was not an idiosyncratic theory of mine but was the lynchpin of the New Left’s political view of the world generally and of its strategy of opposition to America’s war in Vietnam in particular.
The New Left believed that, in Vietnam, America’s corporate liberal empire had reached a point of no return. As a result, electoral politics and any effort to reform it were futile and counterproductive. The only way to alter America’s imperial course was to take to the streets—first to organize resistance to the war and then to “liberate” ourselves from the corporate capitalist system. That was why we were in the streets. That was why we did not take a hard stand against the bomb throwers in our midst.

What happened to change my views and cause me to have second thoughts? As our opposition to the war grew more violent and our prophecies of impending fascism more intense, I had taken note of how we were actually being treated by the system we condemned. By the decade's end we had (deliberately) crossed the line of legitimate dissent and abused every First Amendment privilege and right granted us as Americans. While American boys were dying overseas, we spat on the flag, broke the law, denigrated and disrupted the institutions of government and education, gave comfort and aid (even revealing classified secrets) to the enemy. Some of us provided a protective propaganda shield for Hanoi's Communist regime while it tortured American fliers; others engaged in violent sabotage against the war effort. All the time I thought to myself: If we did this in any other country, the very least of our punishments would be long prison terms and the pariah status of traitors. In any of the socialist countries we supported—from Cuba to North Vietnam—we would spend most of our lives in jail and, more probably, be shot.
And what actually happened to us in repressive capitalist America? Here and there our wrists were slapped (some of us went to trial, some spent months in jail) but basically the country tolerated us. And listened to us. We began as a peripheral minority, but as the war dragged on without an end in sight, people joined us: first in thousands and then in tens of thousands, swelling our ranks until finally we reached what can only be called the conscience of the nation. America itself became troubled about its presence in Vietnam, about the justice and morality of the war it had gone there to fight. And because the nation became so troubled, it lost its will to continue the war and withdrew.

Thus was refuted all the preconceptions we had had about the rigidity of American politics, about the controlled capitalist media (which, in fact, provided the data that fueled our attacks on the war), and about the ruling-class lock on American foreign policy. That policy had shown itself in its most critical dimension responsive to the will of ordinary people and to their sense of justice and morality. As a historian, I believe I am correct in my judgment that America’s withdrawal from the battlefront in Vietnam because of domestic opposition is unique in human history: There is no other case on record of a major power retreating from a war in response to the moral opposition of its own citizenry.

If America’s response to this test of fire gave me an entirely new understanding of American institutions and of the culture of democracy that informs and supports them, the aftermath of the U.S. retreat gave me a new appreciation of the Communist opponent. America not only withdrew its forces from Vietnam, as we on the left said it could never do, but from Laos and Cambodia and, ultimately, from its role as guardian of the international status quo.[2][2]

Far from increasing the freedom and wellbeing of Third World nations, as we in the left had predicted, however, America’s withdrawal resulted in an international power vacuum that was quickly filled by the armies of Russia, Cuba, and the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge. All this bloodshed and misery was the direct result of America’s post-Vietnam withdrawal, of the end of Pax Americana, which we had ardently desired and helped to bring about.
In Vietnam itself, the war’s aftermath showed beyond any doubt the struggle there was not ultimately to achieve or prevent self-determination but—as various presidents said and we denied—a Communist conquest of the South. Today, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, whose cause we supported, no longer exists. Its leaders are dead, in detention camps, under house arrest, in exile, powerless. America left Vietnam 10 years ago; but today Hanoi’s army is the fourth largest in the world, and Vietnam has emerged as a Soviet satellite and imperialist aggressor in its own right, subverting the independence of Laos, invading and colonizing Cambodia.

These events confronted me with a supreme irony: The nation I had believed to be governed by corporate interests, a fountainhead of world reaction, was halted in mid-course by its conscience-stricken and morally aroused populace; the forces I had identified with progress, once freed from the grip of U.S. “imperialism,” revealed them-selves to be oppressive, predatory and unspeakably ruthless. I was left with this question: What true friend of the South Vietnamese, or the Cambodians, or the Ethiopians, or the people of Afghanistan, would not wish that Pax Americana were still in force?

There was yet another Vietnam lesson for me when I pondered the question put by Jeanne Kirkpatrick to the still-active veterans of the New Left: “How can it be that persons so deeply committed to the liberation of South Vietnam and Cambodia from Generals Thieu and Lon Nol were so little affected by the enslavement that followed their liberation? Why was there so little anguish among the American accomplices who helped Pol Pot to power?” Indeed, why have such supposedly passionate advocates of Third World liberation not raised their voices in protest over the rape of Afghanistan or the Cuban-abetted catastrophe to Ethiopia?

Not only has the left failed to make a cause of these Marxist atrocities, it has failed to consider the implications of what we now know about Hanoi’s role in South Vietnam’s “civil war.” For North Vietnam’s victors have boldly acknowledged that they had intruded even more regular troops into the South than was claimed by the Presidential White Paper used to justify America’s original commitment of military forces—a White Paper that we leftists scorned at the time as a fiction based on anti-Communist paranoia and deception. But today’s left is too busy denigrating Ronald Reagan’s White Papers on Soviet and Cuban intervention in Central America to consider the implications of this past history to the present.

My experience has convinced me that historical ignorance and moral blindness are endemic to the American left, necessary conditions of its existence. It does not value the bounty it actually has in this country. In the effort to achieve a historically bankrupt fantasy—call it socialism, call it “liberation”—it undermines the very privileges and rights it is the first to claim.

The lesson I learned from Vietnam was not a lesson in theory but a lesson in practice. Observing this nation go through its worst historical hour from a vantage on the other side of the barricade, I came to understand that democratic values are easily lost and, from the evidence of the past, only rarely achieved, that America is a precious gift, a unique presence in the world of nations. Because it is the strongest of the handful of democratic societies that mankind has managed to create, it is also a fortress that stands between the free nations of the world and the dark, totalitarian forces that threaten to engulf them.

My values have not changed, but my sense of what supports and makes them possible has. I no longer can join “anti-war” movements that seek to disarm the Western democracies in the face of the danger that confronts them. I support the current efforts of America’s leadership to rebuild our dangerously weakened military defenses, and I endorse the conservative argument that America needs to be vigilant, strong, and clear of purpose in its life-and-death struggle with its global totalitarian adversaries. As an ex-radical, I would only add that in this struggle Americans need to respect and encourage their own generosity—their tolerance for internal dissent and their willingness to come to the aid of people who are fighting for their freedom.

 

[FriendlyFire]

But why? Maybe because of people like:

Maybe because of people like:
Maybe if people who supported the war actually went and fought and died instead of running to France, morale would be higher ?

Mitt Romney ‘Long’ To Serve In Vietnam?

During the height of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service by seeking and receiving four military draft deferments, some for university study and others for serving as a “minister of religion” in France.

“I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

Though an early supporter of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service at the height of the fighting after high school by seeking and receiving four draft deferments, according to Selective Service records. They included college deferments and a 31-month stretch as a "minister of religion" in France, a classification for Mormon missionaries that the church at the time feared was being overused.

Indeed, Romney strongly supported the war at first. As a freshman at Stanford University, he protested anti-war activists. In one photo, he's shown in a small crowd of students, smiling broadly, wearing a sport jacket and holding up a sign that says, "Speak Out, Don't Sit In.

"Vietnam was a war that the poor and the people who couldn't afford to go to college had to go to," Soltz said.

The Mormon church, a strong supporter of American involvement in Vietnam, ultimately limited the number of church missionaries allowed to defer their military service using the religious exemption.

But as fighting in Vietnam raged, Romney spent two and a half years trying to win Mormon converts in France

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/06/05/495310/romney-military-vietnam/
http://www.dispatch.com/content/sto...mneys-military-record-faces-new-scrutiny.html

 

[Berzerker]

Americans weren't part of WWII before Pearl Harbor.

Before Pearl Harbor Americans weren't too keen about getting involved in another war, but that changed. The draft wasn't needed and frankly neither were we... Hitler lost the war by invading Russia because he thought them weak based on their less than impressive invasion of Finland.

So we could have sat back and supplied weapons to everyone intent on killing Nazis, but the Japanese got us involved. The draft was expedient and enjoyed broader support, but it wasn't needed. I could be wrong, I'm just an armchair general

 

[abradley]

Maybe because of people like:
Maybe if people who supported the war actually went and fought and died instead of running to France, morale would be higher ?

What does that have to do with Horowitz's explanation of his and other leftists inciting anti Vietnam riots?

Was Romney sneaking back to US campuses to incite riots?

 

[whyidie]

no, but the ones that needed a draft were probably fubar

if people dont wanna fight, making them fight suggests the cause aint worth it

Exactly. If its worth fighting for, we should all have stakes in the game, other than tax dollars.

 

[FriendlyFire]

What does that have to do with Horowitz's explanation of his and other leftists inciting anti Vietnam riots? Was Romney sneaking back to US campuses to incite riots?

Clearly Vietnam was lost because of the Media and anti war movement.
If only brave and dutiful sons of Freedom were not prevented for fighting and dying instead made to run away to France and getting deferment after deferment, If only the US has carried more mass shooting of its own civilians by the military, the war would have been won for sure.

Seriously, as the old military saying goes
"Victory has 1000 fathers, defeat is but an orphan"

 

[Birdjaguar]

But why? Maybe because of people like:

The public turned against they war because

body count =/= victory
The war was on TV every night and nobody liked what they saw
The rising youth culture of the Baby boomers turned against it, ("Hair" was better than "The A Team")

 

[Zkribbler]

Clearly Vietnam was lost because of the Media and anti war movement.

The war in Vietnam could never be won. It was like Iraq: the heavy-handedness of U.S. troops on the ground created insurgence faster than we could kill them. Plus, what were we fighting for, the preserve the bloody dictatorship of Ky and Thieu?

And if you recall, we did not lose in Vietnam. There was a peace treaty. It was three years after we left that the North Vietnamese violated the treaty by re-starting the war. We were not involved in that new war, so how could we lose?

 

[Dachs]

But why? Maybe because of people like:

Horowitz is an avowed neocon himself, and it's interesting to point out that by 2006 he had backtracked completely on the comments he made before and during the destruction of Saddam's regime, claiming that "allowed himself to get swept up in the Bush-led enthusiasm for a democratic revolution in the Middle East".

The problem with Horowitz's argument in your quoted article is simple: it is a call for a "do-something" policy. It's the politician's syllogism: "something must be done; this is something; therefore, we must do it". Even if one agrees that the Hanoi regime's unopposed conquest of all Vietnam would have been a negative outcome, one must question whether that would have been a more or less negative outcome than fighting the Hanoi regime in a dubious effort to prop up a deeply unstable and morally compromised Saigon regime, causing vastly more casualties, forging ahead without a clear indicator of victory, and pouring blood and treasure down a rathole that could in absolute terms never have justified the cost spent on it.

In most after-action analysis of the Indochinese wars, the US military found more than a little fault with its own doctrine, structure, practices, and equipment. But in virtually every retrospective there was a clear call for an unambiguous political objective, or end state, that the Army could actually have a chance of attaining. This did not exist in Vietnam. Therefore, the regenerated US Army of the 1980s, the Army of FM 100-5 Operations and AirLand Battle, believed that the war as it was prosecuted was not a "winnable" conflict. Blaming the antiwar movement for that fundamental error is to disagree with the Army itself, and who better to know?

Before Pearl Harbor Americans weren't too keen about getting involved in another war, but that changed. The draft wasn't needed and frankly neither were we... Hitler lost the war by invading Russia because he thought them weak based on their less than impressive invasion of Finland.

So we could have sat back and supplied weapons to everyone intent on killing Nazis, but the Japanese got us involved. The draft was expedient and enjoyed broader support, but it wasn't needed. I could be wrong, I'm just an armchair general

This is mostly true, except that America was functionally in the war against Nazi Germany already in 1941, several months before Hitler's declaration of war. The Atlantic Charter, which was signed in August of that year, essentially treated the US as an ally - if not yet a co-belligerent - and actually delineated postwar policy for the US and UK. American naval assets defended the convoys sent to Britain full of war matériel for killing Germans, and in October 1941 the first American servicemen were killed when a U-boat sank the destroyer USS Reuben James off Iceland.

There was no "full-scale" war, true enough, and had Germany not declared war on the US it would have been somewhat diplomatically and propagandistically awkward to prosecute one - but there is little doubt that the effort would have been made.

As for whether the draft was necessary - unquestionably, yes. The great American public, like the civilian bodies of basically every country that has ever existed, does not understand how to wage war, nor does it have a full appreciation of the time pressures involved in it. And unlike a modern conflict, an army of draftees was both militarily desirable and necessary. The US effectively began partial mobilization in the summer of 1940, when it became clear that Hitler's Germany was unlikely to be defeated without American assistance and that Imperial Japan too was unlikely to end its aggression in Asia unless it sustained a military defeat that only the United States had the plausible capacity to inflict.

While most Americans eventually came to support the global war, the overwhelming majority of them would not of their own volition take their skins to market and join the military to enforce that support. This was true in 1942, and it was even more true in 1940, when the voting public was far from supporting the war but when the federal government realized that it would have to intervene in some form, and that it would certainly need to buttress its diplomacy with some sort of force. America began war mobilization from a much further-back starting position than did any of the other major belligerents; it would take much longer to create an army and fill out a navy capable of weighting the scales as soon as possible.

The Second World War was a conflict whose scale dwarfed any before or since. The US Army mobilized a total of 91 divisions over the course of the war (counting the Second Cavalry Division, which did not exist at the end of the war, twice, because it was mobilized, demobilized, mobilized, and demobilized again), which was dramatically short of the total of 213 divisions that the Army believed it needed as a part of the Victory Program of 1942. Part of this was due to the excellent performance of the Red Army, which recovered its strength much more rapidly than the Americans believed possible in the dark days of Stalingrad. Still, the Americans were so short of troops that in the winter of 1944, all available combat divisions had been shipped to Europe or the Pacific, and there was no substantial strategic reserve. Had the German offensive in the Ardennes not been halted, or if American units had been cut off and destroyed, the Army would not have been immediately able to make up the difference - and this was including drafted manpower. Admittedly, much of this was because of the lavish support structure the Army ended up possessing - 75% of the Army's manpower was not in a combat formation, which even considering the immense logistical strain of a global war was probably too many - but in war, as unlike almost any other endeavor, the risks are so high that committing too many forces is virtually always better than the chance of a disaster in committing too few.

Whether Hitler's Germany could have been defeated without American armies, fleets, and aircraft is an ultimately unanswerable question. The Red Army, although it bore the brunt of the ground war by even the most cursory calculation, lacked the logistical capacity to sustain an offensive into the heart of the Third Reich without American support. It might have created this support, by redirecting its industrial capacity, but that would have come at the cost of, say, tank production, with correspondingly negative effects on the front lines. The Luftwaffe, which provided the crucial close air support and air superiority that facilitated the offensives of 1941 and 1942, was largely withdrawn to Germany to face the Allied bombing effort from 1943 onward, such that Soviet offensives took place under clear and friendly skies, while German production and matériel suffered from shortages that it otherwise would not have dealt with due to Allied strategic bombing. And while the American contribution in ground forces was dwarfed by that of the Soviets, even the vaunted Red Army was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel by 1945, such that the addition of several dozen Allied divisions to draw off German forces made an important difference. American support did not prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, but it is extremely difficult to imagine the collapse of the Third Reich without it. The same calculation plays out with Imperial Japan, except that while the Red Army was eventually capable of offensive operations, the National Revolutionary Army (to say nothing of the People's Liberation Army) would never have been able to drive back to the coast and throw the Japanese out of north China and the Three Provinces.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The Viet Nam war was a bust because ten years in it had gone nowhere, and it obviously was never going to go anywhere, and over the course of ten years that going nowhere had in some way affected darn near everyone, at least indirectly. No one didn't have at least one friend or relative affected by it in some way by that point. Even the Romneys of the world had been forced to deal with the inconvenience of sending their baby boy off to France.

We learned the lesson that we unfortunately subsequently forgot. Do not get your military involved in another country's civil war. Now we have relearned it.

Do these ridiculous walls of copy pasta text have anything really interesting in them to add to that?

 

[Dachs]

Do these ridiculous walls of copy pasta text have anything really interesting in them to add to that?

I don't understand why you're being unnecessarily confrontational with somebody who generally supports your viewpoint.

tl;dr: Don't be a dick.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I don't understand why you're being unnecessarily confrontational with somebody who generally supports your viewpoint.

tl;dr: Don't be a dick.

Note that your wall of text is your own opinion, which I respect. The copy pasta text I was referring to was the OP.

 

[Dachs]

Note that your wall of text is your own opinion, which I respect. The copy pasta text I was referring to was the OP.

Ah. Thanks. Sorry.

They don't.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

They don't.

I owe you one. I'll read the next mountain of tripe OP and let you know if you can skip it.

 

[abradley]

Horowitz is an avowed neocon himself, and it's interesting to point out that by 2006 he had backtracked completely on the comments he made before and during the destruction of Saddam's regime, claiming that "allowed himself to get swept up in the Bush-led enthusiasm for a democratic revolution in the Middle East".

The problem with Horowitz's argument in your quoted article is simple: it is a call for a "do-something" policy. It's the politician's syllogism: "something must be done; this is something; therefore, we must do it". Even if one agrees that the Hanoi regime's unopposed conquest of all Vietnam would have been a negative outcome, one must question whether that would have been a more or less negative outcome than fighting the Hanoi regime in a dubious effort to prop up a deeply unstable and morally compromised Saigon regime, causing vastly more casualties, forging ahead without a clear indicator of victory, and pouring blood and treasure down a rathole that could in absolute terms never have justified the cost spent on it.

In most after-action analysis of the Indochinese wars, the US military found more than a little fault with its own doctrine, structure, practices, and equipment. But in virtually every retrospective there was a clear call for an unambiguous political objective, or end state, that the Army could actually have a chance of attaining. This did not exist in Vietnam. Therefore, the regenerated US Army of the 1980s, the Army of FM 100-5 Operations and AirLand Battle, believed that the war as it was prosecuted was not a "winnable" conflict. Blaming the antiwar movement for that fundamental error is to disagree with the Army itself, and who better to know?

{SNIP}

David Horowitz: Jeb Bush Is Right About Iraq

In July 2003, four months after American troops had entered Iraq in a war Democrats authorized and supported, the leadership of the Democratic Party turned its back on the young men and women it had just sent into harm’s way and began a campaign of lies to discredit the war and sabotage America’s efforts to defeat the terrorists who had rallied to the defense of its monster regime. This was the greatest betrayal of our country in its wartime history, yet Republicans and conservatives have not only allowed the Democrats to get away with their treachery but have joined them in obscuring the facts of the war and taking the wrong lessons from it.

The latest case of this travesty is an article by Byron York in the Washington Examiner criticizing Jeb Bush for defending the decision to go to war in 2003 – a war that ended in the defeat of the terrorists and the establishment of a massive military base whose 20,000 troops would have stopped ISIS before it got started if Barack Obama had not decided to abandon the country altogether.

In making his case against Bush York repeats the principal lies that have been used in this “anti-war” campaign, which has done incalculable damage to America’s interests in the war on terror and to Americans’ security at home. The first lie is that the war was about weapons of mass destruction alleged to be in Saddam Hussein’s possession at the time. It is true that without this claim, Democrats who had shown no appetite for fighting the war on terror for the previous ten years would probably not have supported the decision to invade Iraq. But the war was not about stockpiles of WMDs. It was about 17 UN Resolutions that the Iraq regime had defied in violation of the Gulf War Truce, and that were designed to prevent Saddam from building weapons of mass destruction, which he had already shown his determination to do.

The only reason Saddam had allowed any UN inspections was because George Bush had put 200,000 troops on the Iraqi border. These troops could not be kept there indefinitely. When Saddam defied a final Security Council ultimatum that expired on December 7, 2002, there was really no choice but to go to war.
(Continued)
http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/david_horowitz_jeb_bush_is_right_about_iraq

AS for some saying Vietnam couldn't be won. Nonsense.

General Abrams, like General Petraeus in Iraq, completely changed the situation.

BUt the Dems took over and like in Iraq withdrew all support.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-War-Unexamined-Victories-Americas/dp/0156013096

http://www.amazon.com/Black-April-S..._UL160_SR107,160_&refRID=1YCVDQ7VMJ9ZWDYCE769

 

[Dachs]

AS for some saying Vietnam couldn't be won. Nonsense.

General Abrams, like General Petraeus in Iraq, completely changed the situation.

BUt the Dems took over and like in Iraq withdrew all support.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-War-Unexamined-Victories-Americas/dp/0156013096

http://www.amazon.com/Black-April-S..._UL160_SR107,160_&refRID=1YCVDQ7VMJ9ZWDYCE769

This is what Horowitz does, and it's kind of my point. He started off on the fringe of the antiwar movement, then swung violently to the other end of things to be a neocon. What he has to say about this stuff is deeply unreliable, no matter where it's coming from. The fact that he was so closely involved in pushing the Bush administration's agenda at the outbreak of the war ought to be proof enough; it'd be like uncritically accepting the stories that Manstein or Guderian told about the Great Patriotic War. So he supported the war in '03, opposed it in '06, swung back to supporting it in the last few years. Seems to me that you should find better copypasta.

As far as the modern Dolchstoßlegende about victory in Vietnam, the case rests on bizarre premises. South Vietnam died because the ARVN collapsed in the face of the PAVN's final offensive in the spring of 1975. Allegedly, American support would have been able to shore up the ARVN and prevent the collapse of South Vietnam, had the political will to do so existed, and it did not. Therefore, the fault supposedly lies with the lack of political will.

This is prima facie preposterous. The US military serves at the will of its civilian leadership and the will of the voting public of the country. It does not get to do whatever it wants to do. I am sure that the American military could completely destroy Liechtenstein if it chose, but it does not get to do that, because nobody in this country would let it. And it may have been able to defeat the PAVN in 1975 - at the cost of even more money, more lives lost in combat, and an indefinite commitment to keeping a corrupt and unstable regime in power when that regime could not manage to do so on its own. As the American voting public and the American legislature defined the war, those were failure terms, and that makes Vietnam a defeat.

The US military was unable to create a functional ARVN. It was unable, within the existing rules of engagement, to eliminate the military threat posed by the NVA; it could suppress the PAVN and Viet Cong for a time, but it could not destroy either, and unless the US military stayed in a combat role in Vietnam for the indefinite future the PAVN would continue to pose an existential threat to the South Vietnamese government. And it was unable to develop a regime in South Vietnam that possessed stability and popular support, because that was not its job. The nature of the US military's failure exhibited some flaws in the organization, which were the subject of the reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s, but the fact of that failure was preordained, because no military on the face of the planet could complete that mission with those parameters - which means that the war should never have happened in the first place.

Those reforms I mentioned yielded, among other things, FM 100-5 1981: Field Operations, a statement of American doctrine and essentially the founding text of AirLand Battle. There's an interesting quote in there that quite clearly came about because of Vietnam. "Once political authorities commit military forces in pursuit of political aims, military forces must win something - else there will be no basis from which political authorities can bargain to win politically. Therefore, the purpose of military operations can not be simply to avert defeat - but rather it must be to win." Continuing the war beyond 1972 might have averted defeat, at a cost unacceptable to the American public. It would not have won, because of the war's impossible victory conditions.

That there are some former soldiers and ideologues interested in perpetuating the Dolchstoßlegende does not matter. The US military's tactical performance in set-piece engagements does not matter, either. They were empty victories that led nowhere, because the war as defined was a fundamentally unwinnable war.