Thursday, January 25, 2007
Jim Webb and the Iraq/Vietnam analogy
I do not agree with Jim Webb on the wisdom of the surge -- he being against it and me struggling to see what the downside might be -- but he is not shy about pushing Senate Democrats to think critically about their own assumptions:
Senator James Webb, a Virginia Democrat who fought as a marine in Vietnam, urged his colleagues not to draw a link between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Such comparisons, he feared, could force people away from backing the Iraq resolutions.
“I think there are parallels and there were many people at this table who opposed the Vietnam War, but some of those parallels are superficial,” Mr. Webb said. “We’re losing the support of a lot of people who supported the Vietnam War and who have problems with this if we try to lump it together.”
I think Webb is being diplomatic, and believes that most of those parallels are superficial. In that regard, I highly recommend Mark Moyar's new revisionist history of the that war, Triumph Forsaken
, of which more later.7 Comments:
By 
D.E. Cloutier, at
Thu Jan 25, 09:43:00 AM:
Vietnam vet Jim Webb's wife, Hong Le Webb, is a native of Vietnam.
On "Meet the Press" last November, Webb said, "And I, you know, I’m one of these people who—there, there aren’t many of us—who can still justify for you the reasons that we went into Vietnam however screwed up the strategy got."
Singapore patriarch Lee Kuan Yew has similar thoughts about the Vietnam War. (See Tigerhawk's post "Revising Vietnam," 20 Dec 2006). In a speech last October, Lee said: "However there were enormous 'collateral benefits' to East Asia from the Vietnam War. It prevented the dominoes of Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, from falling. It also changed China’s attitude to Vietnam; when the war ended China attacked Vietnam in February 1979 and stopped Hanoi from threatening Thailand, after Hanoi invaded Cambodia in December 1978. Without US intervention there would never have been the four East Asian dragons (S. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), followed by the four tigers (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines)."
Personally, I think the U.S. won the Vietnam War. I have believed that since the mid 1980s.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Thu Jan 25, 10:11:00 AM:
P.S. In 1986 I had dinner with an aviation official from the Chinese government. We were both in uniform during the Vietnam War. I was in the U.S. Army. He was a Chinese military advisor in Hanoi.
"America did not lose," he told me.
By skipsailing, at
Thu Jan 25, 12:26:00 PM:
recently while painting a wall in my hovel I noticed that printed on the roller pan cover was "made in viet nam". yeah, I think ultimately we did win.
the question then becomes, had we stayed, would the positives still have obtained? Would we have been able to prevent the blood shed of the likes of Pol Pot?
I wonder.
By 
, at
Thu Jan 25, 06:32:00 PM:
skipsailing,
We unfortunately aren't fighting the NVA in Iraq, we are fighting the Camar Rouge
By , at
Thu Jan 25, 07:03:00 PM:
It is interesting tha Webb chose the flag of Virginia for the background. The moto on the flag is "" Sic Semper Tyrannis" - "Thus Always to Tyrants". Adopted in 1776.
By , at
Mon Jan 29, 02:55:00 AM:
he being against it and me struggling to see what the downside might be
The downside would be the extra Americans and Iraqis who would be killed, and the cost. Your typical lefty blogger believes that adding American troops will make things worse in Iraq, not the same or better. But even if it was just the monetary cost, everything has a downside.
By , at
Thu Feb 15, 04:13:00 AM:
How interesting. The United States entered the Vietnam War to support a non-Communist government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon against the Communist government in Hanoi. After 23 years of military support (1952-1975, counting US support for French colonialism), 11 years of direct combat intervention (1962-1973), hundreds of billions of dollars, and 59000 American and 1-2 million Vietnamese deaths, the Communist government in Hanoi rolled into Saigon and conquered the South. Today, the hammer and sickle flies over Hanoi, capital of a united Vietnam.
The U.S. lost the Vietnam War. One can always redefine one's strategic goals in retrospect to make it appear that one has "won". That is the habit of dweebs and losers. Real men admit it when they get beat.
The fact that skipsailing's paint roller is made in Vietnam signifies that the Communist government in Hanoi has embraced capitalism and has succeeded in building a successful economy and society. This might have been achieved many years earlier if the US had never entered the Vietnam War in the first place. In that case you might say that the US had won by never fighting.
As for dec's Chinese air force officer, the Chinese have an interest in pretending that they did not lose their 1979 war in Vietnam, either. In fact, the Vietnamese beat them, too, and kicked them out of Cambodia to boot. (The Chinese were the Khmer Rouge's chief sponsors; the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and drove the KR from power after the KR began massacring ethnic Vietnamese and suicidally attempted to invade the Mekong Delta.)
This has been a little intervention from the real world. You may now return to fantasy roleplaying land.
