Karen, re: Appreciate your commments Ed. However, I do keep wondering if the Rev War were being fought today, would it be successful in the end, or would the "children --who want everything now, this minute, thank you very much--" pull out, and we would lose as we did in VietNam?
First, I don't think the rev. war has anything to do with the Iraq war. It's far different to settle your own differences than it is to try to settle someone else's differences, especially a half a world away in distance and light years in culture.
Second, don't sell the "children" short. Fighting the wrong war is not a true test of whether people will fight. You might be surprised but I'd bet that some of the people who are adamantly opposed to fighting this war would be among the bravest volunteer fighters in a different war. The test of character and courage is not the willingness to blindly support poor leadership that takes us into a bad war but rather the willingness to make the choice that a cause is worth killing and dying for and then to have the courage to personally accept a full share of the risk.
Finally, and I've made this point before, we lost in Vietnam when we were fighting the war, we won when we quit fighting it. I say that because winning and losing a war isn't like winning or losing a football game. Winning and losing should be defined in larger terms.
When we were fighting the Vietnam war we lost billions of dollars, we were left with hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of damaged Americans and, most importantly, we lost almost 60k American men and women dead while millions of Vietnamese died hard deaths.
When we "lost the war," the Vietnamese birthed their own unified nation and we lost nothing. They are now a trading partner, we have commercial flights to Vietnam, Americans are welcomed there and from the time we left there has been absolutely no threat to America or America's strategic interests as a result of our leaving. If that's losing, I'll take losing over "winning" anytime. But maybe that's because I was there and the people dying there weren't faceless names to me.
My bottom line is we should have "lost" in Vietnam much sooner and whenever we get involved in similar situation where we're trying to push strings at the cost of American lives and fortune, the sooner we "lose," the better. We owe that to the brave young men and women who go where we send them to try to do undoable tasks. Ed |
