Now working on a book about the second half of the war, historian Mark Moyar argues: "In the offensive of 1975, the North Vietnamese are moving around huge conventional forces that would have been pulverised by our air power."
- From: Chim <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 11:55:02 -0700
Vietnam Historians Give President Bush a Reason to Stay in Iraq
Sunday , August 26, 2007
When President George W. Bush invoked the memory of Vietnam to justify
staying in Iraq, he was drawing on a new wave of revisionist history,
which maintains that America did not lose the war, but the will to
win.
"Three decades later there is a legitimate debate about how we got
into the Vietnam war and how we left," Bush said in a speech to army
veterans last week. White House insiders admitted it was a risky topic
which had previously been left to the anti-war movement. Americans
generally prefer to forget Indochina and remember who won the Cold
War.
Yet as the prospect of victory in Iraq has receded, the lessons of
Vietnam have provoked intense discussion among historians and in
current affairs magazines such as the neo-conservative Weekly
Standard.
Bush has been quietly paying attention and had been thinking for
months about the right moment to bring Vietnam into the debate,
according to a White House official.
In "Triumph Forsaken," published last year, the historian Mark Moyar
claimed that South Vietnam could have survived had the Americans not
acquiesced in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963,
plunging the country into an "extended period of instability and
weakness."
Moyar is now working on a book about the second half of the war, in
which he argues: "In the offensive of 1975, the North Vietnamese are
moving around huge conventional forces that would have been pulverised
by our air power." By then, however, Hanoi was well aware that America
was turning against the war and doubted that the U.S. military would
be able to act decisively.
Supporters of the Iraq war have also been delving into Lewis Sorley's
book,"A Better War," which was re-released in paperback this year. The
war, Sorley wrote, "was being won on the ground even as it was being
lost at the peace table and the U.S. Congress."
The North Vietnamese have given this argument a boost over the years.
In an interview after his retirement, Bui Tin, who received the South
Vietnamese army's unconditional surrender in 1975, recalled that
visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda, church ministers and other anti-war
protesters "gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of
battlefield reverses ... through dissent and protest [America] lost
the ability to mobilize a will to win".
James Q. Wilson, a social scientist who is revered by conservatives,
argued in The Wall Street Journal last year: "Whenever a foreign enemy
challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the
battle ... among the people who determine what we read and watch. We
are in danger of losing in Iraq ... in the newspapers, magazines and
television programs we enjoy."
Anti-war historians have hit back at Bush's invocation of Vietnam.
"What is Bush saying?" asked Robert Dallek, the biographer of John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. "That we didn't fight hard enough, stay
long enough? That's nonsense."
The debate is not just academic for Sen. John Warner, former chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who called last week for Bush
to begin pulling out 5,000 troops from Iraq by Christmas. The 80-year-
old Republican is still haunted by the memory of Vietnam.
"The army generals would come in [and say], 'Just send in another
5,000 or 10,000,'" Warner recalled. "You know, month after month.
Another 10,000 or 15,000. They thought we could win it. We kept
surging in those years. It didn't work ... You don't forget something
like that."
Senior generals, including Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of
staff, and George Casey, the army chief of staff, are believed to
support reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to below 100,000 by
the end of next year.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is also thought to favor the idea of
drawing down 3,500 soldiers every other month or so and accelerating
the pace after April, when troop shortages will make the surge
impossible to sustain at current levels.
However, Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, is likely to
demand more time for the surge to work when he reports to Congress on
the progress of the war next month. Last year, in his previous job as
head of the army college at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he made a
point of examining the "lessons learnt" from the Vietnam war.
One lesson was that it takes time to "clear and hold" communities and
build a political settlement. Major-Gen. Rick Lynch, who is based
south of Baghdad, said on Friday that pulling out American troops
would allow Sunni and Shi'ite fighters to regroup within 48 hours.
The enemy would start "building the bombs again ... and we would take
a giant step backwards," he said.
Ultimately, Iraq could experience the maelstrom that overtook Vietnam
and Cambodia. "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam," Bush warned last
week, "is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions
of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new
terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"
A humanitarian disaster on this scale would cast a pall over Bush's
decision to invade Iraq. It may be some comfort to him to imagine
that, 30 years on, intellectuals may launch a revisionist movement
that would look more kindly on his war record.
.
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- Previous by thread: In this mystical but ravaged land, "Cambodians are all so generous."
- Next by thread: India coach Bob Houghton lauded his boys for the stunning 3-0 win over Kyrgyzstan here Sunday night that takes them to their maiden finals of the Nehru Cup international football tournament
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