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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7575)	12/20/2005 8:51:09 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541469

Extending the Vietnam war for several years Interesting issue that. If your view is that the US was doomed to defeat than it might be reasonable to argue that not ending it quickly was a critical failure. While Nixon did remove some earlier restrictions on the conduct of the war, he didn't, and in the political climate that existed by that time probably couldn't, fundamentally change the way we conducted the war. OTOH Vietemization was to a great degree working by the time we left. Not to a great enough degree that the South could stand up to a massive invasion from the North with just about all US support ended. If it was not for Watergate all US support might not have ended, but then Watergate was of course connected to Nixon as well. If the US had supported the south with airpower and resupply the way we did against the "Easter Offensive", I don't think the South would have fell at that time. But its impossible to predict what the long term result would have been if the South had survived that invasion. But I see a bigger body count and more massive military spending, much like Bush The body count was of course higher all around, as was the military spending as a percent of GDP or as a percent of the federal budget. "Iraqization" has not gone as far as "Vietnamization" did but we still aren't as far in to the process. Fortunately there is no North Iraq to invade, if we can improve Iraq's army and security forces to the point where they are comparable to South Vietnam's in the early 70s than we should be able to turn things over to the Iraqis. Tim