Bill, I think that you're wrong on several issues and on your conclusion. Here's why:
* Vietnam wasn't only the North against the South. I fought in Vietnam and we fought N. Vietnamese AND S. Vietnamese soldiers. Both the N. and S. Vietnamese enjoyed the support of enough of the S. Vietnamese population so that they could be fed, clothed, armed and sometimes concealed from our troops.
* It's true that there was never an end to heavy combat but you should consider that there was a beginning. In the beginning the battles were smaller and the support among the South Vietnamese was less intense and less widespread. As we "pacified" the country the support for the N. Vietnamese and the Viet Cong grew stronger and more widespread. We were, after all, foreigners in a foreign land.
* Contrary to your inference, we did create and support supposedly legitimate governments in Vietnam but they were viewed by the population as puppet governments. None of them had enough support from the people to effectively change the tide of the war and, as in Iraq, very few of the S. Vietnamese were voting for our side with their lives. As the years passed and we tried to turn the fighting over to them, we found that they were poorly motivated and generally either wouldn't fight or wouldn't fight well.
* I don't know what "hidden weapons or POWs" adds to the discussion. It will be a costly, ongoing guerrilla war, or it will not; hidden weapons or POWs or not.
* As far as whether the Vietnamese welcomed our troops as liberators, one of the things that was sold to every American, and to our soldiers that left to fight in Vietnam, was that we were there TO PROTECT THE S. VIETNAMESE from Northern invaders. We were told that we were wanted and welcomed there. I arrived as an e-2 enlisted infantryman and I spent most of my time in the jungle. I can tell you however, that within 3 days of arriving in country I could have told you that the S. Vietnamese people I saw were coldly unfriendly with hooded stares and hostile glances.
* As far as technological limitations and collateral damage, you make a good point. For every innocent life lost to American firepower there is a family and friends. Grief and anger create more resistance. I suspect, however, that it is nationalism and an intuitive resistance to foreign occupation and rule that creates resistance, especially when the foreign rule is from a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different majority religion and the most powerful nation in the world. The region has a long history of resistance to foreign rule.
The similarities I listed are real. There are a great number of passionately committed resistors. They are able to hide among the general population and pick their times and places to strike. Our troops are targets and until they receive fire or are the targets of explosions, there's little they can do to protect themselves. There is clearly support for the resistance in, at the least, a strong minority of the population. And our goals are undoubtedly at odds with the goals of a number of political and religious factions among the Iraqis. In addition the Iraqi resistance will receive the aid and support of other Arabs in the region.
The Russian experience in Afghanistan should be a lesson for us. Unless we are willing to take draconian ?Saddam like? measures to "pacify" the resistance and the hell with the innocents, or unless we are willing to suffer the death of a thousand cuts, we should reevaluate the "open arms and flowers" rhetoric of the Bush admin and ask whether what we're trying to accomplish in Iraq, given the odds of ultimate success, is worth the lives of our young and the expenditure of funds that could go a long way to fund other priorities. |
