Good War….Bad War

Which is part of my point – Sure, keep questioning, keep writing, keep arguing. That’s human nature. But how about fighting our present battles rather than using them as an excuse to re-fight our past battles?

Like: 1973, Nixon (& Henry K.) “win” in Vietnam with 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

We won.
The war,
when we fought.

Then we left.
Fact: by 1973 Nixon had pulled out of Vietnam.
Fact: the Democratic Party controlled house voted to forbid re-introduction of troops into Indo-China (Neo, don’t you have the date of this act?)
Fact: in 1975 Congress cut militry support funds for S. Vietnam
Fact: the USSR continued to supply weapons to the North Vietnamese
Fact: the N. Viet VIOLATED their international treaty, and invaded in 1975. And won in a fine Blitz of the somewhat cowardly/ incompetent/ corrupt S. Viet forces who did NOT get previously promised US air support.

My analysis: the Dem Party of the USA voted to lose in Vietnam, after Nixon/ Abrams had won.

The media problem — the above facts are not emphasized.
“Because we DID lose, that proves we could NEVER win”.

I understand what you’re saying, and I, too, appreciate the excellence of Neo’s writing on the subject. One thing about vast conflicts like Vietnam, the Civil War, and the Revolution – nobody ever completely understands them. Still, something compels us to keep trying. The Vietnam War will probably never cease to be written about, even when it ceases to be historically fresh.

I guess what I don’t understand is, since we’re all so self-reflective about Vietnam and we know that we’re re-fighting the damn thing 40 years later – like in the election of 2004, for example – then why do we keep doing it? Or are we in fact not all that self-reflective?

Maybe I don’t understand because I grew up in the 70s rather than the 60s so I don’t have any vast political/social/cultural schisms by which to define my identity. I mean, there was Disco – but I think I’ve pretty much gotten over that.

And yet it took years before Vietnamization was adopted. Precisely because the US did not obtain victory, hence people don’t tend to go with failed policies, even if they failed due to circumstances that were not directly connected to those policies in the first place. This cycle of defeat and having to relearn lessons over, is a trait of what happens when people give up in wars. For nations that don’t give up in war, but still lose, they at least have known that they did their best and were defeated by superior enemy tactics, strategy, or logistics.

When nations give up in war, they also tend to try to forget the successful strategies employed, because it brings up bad memories. This means more Americans will die in future wars, future wars that could be benefited by adopting previous strategies. However, not many people care about the long term consequences to human life. It is always going to be the other guy dying, they think.

It didn’t work … You don’t forget something like that.”

Defeatism is a self-fulling prophecy. That is why nations often do not win against a foreign enemy because of internal squabbles.

Unfortunately the American people didn’t get the message any more than Senator Warner did.

That’s because when Americans stopped dying, and only Asian folks were, the media didn’t give a damn anymore to provide coverage for what would not benefit them. Saving Asians provides the Democrats nothing at all. That is the realist and isolationist philosophy under the slimy rock called the Left.

Few members of the latter group would have admitted it, but only by losing the war could they be proved right.”

The Left knows as well as we do that wars and violence solves many things and proves the victorious right, often and almost always. We know that they know. The Left is the only one using self-deception when they say wars don’t prove anything. Wars prove a great many things, much of which is the foundation upon which the Left stands. How many revolutions have the Left attempted to “prove” their existence and righteousness?

The classic analysis, in both military and political terms, is Harry Summer’s On Strategy. Last I heard, it was still a required text at our military academies. For me, it answered the questions I had without violating what I knew, or what I believed. (That last part is dangerous, as the Sanity Squad would be quick to say.)

On the left, it seems impossible to believe that the tragedy of Mai Lai was that once, just once, American soldiers behaved the way the VC behaved all the time. Just once, in self-defence, a stressed-out officer and his stressed-out men resorted to the terror tactics that were the backbone of the VC’s doctrine. The doctrine that became the policy of the conquering North.