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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (168696)	8/7/2001 11:26:30 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Tet took place in January, 1968. While it was a massive disaster for the Viet Cong, it was a strategic victory for the North Vietnamese, because it drew the traditional American isolationists-virtually silent since Pearl Harbor-into the formerly entirely Marxist "Peace" movement. It's most visible effect was to drive Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential race two months later, after weak showings in the early primaries. The Nixon/Kissinger team knew that the "overwhelming force" option (including nuclear) would still have eliminated North Vietnam from the war, but Nixon had the big picture in mind. He and Kissinger believed that the total destruction of Hanoi and Haipong would inhibit the pursuit of Free World interests in the inevitable conflicts after the war. Opening up friendly relations with China while leaving a Soviet client state on their southern flank was-regardless of other negative implications-the best opportunity to turn the Protracted Conflict around since the Berlin airlift of 1948-50. Nixon knew (as few others did at the time) that the key to American security in his era was slowing Soviet influence in the underdeveloped parts of the world. At the same time, a quick withdrawal from Vietnam was never an option after 1966. Elect McCarthy or Kennedy, and there STILL wouldn't have been a capitulation. Few besides Nixon realized that at the time. A disaster of the proportions of Stalingrad or Dunkirk would have destroyed the career of any American president unlucky enough to have attempted it. The rest followed naturally: the Cambodian incursion set the NVA back two years, saving countless thousands of American lives. The "Christmas bombing" damaged the dominant influence of the hard-line Stalininsts in Hanoi, whose confidence had been artificially inflated by the "Peace" movement and the left wing media's popularization of it. So Nixon/Kissinger got the new relationship with China, while leaving their worst enemy with a presence on two of their borders: north and south. China was left to deal with that the only way they could, by becoming increasingly less amicable with their fellow communists in Moscow. And Nixon got the best possible exit from Vietnam: one where he didn't have to watch the networks broadcast 50,000 GI's getting shot in the backs while trying to climb onto the boats. Barely less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan became president in a world where the communist threat was divided, and presented more opportunity for those subtle Cold War victories that so few liberals have ever had any interest in understanding. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the historical sea change that has been brought about is, among many other things, the final judgment of Nixon and his much-hated strategy for Vietnam. Such history can be revised by the "fashionable" left in the short run, but the events that resulted are the overwhelming evidence that will lead future, more objective students of the 20th century, to the inescapable realities...