Vietnam, like Korea, was one battle that was part of a much longer war, one which lasted forty years, and which the American people and their allies saw all the way through to victory.
To take another, perhaps more relevant example, remember a little exercise called the Gulf War? How so-called "experts" everywhere predicted with utmost certainty that a ground war would lead to massive casualties on the coalition side; that an air war would prove largely ineffective; that American tanks and high-tech weaponry would malfunction and troop would fight ineffectively after long exposure to the desert environment; that the "Arab street" would rise up and topple moderate regimes; that the Middle East would be badly de-stabilized; that inimical regimes would take advantage of US distraction; and that the public would cease supporting the war as soon as terrorist attacks, the overwhelming expenses of an extended engagement, and the grisly realities of combat delivered onto TV sets by the mass media brought the whole dreadful mistake home?
Come to think of it, and bringing this whole subject back to the topic of this thread, I even wonder if the widely perceived success of the Gulf War, at least compared to the fears that accompanied its commencement, and in particular the vivid and unprecedented success of American high-tech weaponry, didn't have something to do with the willingness of people up until relatively recently to believe that, indeed, "this time, it [could be] different." Obviously, the fall of Communism as well as the novelty and rapid expansion of the Internet had a lot to do both with restored national self-confidence and enthusiasm for technology. The millenial bubble and its explosion coincided with the eventual exhaustion of the post-Gulf War recovery, but, all the same, for a time things really were different.
There's no guarantee of success this time, but, every time in history that the United States has been truly challenged, we have responded in a way that not only eradicated the immediate threat, but put the country and and democratic capitalism in a previously unimagined better position. Or do you really believe that a few thousand malnourished pariahs who rush out to sacrifice their lives out of the monomaniacal belief in a few pitiful fairy tales are a more daunting enemy than Tojo's Japan, Hitler's Germany, and the Warsaw Pact? |
