"Follow through," when you have made a mistake, begins to look like hitting your head against a wall. All the books I have read on Vietnam portray it as a conflict we should not have gotten involved in. The communists were resilient, and funded by the Chinese. We were outsiders, trying to shore up a weak regime that failed to inspire its own side. You mention getting the South Vietnamese to fight harder- I think we tried that. That's why we had "advisers" over there for so long. But the North had more will.
Our generals and our soldiers certainly tried to do a good job, but guerillas are notoriously hard to fight, especially when another super power is propping them up- that's why the Soviets lost Afghanistan. We were helping the Afghans.
I know some people want to believe Vietnam could have been won, but that's a minority opinion, even among the military men who fought there. In the end, without our doing much, Veitnam has become a a capitalist zone. While it might have saved Vietnamese lives, maybe, we can't know that for sure. I'm glad that we erred on the side of non-involvement, and let the region work itself out. I'd hate to still be there. If it took 10 more years, or 20 (not that Americans would have stood for that) but if it had, that wouldn't have made much sense.
The lesson of Veitnam is (IMO) "Meddle in civil wars, and guerilla wars, with care- they are very hard to win, and even when you can "win" it often requires such ugly measures that winning starts to look like losing." |
