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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (85609)	8/17/2000 10:08:19 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 108807

Nothing changed. The fact that victory was not achieved in Vietnam is perceived as a failure of will, and therefore it is insisted that the criteria for engagement be narrowed to ensure that the requisite effort will be made. This began, however, due to an objection I made to the premise that toughness would have made no difference. Goldwater, incidentally, was skeptical of American commitment in Vietnam. His point was that if the commitment were made, we should wrap things up with all deliberate speed, which meant breaking the back of North Vietnamese support for the Vietcong. But even the idea that no vital interest was at stake was largely a technical question for the foreign policy establishment, not a matter of popular opinion. Support for the war was strong until Tet, and only gradually began to recede. The real reason that Johnson held back was that he was afraid to lose his basis for governing if he had to make a choice between guns and butter. He could not keep sufficient support for the war on Capitol Hill if he did not send them huge domestic spending initiatives, and keep the war "low key". That was the price of liberal support, until even that became dubious. Would popular support have been sustainable over a protracted period of time, turning to a more aggressive policy? Probably not, but then, the idea of a more aggressive policy was to bring the war to a conclusion much more rapidly, which we had the technical means to do. Perhaps without the demoralization of a war of attrition, a stable Vietnamese government could have been formed. Who knows? I am not trying to prove what the outcome would have been, since there are always contingencies. I am only trying to show that various lessons could be drawn from the debacle, and they do not all point in the direction of isolationism or the listless conduct of military operations..........