<You mean we're deluded in thinking our country and system isn't better than Communism and the Islamism of OBL?>
You're deluded in thinking that the Communists and Islamists have no good ideas.
An example:
When the Viet Minh were fighting the French in the 1950s, they would send members of their Armed Propaganda Brigades into villages. These cadres would identify themselves as part of a nationalist Front, and downplay their communism. They would identify the money-lenders, kill them, thereby abolishing the crushing debts of the peasantry, debts that got handed down from generation to generation, forever. They would identify the absentee landlords, kill or intimidate them, and tell the peasants they now owned the land they worked. Then, they would invite the peasants to join their nationalist war against the French colonialists. This method worked. It worked because the Communists had good ideas. Land reform, and ending the crushing generational debts, and nationalism, these were good ideas, and the Communists championed them. We didn't, which is why we lost.
If the French, and later the Americans, and the S. Vietnamese governments we created, had understood the appeal of these ideas, and co-opted them, we could have won against the Communists. But, to do that, we would have had to understand that the Communists had some good ideas. Instead, we supported the landlords and money-lenders, and the French plantation-owners, and the small Catholic Vietnamese minority. We fought a campaign that was 90% military and 10% political, when we should have reversed those percentages in our anti-Communist effort.
I see us making the exact same mistakes, in our current war against Islamism. There is the same arrogant dismissal of the real appeal the Islamists have, among the 1.2B Muslims we share this planet with. There is the same focus on HiTechBigGunMilitary solutions, with only token efforts to reach out to the people who inhabit the battlefield, and nil efforts to address their real-life concerns. There seems to be a near-total lack of understanding of how to fight and win a guerrilla war.
Before Vietnam, there was some excuse for not knowing how to fight guerrilla wars. Our previous 3 wars (Korea, WW2, WW1), had been almost exclusively conventional wars. But after Vietnam, there is no excuse. We got our head handed to us; we got our ass kicked. This should have been a "learning experience", seared into our brains permanently. It's like, instead of a "learning curve", we have a "learning sine wave", with a 40-year wavelength. |
