When US forces settle in for a long peace after fighting a difficult war -- as in (West) Germany and Japan following World War II, or South Korea since the 1950s -- their presence has generally nurtured stability, prosperity, and democratic freedoms. When they retreat precipitately — as in Lebanon or Iraq — renewed cruelty and violence predictably fill the vacuum.
There is a huge difference between the scenarios presented here where U.S. troops "settled in for a long peace" and those where they "retreated precipitately." In the case of Germany and Japan, those nations were effectively destroyed before any military occupation took place. And South Korea wasn't even an occupation as I would use the term (the U.S. didn't topple the Korean government in a military campaign).
The cases of Lebanon and Iraq, along with Vietnam, don't make the case for long-term military occupation at all. In fact, a better case could be made that the U.S. never should have had a military presence there in the first place. You don't fight a half-assed military campaign and then expect to get any results. You're better off if you don't even bother with the military campaign in the first place.
And the reason for this is that people never change. We have to wait for the defeated generation to all but die out in order to change the culture left behind.
Therefore we will never achieve victory In the middle east because we won’t stay long enough to destroy islam as a functioning part of those societies.
Ann Coulter had it right. The only way to win is to conquer their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Until we have the will to do that we are only fighting a holding action as we retreat and pray for Jesus to come back soon.
It was progressing on the ground. It was, in fact won in the air. Hanoi was, according to Giap, making preparations for an American Occupation. The big guys were getting their families out of the country. We marched up the hill and then, we marched back down the hill. It was pretty much the same after Tet in 1968. We had won the war by spring 1969 when the last of the VC were crushed and the NVA had all withdrawn. Then we stood down because it wasn't fair and we had to let the NVA take time for some R&R to get back into the game.
Just to engage in a little counter-factual history
A mere 3 years later in 1976, Mao Tse-Dong (as well as Zhu De and Zhou En-lai) would all die in China.
Would new leaders in China (ie. Deng Xiao-ping) have pushed the North to make peace with the South?
I would differ with that assessment. I go there from time to time and not for business. I hang around in a highway town and take a jaunt or two up or down country. I have many close friends there including a couple of American expatriates, one who has been in Vũng Tàu since '83. My experience is that the Vietnamese have more what I call walking-around freedom than we have here. Of course they do not have the Constitutional protections we have but very few countries have those. They can up and go somewhere at will and the formality of notifying the local gendarmes is still observed- sometimes. They can buy and sell property even though on paper the land all belongs to the government and is leased at tiny, even for Vietnamese, sums. One can build on one's land without government telling one just how far apart the nails must be and just what the composition of the nails must be.
There is the endemic corruption; you have to grease palms for most things but the cost is relatively far less than all the permits and approvals required in our "free" system. The difference here is that our far ore expensive corruption is institutionalized and formalized. You don't have to slip a few dollars to the local police chief before you build something but you have to get permits for everything and will be told what you may build and how you must build it and what your yard must look like.
Speech is much more open now than in say, 1985, and the people still refer to bureaucrats as "Vi Si"(VC). The bộ đội can arrest you for anything at all but it happens probably no more than it does here and there are no SWATs though that may change as the government people try to copy all things American so long as it doesn't cost them their jobs.
Religious freedom is a bit circumscribed but that is changing favorably by fits and starts and by a militant Catholic Church and Buddhists who are taking back some of their properties stolen in '75.
The country is prospering because of general economic freedom. The commiebastards, being Vietnamese, are perceptive and practical, unlike their onetime counterparts in Moscow, and East Europe. They saw that the country would get continually poorer with socialism and collective farming and would become inevitably a province of China so they got off the socialist horse and said produce what you want, build what you want to build.
Gradually the bribery has become less onerous because the production has outstripped the bribe levels and businessmen are becoming more influential than the bureaucrats.
The Vietnamese government and people have made a workable accommodation with reality. A clan based society is unlikely to be able to profit from democracy in that each voter will always vote for the candidate most related to his clan regardless of qualities. That has been illustrated starkly in the Middle East in several instances recently. South Korea seems to be the only example in history that is different.
Actually, I think there are only three countries in the world who have overthrown a tyrannical set of rulers and replaced them with successful democratic/republican systems, with systems that were not more tyrannical than the ones displaced. There is the oldest one, Switzerland. Then there is the American experience and the last is South Korea. The Swiss and American societies at the time of their liberation were both based on individuals, people who had migrated out of class based tyrannical societies into relatively empty lands that had weak control from nominally ruling capitals in other places.I might place the Baltic states in that category but they are not out of the Russian woods yet.
Việt Nam had a version of that experience with outcasts and the more entrepreneurial folks leaving their villages for the wide open spaces of the Mekong Delta. That's why the South is more entrepreneurial and prosperous than the North and has much less interference by the government in day to day affairs.
The Congress elected in 1974 has the blood of millions on its hands. The war was won at Christmas 1972 with the massive bombing and mining harbors. Even the barest follow up in the ensuing years would have kept the South and Cambodia free.
I think his assessment of Reconstruction is laughably one-sided.
What crap.
THE recurring theme of US military history is: We are a representative republic with a citizen army. Our people hate and will not support prolonged campaigning, and they will not support even short wars with no plan for victory.
The "people we leave behind" are foreigners, and are no concern of ours. It's the people (our people) who bear the burden that our obvious concern. The repeated commitment of forces that take casualties and die with no plan to eradicate the enemy and achieve victory (and now do not even get to NAME the enemy) is repulsive to Americans, and we will never support it.
I predicted, right here on 9/13/01, that George W. Bush would fight a Vietnam war in South Asia, which is exactly what he did.
The only "recurring theme" we need to know about is TomasUSMC's tagline: "Fight like WWII, win like WWII. Fight like Nam, finish like Nam".