One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agony would add to our vocabulary new terms, like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’
U.S. President George W. Bush
With all due respect to President Bush, however, that is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from Vietnam.
Because the unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s refusal to withdraw from an “unwinnable war” (as no less a person than Henry Kissinger has described the war in Iraq) should not be paid by thousands of American soldiers, whose deaths would add to our vocabulary new terms, like the fallacies of “[American-style] democracy is God’s gift to the world,” “shock and awe,” and “mission accomplished” on the one hand, and the terminal menace of “Islamic insurgents,” “torture,” and “IEDs” on the other.
Moreover, since Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has evidently drawn the same lesson from Vietnam as Bush, this alone provides just cause to vote for Sen. Barack Obama (or Sen. Hillary Clinton if she and husband Bill manage to steal the Democratic nomination) to become the next president of the United States.
After all, where McCain has pledged to “stay the course” in Iraq for 100 years (during which time U.S. casualties would surely surpass the 58,000 who died in Vietnam), Obama and Hillary have pledged to withdraw well before today’s 4000 casualties double to 8000.
But it is self-evident that the U.S. will have to cut and run from Iraq. The only question is when that will be and (in terms of lives and money) what price this defeat?
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Iraq and Vietnam
cosi says
Would it not be better to redefine our strategies in a country of which we are responsible both for the installation of Sadaam and then the withdrawal? A country we invaded and then left the very people who took a chance on us to face Sadaam’s wrath in the first war?
What we did initially was not wrong. In fact, the “war” itself was executed with a proficiency never before seen and was over in a matter of days. It was the mishandling of the inevitable “vacuum” created at the removal of the one person – by whatever horrible means – who was able to hold the country together. As well as the lack of foresight in dealing with a people – jihadists (as I call them) whose manner of fighting is so different than what we expect, catching modern military strategists much the same as the fighting tactics of the American Colonists caught the British by surprise.
Cosi girl
ALH ipinions says
Cosi girl,
If you think it “was not wrong” to invade Iraq, do you think it would be right to invade Iran, North Korea…?
(Incidentally, it’s too bad the neo-cons who planned this war did not have your knowledge of and regard for historical precdent. And never mind the war of Indpendence, how about the lessons they should have learned from Vietnam or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?)