KLP, re: "The question is, Ed...how do you feel about that? We lost in VN because the anti-war group was so vocal, and Congress withdrew funding to complete the job...Left our Military men and women without support. Many died because of the anti-war group and our Congress who did not keep their word."
I think that in every war the human losses are an integral part of the political debate. I think that Cindy Sheehan has a perfect right to use her status as the mother of a lost soldier to question the merits of the war in Iraq. I think that another mother with a different perspective has a perfect right to use her status to support the war in Iraq. In my view neither mother is "sick" or a "pawn" or should be castigated as dishonoring the memory of their sons. The simple fact is that their voices are amplified because the war is very real to them and we listen to people who have lived that reality and have had cause to think long and hard about the cost/benefits of staying at war.
As far as the specific questions, I don't buy the argument that we should "finish the job" in order to honor our fallen soldiers. After all, we owe much more to the soldiers that WILL die than we do to the ones who are already rotting in the ground.
I think that we should reconsider at all stages of a war. We should constantly examine what the facts of the conflict are telling us, what theories going in must be discarded, what cost/benefit analysis decisions must be altered, and is it worth continuing?
As for Vietnam, your view of that war from a win/loss perspective is much different than my own.
You say we lost in Vietnam. As I've pointed out before, what did we lose by leaving?
You say we lost because the anti-war group was so vocal. I wish they'd been vocal much earlier because I think the war was lost when we went in and tried to use force to intervene on the wrong side of a civil war.
You say that Congress withdrew funding and left our military men and women without support. I was there and we had plenty of support in 1969 and 1970. The problem was that the other guys had a say in it too and they were tough, determined, committed men and women willing to die for nationalistic and powerful ideas that we could not kill. We'd still be fighting an insurgency there even if we'd have "won," whatever you mean by that.
Millions of people died in the American-involved war in Vietnam and more than 50,000 of the dead were American soldiers. I had personal connections to some of those men and you can be assured that I've thought long and hard about the hows and the whys of it. In my view it is revisionist history to claim that "[m]any died because of the anti-war group and our Congress who did not keep their word." The basic cause of the "many" who died there is much simpler; many died there because we went in with a wrong view of what we could and could not do there and we fought for years without figuring it out. It was a losing proposition when we started and it remained a losing proposition when we stopped.
I'm not hung up on some preppy notion of whether we "win" or "lose" wars. I'm hung up on the issues of what we win or lose by continuing as opposed to what we win or lose by discontinuing. In Vietnam, and in Iraq, you had to constantly ask why we were fighting and the answers weren't very clear. I think that when the answers aren't very clear then you have no right to send brave and loyal young men and women to their deaths. I think that's what Cindy Sheehan is saying. Ed |
