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Still moot, the military Bush 41 had he inherited, he didn't build. And, most importantly there was no senseless war costing thousands of lives a year during the 80s that would have scared 18 year olds away.
I don't think it's accurate to compare saddam's forces with the VC and NVA on a toughness level. The Iraqis gave up faster than the French (who had been whipped by Ho's peasant army). The VC went underground (literally) for years and the NVA kept the Ho Chi Minh Trail moving in spite of daily B-52 poundings.
I am not arguing that we could not have won, of coure we could have with different leadership. I am arguing that the VN War was unique in far too many ways, including the home front, to be analagous to any other conflict in our history.
True, he inherited it from Ronald Reagan -- and immediately set about dismantling it. Forces in Germany and all four Navy battleships, plus iirc a carrier group or two, were scheduled for demobe when, 18 months into 41's administration, Saddam moved on Kuwait. That's because people on Park Avenue don't like paying for a big military -- in the 30's, they had the Army exercising with wooden rifles and sacks of flour, even as Hitler was building up his Luftwaffe air flotillas. Conservatives and especially neoconservatives want a serious defense establishment; a lot of paleocons don't trust standing military forces (Murray Rothbard denounced Bill Buckley over just this point), and economic royalists are all about their tax bills and corporate welfare.
Nevertheless, Reagan may have been helped in his initial recruitments by a soft economy, but the economy was quite strong during his second administration, and so I think my point is made, that the recruits are there, for good leadership.
And, most importantly there was no senseless war costing thousands of lives a year during the 80s that would have scared 18 year olds away.
If Vietnam had been prosecuted the way we know how to do things, it wouldn't have been "senseless", would it? True, the 80's were a period of peace, but they were also a period of menacing confrontation with the USSR, and began during the end of the "window of opportunity" that offered the Soviets their best chance to take Europe by military coup de main. Remember, that was when Hackett et al. were writing and popularizing their Third World War books based on wargamed scenarios. The 80's weren't the late 50's, no enemies in sight and easy tours of duty.
I don't think it's accurate to compare saddam's forces with the VC and NVA on a toughness level.
If you are talking about his ill-used and ill-equipped draftee "regulars", who were really more like militia, then I agree, but the Republican Guards and the Special Republican Guards were a different proposition. They stood and fought, and like the NVA and the Viet Cong when they stood and fought the United States Army, they died like flies. Underground, they have been every bit as tough and elusive as the Viet Cong, and I think for the same reasons -- Chinese advisors who taught them the rudiments of "asymmetrical warfare" based on Chinese experience during their 20-year civil war.
The Iraqis gave up faster than the French (who had been whipped by Ho's peasant army).
Well, that's really saying something, but that's just the line units. As I said, the Republican Guards have behaved much more like the VC and NVA.
The VC went underground (literally) for years and the NVA kept the Ho Chi Minh Trail moving in spite of daily B-52 poundings.
So have the Ba'athist holdouts, and it's just a matter of cutting off their supply routes and holding their heads under water until they expire. That was tough to do with other countries' neutrality and jungle canopy in the mix, but Iraq is a desert and you can see forever. Tough to hide out there unless you dig holes in the ground, and even those can be found -- and people in them have zero mobility and not much ability to communicate that NSA can't ferret out. There are probably 50 guys at NSA this afternoon just praying that Zarqawi or Ayman Zawahiri or OBL will accidentally key his cell phone.
Vietnam proved you can't stop canopy-covered supply line without boots on the ground; in Iraq, the boots are on the ground, they're backed by AFV's and damn-near-invisible eyes in the sky, and they can see. Huge difference.
I am arguing that the VN War was unique in far too many ways, including the home front, to be analagous to any other conflict in our history.
I'm not sure you intended it to be one, but that is a tautology -- "it was different, so it was different". They're all different, and the thing that makes them the same is people's willingness to help, to sacrifice if need be, and to win. JFK told everyone what the stakes were and what we proposed to do, but LBJ muddied the message because he didn't want Vietnam to interfere with his legacy-building personal agenda.
Moral of the story: Identify all giant, corrupt and corrupting egos and filter them every time from the leadership pool. Nobody can remember the names of the consuls and senators who built the Roman Empire -- just those of the prima donnas who nearly destroyed it, and eventually overthrew it, for the sake of their egotism.