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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (261977)	12/11/2005 1:29:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 1573099

You may be right.......we may have been fighting a conventional force. A guerilla force and a conventional force. The conventional part had the advantage that it could withdraw and than we wouldn't go after it except through the air, and sometimes not even through the air. It got to combine the power of a conventional force with some of the strategic advantages of a guerilla force. But even with those advantages it lost when it tried to invade the south while the US was still providing air support and resupply to the South (most of our soldiers were gone by then). So they waited and invaded again later and the US did nothing and the South fell. The South fell to the conventional force. The guerillas were a problem but by the time we left they where not the type of problem that would have caused the South to fall. The conventional invasion would likely not have worked either if we still were providing support to the South, but soon after we pulled out our soldiers we just washed our hands of the whole thing. Iraq is different in that it is unlikely to face a massive conventional invasion any time soon (esp. if the US even hints that they will provide any sort of assistance in repelling such an invasion). OTOH the insurgency hasn't overextended and exposed themselves by trying anything like Tet. Were we winning in Vietnam? Probably not, because by the time we had sufficient military success we were losing the battle for the "hearts and minds" on the American home front. To an extent this was predictable. If a war drags on, and it isn't considered as vital as something like WWII. Support is bound to fall. Overoptimistic statements by the government and the military early on, made things worse when the optimistic projections didn't come true, and appeared (and probably sometimes were) dishonest. By the time "Vietnamesation" could have any success people were already turned off of the war in the US. In most ways Iraq and Vietnam are very different but if we fail in Iraq the reasons will be similar. There is less reason to fail in Iraq. Our casualties are lower, we don't have anyone as committed to invade as North Vietnam was, you don't have the Soviet Union and China assisting the insurgents, and I think it is less likely that we will just abandon Iraq the way we did South Vietnam. Tim

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