The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years AgoThe Americans and Communists alike shared a common myopia regarding wars. What happens in the political, social, and economic spheres are far more decisive than military equations. That was true in China in the late 1940s, in Vietnam in 1975, and it is also the case in Iraq today.
---
By the beginning of 1975 the regime in South Vietnam was beginning to disintegrate by every relevant criterion: economically and politically, and therefore militarily. The Saigon army abandoned the battlefield well before the final Communist offensive in March 1975. Moreover, with the Watergate scandal, the Nixon Administration was on the defensive after 1973, both with the American public and Congress, and after Nixon's forced resignation the new American President, Gerald Ford, was simply in no position to help the economically and politically bankrupt Thieu regime. The American army, at this point, was too demoralized to reenter the war. Washington correctly assumed that its diplomatic strategy had won Moscow and Peking to its side by threatening to swing its power to the enemy of whatever nation would not support its Vietnam strategy-triangular diplomacy.
---
Thus ended the most significant American foreign effort since 1945. There are so many obvious parallels with their futile projects in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and the lessons are so clear, that we have to conclude that successive administrations in Washington have no capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years ago should have proven that. It did not.
CounterPunch
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
