The CSA didn't exist for as long as South Vietnam, and many people in the CSA where patriotic about it. It was a separate state, the fact that it lost in battle and was reabsorbed in to the North doesn't change that. No state lasts forever. The CSA didn't last as long as most but it did function as a state and the people of the CSA more or less supported secession.
"It would be unusual if the North continued to try to invade the south to take control of it again if the North could not ever win anything big enough to be called a serious battle and absorbed not just disproportionate but strongly disproportionate casualties again and again while failing to defeat the South for over two decades."
It's clear that I've made my point and that you have little left to offer. Now your point is that North Vietnam suffered repeated losses?
My response would basically be the part you already quoted. You didn't deal with the point that you quoted.
You could make the same point about the Continental Congress in what would become the United States in 1780, but our ancestors fought on.
The American revolutionaries don't fit the equivalent position of the NVA. You would have to make the point about England's forces in the revolution and that wouldn't fit. For that matter I wouldn't be surprised if the American revolution would have been defeated (if perhaps not permanently another revolution could have happened later), if it keep losing all the battles (most of them very uneven losses) for 20+ years.
But maybe the American revolution would have dragged on. A low level insurrection can continue after any number of defeats, but its very unusual for an invading force to get smashed repeatedly, with strongly disproportionate losses and almost no victories, even minor ones, yet continue to invade. England did have victories, and even when it lost it often hurt the other side severely, but they still gave up and went home.
Now if you want to shift the analogy from comparing the American revolutionary forces to the NVA and instead compare them to the resistance in Iraq, you would be a bit close to the truth but there is still several ways the analogy falls down. For one thing the American revolutionaries where fighting for greater individual liberty not less liberty. They were not fighting against the forces that had just liberated them from a harsh abusive dictator and their members did not include previous servants of such a dictator. They did have a high level of international support (including strong open support from a France which was a major power in the 18th century). And perhaps most importantly they did have the ability to outright defeat the invaders in open battle at places like Saratoga, Trenton, Cowpens and of course Yorktown.
The CSA was an example where resistance was crushed by the invading forces. Sure the invaders where from similar ethnic/religious/cultural backgrounds to the invaded, but so where the English who tried to put down the American revolution. You try to have it all ways. Whatever side won you say is like the resistance in Iraq. Even consistent historical analogies are not a simple and certain path to predict the future. They become even less useful for such predictions when they are twisted around and wedged in to fit an argument. Reality isn't as simple as "invading powers lose (or win)", and wars are not won or lost simply based on the ethnic group of each side and how many people of similar ethnicity exist in the region. While we should never be ignorant of the past, each war is its own situation. Each new war is not just like some past war and you can't determine how the war will play out by some simple analogy to a past situation.
Tim |
