Hawk, the Baghdad Bob of fadg.
Now your one-eyed mind has turned toward the Vietnam war and distorted facts there in order to justify your distorted view of the Iraq debacle. No wonder you didn't learn anything from the debacle of Vietnam..you don't understand even the basics of that misadventure.
"Vietnam was partitioned and Ho Chi Minh claimed (despite having agreed to the partitioning) that he was fighting to unify the Vietnamese and remove foreign occupiers."
That statement is either ignorant or deliberately misleading. The partition was supposed to be followed by elections. The elections were not allowed when the US and it's puppet S. Vietnamese government realized that the vote would go against them. Minh kept his end of the bargain, we didn't.
"And the North enjoyed TREMENDOUS economic and military support from the Soviets and China, while we opted to pull out and leave the RVN on their own."
I don't know what you mean by "TREMENDOUS" but I do know that it wasn't a pimple on the ass of what we were putting into fighting the war for S. Vietnam. If the support had been reversed S. Vietnam wouldn't have survived the first half year of the war. Most of the support for the NVA part of the war was the backs and blood of the NVA soldiers who packed supplies and armaments in on their backs and died and rotted in the jungles.
It wasn't about logistical support and armaments. We gave the South plenty and their soldiers fought weakly. Like the Iraqi national forces we're trying to prop up, it's not about the tools of war, it's about the will to die fighting for a principle. The NVA had it, the ARVN forces of S. Vietnam didn't. Learn that lesson.
"But Murtha also tried to make the compariaon that 38,000 Americans died in Vietnam's "civil war" after the first election there in 1967, yet he FAILED to mention that after 1968 the war had transitioned from a internal civil war within S. Vietnam to a direct invasion by the North against the South."
There was no "direct invasion" after 1968. We had been fighting NVA and VC before 68 and we continued to fight NVA and VC afterwards. The NVA didn't suddenly mass at the borders and invade in 1968. If they had we'd have wiped them out with air power. They continued to infiltrate through the jungles, dug in, engaged in hit and run attacks and created areas where we couldn't go without incurring heavier casualties than we were willing to suffer.
You must be a city boy. City boys always think of territory as a spot on the map. In fact, however, territory is hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of jungle and you don't occupy that kind of land mass, you just trickle through parts of it. Like a boat through water, the wake soon fills in and there is no record of your passing. The NVA dug into that jungle, moved when it got hot and usually killed their share of Americans when their paths crossed. It was like that before 68, it was like that from 68-72 and, if we'd stayed, it would still be like that.
But you wouldn't know that. Although you've never fought in a war you're willing to provide sweeping statements about how wars could have been won, or could be won, and how we can control other civilizations by killing those among them who present some kind of future risk. You never seem to understand why it is that we can't find and kill Zarquawi or Bin Ladin, you never seem to understand why it is that our use of blunt force and our foot-on-the-neck of other populations seems to create more insurgency, less hearts and minds won and a more dangerous world.
But I'll give you a hint...you will never understand because you're far too simple minded to grasp the complexities of human nature, different cultures, or war. You don't understand the limits of power and your fears are too great to allow you to accept that there's not a damn thing you can to to end the kinds of threats that are terrifying you.
That's too bad because terrified thinking usually leads to panicked and ill-chosen responses. Yes, you're much like our peerless, frightened leader. If you weren't such a danger to the rest of us, I'd pity you. Ed
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