STEPHEN J. MORRIS: The War We Could Have Won (NYT)

[T Roosevelt]

Is it me, or is this a bit of historical revisionism hoping to support staying in Iraq?

note: free reg req'd


Published: May 1, 2005

THE Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. However, 30 years after the war's end, the reasons for its outcome remain a matter of dispute.

The most popular explanation among historians and journalists is that the defeat was a result of American policy makers' cold-war-driven misunderstanding of North Vietnam's leaders as dangerous Communists. In truth, they argue, we were fighting a nationalist movement with great popular support. In this view, "our side," South Vietnam, was a creation of foreigners and led by a corrupt urban elite with no popular roots. Hence it could never prevail, not even with a half-million American troops, making the war "unwinnable."

This simple explanation is repudiated by powerful historical evidence, both old and new. Its proponents mistakenly base their conclusions on the situation in Vietnam during the 1950's and early 1960's and ignore the changing course of the war (notably, the increasing success of President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization strategy) and the evolution of South Vietnamese society (in particular the introduction of agrarian reforms).

For all the claims of popular support for the Vietcong insurgency, far more South Vietnamese peasants fought on the side of Saigon than on the side of Hanoi. The Vietcong were basically defeated by the beginning of 1972, which is why the North Vietnamese launched a huge conventional offensive at the end of March that year. During the Easter Offensive of 1972 - at the time the biggest campaign of the war - the South Vietnamese Army was able to hold onto every one of the 44 provincial capitals except Quang Tri, which it regained a few months later. The South Vietnamese relied on American air support during that offensive.

<snip>

Soviet archives show that after the war ended in 1975, with American power in retreat, Hanoi used part of its captured American arsenal to support Communist revolutions around the world. In 1980 some of these weapons were shipped via Cuba to El Salvador. This dimension of Vietnamese behavior derived from a deep commitment to the messianic internationalism of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

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[Demeter]

1. The US Had No Intention of Winning that War

The goal was to stop China, not liberate Vietnam. We consorted with the foulest people in power, instead of suppporting the local equivalent of Solidarity.

Guns don't win wars, ideas do. And we were clueless.

[Wright Patman]

2. There's not a very deep commitment

to the 'messianic internationalism' of * and the neocons' ideology or his poll numbers wouldn't be in the tank.

There is a lesson to be learned here. The messiah has already come and he wisely refused to run for office while here. Messianism in politics is a prescription for disaster, as we have to relearn every time it is tried.

[bemildred]

3. This guy has a lot of nerve talking about ignoring evidence. nt

[acmavm]

4. This guy is telling tall tales and rewriting history because Iraq is being

compared to Viet Nam, that's all. He's trying to save neocon face and keep the public from seeing that yes, once again, big oil and bloody fingered criminal greedy bastards are leading us into another disaster. One in which THEIR CHILDREN OR GRANDCHILDREN will never fight.

This editorial sickened me like no other that I've ever read in the NYT. There's a wall in Washington D.C. serves as proof that this bastard is a damn liar.

[chaumont58]

5. Revisionist history

I once worked with a retired Navy Seal who claimed to have spent, off and on, 7 years in VietNam. He said that he knew the war could not be won as early as '63.
In David Halberstam's book, "The Best and Brightest', he quotes then Army Chief of Staff, Gen William Wheeler as saying, "We can not attrite them faster than their birth rate will replace their loses." Wheeler was talking about the VC and the NVA. This was in something like 1964. He also didn't think much of the bombing campaign.
"Winning the VietNam War" and 'Cold Fusion" belong is the same catagory: fiction.

[pretzel4gore]

6. Maybe Vietnam have something to say about it!

the Vietnamese should put warrants out for assholes like the editorial board of the NYT/CNn etc who wage war against them using bushit and revised history etc....the war aint over until this morris pig is in jail, and it never will be!

[nightfire]

7. It's worth repeatng a quote from a new Vietnam memoir

"By the way, it bears mentioning that our war in Vietnam was unwinnable. For the whole of my adult life there has circulated the bizarre contention that the United States could have won the thing - if only we had done this or that, or the other; that wish list stretching to the horizon. Where did this idiot notion come from? Which Defense Department think-tank chuckle-head did that math? To say we could have won the war is the same as saying that we didn't fill our hearts with enough hate; didn't shoot enough Vietnamese down like dogs; didn't dispatch enough of their wounded with enough large caliber bullets to the head; didn't dump enough of their corpses in the bushy ditch-scrub like so many roadkills; didn't throw enough of them out of helicopters; didn't bumfuck enough of their women; didn't Zippo enough of their hooches; didn't napalm or strafe or frag them hard enough; didn't poison enough of their woods and farmland with Agent Orange; didn't bomb them with enough B-52 strikes ("whispering death," they called it); into enough small pieces far enough back into the Stone age . . ."

Larry Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain: Return to Vietnam pp. 37-38

[bpilgrim]

8. lol - tired OLD propaganda

"Its proponents mistakenly base their conclusions on the situation in Vietnam during the 1950's and early 1960's and ignore the changing course of the war (notably, the increasing success of President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization strategy) and the evolution of South Vietnamese society (in particular the introduction of agrarian reforms)." - they were saying right up to the day we left, and to this very day.



it's BS.

peace