Posted on 11/27/2004 11:18:35 AM PST by markkind
John Rambo: Sir, do we get to win this time?
That was a line uttered by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II. Of course in this movie he's referring to Vietnam and our unfortunate "stalemate" in that war. More to the point, the dialogue illustrates that what the soldiers in the Vietnam War were feeling. Most scholars of that conflict would validate the soldiers by saying that the US Armed Forces were severely hamstrung against the North Vietnamese. From 1957 thru 1975 American soldiers racked up enemy bodies by the 100's but did not end the Communist aggression against the S. Vietnamese. This is where the familiar term quagmire gained its popularity.
Quagmire...we throw that word around a lot now and apply to almost any military confrontation. Most recently, the liberal talking heads were calling the Iraq war a "quagmire" and furthermore, were comparing the Iraq War with Vietnam. Mind you, the Vietnam War lasted about 18 years, not counting the years after WWII and the French-Indochina War. Our involvement in Vietnam cost us roughly more than 58,000 Americans. Then there are the approximately 3 to 4 million Vietnamese (North and South) whom were killed, in addition to another 1.5 to 2 million Lao and Cambodians who were drawn into the war.
We've been in Iraq since March of 2003 and though many brave soldiers have given their life over this war, it's not anywhere near the catastrophe Vietnam was. This from Newsmax.com:
"Zarqawi: US 'Infidels' Have Us on the Ropes
The world's most dangerous terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, announced on Wednesday that the battle of Fallujah was a massive defeat for the Iraqi insurgency, blaming the debacle on Sunni Muslim clerics who failed to support his reign of terror.
"Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence," Zarqawi said, in an audio tape posted on an Islamic Web site known as al-Qala'a, which has been a mailbox for Islamic militant groups.
"You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy," the notorious mass murderer complained. "You have stopped supporting the holy warriors."
The finger-pointing tape from Zarqawi is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. offensive in Fallujah has been a massive success, and could be the beginning of a rout for terrorist forces in Iraq."
Once again, this is hardly Vietnam.
Winning in Vietnam meant stopping the North Vietnamese Communists from taking over South Vietnam. In 1965 the United States sent in troops to prevent the South Vietnamese government from collapsing. Ultimately, however, the United States failed to achieve its goal, and in 1975 Vietnam was reunified under Communist control; in 1976 it officially became the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Winning in Iraq means allowing the Iraqi's to elect their own leaders (whom we support) and stopping any development of an Islamic Republic, as in Iran. It also means the Iraqi's will have redeveloped their own armed services as well as a brand new police force. It does not mean there will total peace and it never will...hell, there isn't even total peace in America. What we do have is an infrastructure that is strong and can support and nation of 300 million people. That is what we are trying to build in Iraq and that is what winning will look like.
Contrary to popular myth, the North Vietnamese were never going to surrender. The Soviets, the Red Chinese and the Cubans backed them. This was also their home. Where could they have retreated? You have to remember, after we left Vietnam, Pol Pot killed something like 800,000 of his own people (Cambodians) though the CIA estimated there were 50,000 to 100,000 executions. Needless to say, the South East Asians were not afraid to confront death on a massive scale.
The Arabs are no slouches in that category either, however, when your top Arab villain says, "You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the country and its people to the Jews and Crusaders, by resorting to silence on their crimes and preventing our youth from heading to the battlefields in order to defend our religion," it seems to me it's not going to take 20 years for the Iraqi's to figure out which road is the quickest to reasonable peace.
Unlike Vietnam, we are going to see this thing though and short of launching a nuclear strike, we will do what it takes to win the Iraqi War. This time Rambo, we do get to win...and so will the Iraqi's.
The French won militarily in Algeria too, but they couldn't put down the violence against the general population, and were eventually forced to compromise and withdraw.
Iraq is Not Vietnam; It's Winnable
Viet Nam was winnable too – in fact it was nearly won by mid 1968. What changed it to unwinnable was our “esteemed” news media led by Hanoi’s Resident American publicist, Walter Cronkite.
Listening to Michael Medved really opened my eyes about Vietnam. Seems that there was a lot of forgotten history that I was unaware of.
I wasn't aware that the peace deal reached included a return of American troops if the north invaded. Watergate was great cover for the north Vietnamese takeover of the south. Then Ford fought congress unsucessfully to hold up our end of the bargain, in fact congress even withheld sending medical supplies to Vietnam.
I have to quibble with this--first we withdrew our forces and then our support to our allies and then we just plain lost. Our strategic goals were to contain the expansion of communism and maintain South Vietnam as a free nation. Yet South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all ended up communist with the consequent mass murder, refugee flows, and loss of freedom.
However, the strategy of building up the South Vietnamese forces so they could handle the situation on their own is essentialy the United States military end-state for Iraq. Much more doable however as there is no equivalent of the Soviet Union arming and aiding the Iraqi insurgents.
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