Posted on 08/26/2007 6:45:38 PM PDT by ricks_place
The US President has called on a revisionist history of Vietnam to sell Iraq, writes Sarah Baxter
WHEN US 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,'' Mr Bush said in a speech to army veterans last week.
White House insiders admitted it was a risky topic that 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.
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, 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 US 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 US 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 mobilise 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 President's use of the Grahame Greene novel The Quiet American also raised eyebrows.
In his Veterans of Foreign Wars speech, Bush said: ''The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: 'I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.'
''After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.''
In Time magazine, Joe Klein responded: ''I love that the President's (or his speechwriter's) book-reading yielded a reference in the speech to Graham Greene's splendid The Quiet American ... I would hope that the President will re-read, or perhaps just read the book, as soon as possible because it is as good a description as there is about the futility of trying to forcibly impose Western ways on an ancient culture.''
But the debate is not just academic for senator John Warner, former chairman of the Senate armed services committee, who called last week for Bush to start pulling out 5000 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 5000 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 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace and Army Chief of Staff George Casey, are believed to support reducing the number of US troops in Iraq to below 100,000 by the end of next year.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates is also thought to favour the idea of drawing down 3500 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, the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, 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-General Rick Lynch, who is based south of Baghdad, said on Friday that pulling out American troops would allow Sunni and Shia 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 'boatpeople', '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.
Revisionist history to the MSM. If any doubt remains that the media are controlled by liberals, one only need to see how Vietnam is portrayed--as the technologically-sophisticated giant America being defeated by folks in pajamas who were under-funded and under-equipped.
Any objective observer can simply look at the facts and see the truth--what Congress did, and what happened after, and what our soldiers were ordered to do (leave Vietnam) and what happened after.
To simply say "The US lost and to explain how the US political will to win was destroyed led to that loss is revisionist history" is ridiculous.
It’s not necessary to see history through a leftist prism. It was mostly Democrats who opposed the Vietnam War, and many of those people occupy high positions in the Democratic Party today.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
South Vietnam fell to a massive tank assault launched by N Viet in all out violation of the peace treaty, because Nixon resigned and Congress (Dems) cut off all support for S Viet. That's how Indo China fell, it had zero to do with Viet Cong infiltrating villages. S Vietnam was pretty stable until the communists launched that attack.
I guarantee that people don't understand that and think the helicopter evacuation of our embassy personell in Saigon was the result of a series of military failures by the U.S. It wasn't. I lived through this era and even as it happened the liberal take on events was in no way similar to reality.
Stopped reading at this point. Didn't need to read the Leftist hit piece further.
Traitor Democrats OWN defeat. They will now go ape because forcing defeat in Vietnam is the very touchstone of a liberal’s self worth.
Hey Joe, tell it to the Japanese ...
That's a laugh. Liberals have revised history from Rome to the Founding Fathers to Vietnam to the First Gulf War.
They are disgusting.
Facts are in everyone’s faces....the commie left have always been the revisionist...FACTS ARE FACTS!!!!
“The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interest and perspectives, is — second only to American political campaigns — the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of intellectualism of our time.” - Larry Laudan
The loss of the War in Vietnam was a political and propaganda loss. We lost it, and three and a half million Southeast Asians were slaughtered in the aftermath, because—and solely because— the Democratic party and the “American” Press fought that political and propaganda war for the Communists. THREE AND A HALF MILLION HUMAN LIVES, DAMNITT!!!!
Bastards. Damn Bastards.
And they have the NERVE to go on and on about how much they CARE about Human Suffering.
They don’t .
And they never will.
Better yet, tell it to the Vietnamese who came strolling over about ten years later to say, Oh, by the way, could you, um, show us again about how that whole Capitalism thing is supposed to work, because as it turns out, wouldn’t you just KNOW it, this Communism thing just doesn’t really, ah, you know, well, ah, work, or anything.
So was “Revisionist History” on the latest DNC talking points fax? I’ve seen that term all over the talking head shows and news today.
I thought John Kerry negotiated the end of the Viet Nam war.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/03/25/kerry_spoke_of_meeting_negotiators_on_vietnam/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39744-2004Sep21.html
Ad Says Kerry ‘Secretly’ Met With Enemy; But He Told Congress of It
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2004; Page A08
I don’t recall seeing Sarah Baxter sitting in a jeep or truck with me riding through the Mekong Delta in 1970.
Oh, I forgot, she’s an expert on something, but it’s not Vietnam.
Re Sorley and Moyar. Two great guys who do their homework.
Wait for Mark’s newest book. The left will have a heart attack.
Max Friedman, MACV-accredited journalist, So. vietnam and Cambodia, Fall, 1970.
You could just as well say that we won the war and went home, then betrayed our allies later when they needed us to step up. We had almost no ground troops left in VN by 1975, when the North invaded with armored strength. A 'rat Congress refused the South's plea for logistical and air support, which we had promised under the Paris peace agreement.
Seems we never learn.
If they cared even one little bit about human suffering they would have long since realized the suffering and damage their 40 plus year war on poverty has inflicted on those it was supposed to help. The people who run the programs have done quite well, but those who were supposed to benefit from them have ALWAYS gotten the short end of the stick. The collect the money in taxes, use 80 percent or more for administering the programs, then short change the end users by that amount and ignore the abysmal outcome of the programs. All the while preparing their next grant application to repeat the process for the next budget year.
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