Nadine, too many of us don't understand the deeper lessons of Vietnam. We buy into the "we could have won it" words of the chickenhawks and the gung ho crowd. And then, sadly, we explore all the things we could have done to fight it harder, smarter, and more brutally.
It's much ado about nothing. The real lessons of Vietnam, Sudan, and Soviet invaded Afghanistan is much more elemental and much darker for nations that intend to control the internal affairs of a sovereign nation through the use of military force. The real lesson is that, with very narrow exceptions, NO nation will peacefully tolerate an occupying force that uses military power to attempt to force internal changes in it's society.
If you use Vietnam as an example, how would you have "won" the war in Vietnam? I was there and there weren't any military goals that we COULDN'T successfully complete, except for one. And that elusive goal was to KILL enough of the S. and N. Vietnamese fighters to make them quit, EVEN THOUGH THAT WAS OUR STATED OBJECTIVE. Yes, our seek and destroy missions were targeting body counts, not taking territory or "defeating" enemy units.
And we killed a whole lot of them. We killed them with napalm, bullets, artillery, b-52 bomb strikes that lit up the land like welding sparks and shook the ground, gattling guns mounted on fixed aircraft that would saturate the ground with bullet and we even got a lot of help from the jungle's malaria, fevers, snake bites, malnutrition, infections and other things. But they just wouldn't quit, in fact their popular support grew among the S. Vietnamese.
How do you kill a people's pride? How do you kill a people's history and culture and religious beliefs?
What were you going to do, kill millions of them "for their own good?" We tried that and it didn't work. In the end that war would still be going as long as there was one man with one gun.
You say it's different this time because you: "don't see that the Vietnam analogy tells us very much about what will happen in Iraq. Different times, different politics (who is the insurgents' USSR?), different culture, and different army too - our current forces are far better than the conscript army in Vietnam, and today's officer corps all went to school on Vietnam."
The fact is that the Iraqis, like the Vietnamese, are a fierce people. Look at their history, their religion and the war with Iraq. These people will fight and will fight to the death.
They don't need a USSR to fight an effective guerilla war against us and they don't need to put on uniforms and fight us straight up. They can fight like the VC and pick their time and place to booby trap, ambush and attack. That gives THEM a tremendous advantage and leaves our soldiers taking wounds and deaths and swatting back at thin air. Inevitably our soldiers will take out their fear and anger on someone, and when that happens, and it already has, moderate Iraqis will join the insurgency. So what would we gain?
If you believe in killing millions for some benefit that escapes me, then you can win a war like the one in Vietnam and the one that's developing in Iraq, if not, don't go there.
I'll respond with a separate post to your last paragraph. |
