Iraq: Another Vietnam?

THINKING THINGS OVER: The Wall Street Journal ^ | November 3, 2003 | ROBERT L. BARTLEY

[OESY]

Suddenly the historical debate over Vietnam is sprouting all through the current debate over Iraq. Howard Dean, leading the Democratic pack, told Dan Rather: "We sent troops to Vietnam, without understanding why we were there. And the American people weren't told the truth and it was a disaster. And Iraq is gonna become a disaster under this presidency."

[OESY]

Bartley captures some of the more valuable lessons of Vietnam in his retrospective.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

When a career officer is court marshalled for using a little extra to get information that saves other soldiers' lives, then, I'd say we've got another Viet Nam.

[Piquaboy]

Now, there is two of a kind. Dan Blather and Howard Dean.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Well, first of all, the Tet offensive was a militarily significant effort, not four truck bombs. After erosion of their position during 1967, the Communists threw all of their South Vietnam guerrilla forces into attacks in more than 100 cities across the length and breadth of the country. Most spectacularly, since it came before the eyes of the Saigon press corps, a 19-man sapper squad penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound. They failed to enter the chancery building, despite early reports, and the last of them was killed or repulsed after a six-hour battle.

General William Westmoreland appeared in the shattered compound to proclaim a great victory. His televised appearance came against a backdrop of destruction throughout the country, and the American elite decided to believe not the general but their own eyes. A widely cited Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that "the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, it may be falling apart beneath our feet." Walter Cronkite turned against the war, editorializing on the need for negotiation. With this home-front reaction, Tet was the turning-point in the war, the anvil of Communist victory and American defeat.

Yet in fact, Westmoreland was right, subsequent analysts have uniformly concluded. The Communist offensive was decisively repulsed. There was no general uprising in favor of the North. The South Vietnamese army did not buckle, though operating at 50% strength because of imprudent holiday leaves. The indigenous Viet Cong were destroyed, leaving the rest of the war to be conducted by troops recruited in the North.

In other words, Tet was a hugely successful media event

The big-picture lesson of Vietnam is that free, competitive journalism is free to--and does--collude openly in plain sight. Its very freedom assures that journalism is essentially impossible to hold to account for such collusion; journalists herded together and gave us a monochomatic picture of Vietnam. It was superficial, both in the sense that it was proven historically inaccurate retrospectively and in the sense that the journalists are far less expert in military affairs than American generals but subjected the expert's accurate assessment to withering ridicule.

This would seem to have been impossible, assuming that the freedom of American journalism produces vigorous intellectual competition in journalism. Unfortunately, it does not. Freedom does produce vigorous intellectual competition, but journalism is a venue which rejects intellectual competiton. That is, anyone who seriously and determinedly critiques the timid consensus of journalists is excluded--retroactively--from the ranks of journalists.

Journalism is the venue of arrogant timidity. Externally, journalism is arrogant--as the example of its rejection of correct expert opinion show not merely on Vietnam but on fads in general. The riot after the Stacy Koon acquital was caused by journalism's rejection of the expert opinion of the jury, as informed by the defense counsel as well as the prosecution. The list goes on.

But internally, each journalist is afraid of the herd, unwilling to oppose it courageously. Each individual journalist is a mere celebrity, someone who is not expert in whatever subject is at hand but nevertheless is in a position to pontificate about it--and whose real expertise is not in the truth but in what it is safe for him/her to say.

Journalism is not "objective" but systematically anticonservative. A historian should, in order to comment accurately on relatively recent events, view journalism from that perspective. Any history which is merely the second draft of jounalism is BUNK.

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

[Mr. Jeeves]

"To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other -- in a major crisis abroad -- cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism," Peter Braestrup wrote in his book "Big Story."

Well, it can if one considers American journalism's true motives.

[nathanbedford]

No nation acutely allergic to casualties can successfully wage war. It remains to be seen whether America has contracted another erruption of this fatal allergy post 9/11.

Absent another domestic terror attack, I greatly fear the media will have its way and eventually turn the nation against enduring losses in Iraq.

In this context, the media's responsibility is to acquaint the public with the probable consquences of losing the war in Irak.

It means a catastrophic loss of prestige and influence for Bush, his administration, and for America. It means the loss of ability to intimidate enemies like Syria, Iran and North Korea and thus makes nuclear war more likely. It means the loss of ability to influence borderline enemies like Sudan, Yemen, etc. and means that they might well provide sanctuary to terrorists. It means loss of prestige among our allies like Great Britain and Australia and further isolates us at places like the UN. It means our ability to hold pseudo allies like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, France could be fatally compromised.

It probably means the end of the Bush presidency, and his doctrine of preemption. That would certainly mean the end of waging war in any real sense against terrorism as Democrats assume power and compromise and temporize.

That means the loss of the war against terrorism.

The loss of the war does not mean the end of casualties but their acceleration. It means the end of security. It makes the odds of atomic strike against an american city very short, indeed, it makes the liklihood almost inevitable for we will have lost the foot race we are now running to kill off the terrorism infrastructure before it can detonate a mass killer weapon somewhere in the heartland. No parent can doubt the evidence of his eyes: These islamists are suicidally bent on the utter destruction of the american system by mass murder.

Worse the loss of the war means the onset of a new dark age of Churchillian proportions, I have previously posted:

"Ever since Viet Nam it seems that the most important battle in every war is the battle to define victory. If the writing of definitions is defaulted to the left, no victory will ever be recognized unless the CIC is a Democrat. Victory means the preservation of the enlightened western civilization without threat of unprovoked, unforseeable mass murder.

We also ought to make the matter of defeat clear so that voters will understand their options. Churchill left the world in doubt what defeat meant for the Anglo-Saxon peoples. He described defeat as introducing a new dark age made more terrible by the lights of perverted science. Defeat in the war against terrorism means a slide away from science into superstition, from liberty to dogmatism, from tolerance into bigotry. It means descent into poverty, sickness,and squalor which we see everywhere the Mullahs rule. To put it in words that all can comprehend, it means swapping flush toilets for filthy open latrines. It means that nuclear war would be almost inevitable somewhere in the chaos which would ensue."

This, and perhaps worse, is the cost of declining to accept casulties now numbering in the thousands and dead in the hundreds.

[Cicero]

Perhaps we should say more about the role of the Democrats in Vietnam.

The Democrats started the war, but they fought it for six years or with limitations amounting to one hand tied behind our backs. After they had screwed up and public opinion threw out LBJ, Nixon came in. The Democrats managed to blame Nixon for the war, so the average person today links the affair together something like this: "Vietnam--No, no, we won't go--Watergate--Kissinger--all Nixon's fault."

With Watergate, our national security interests were sacrificed to force a dishonest regime change. Nixon, elected by landslide, was thrown out, the war was thrown out with him, and the Democrats achieved the one thing they really wanted: a return to power.

[yoe]

What the article fails to disclose is the involvement by Washington Bureaucrats and the mess it caused. President Bush on the other hand let the experts carry out the war in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It is only now that the Bureaucrats are beginning to take over which will once again muddle the efforts of the experts, confuse and lengthen the recovery of Iraq. All these Monday morning quarter backers and think tanks can’t think outside of the box, they can’t keep their fingers off the experts doing their jobs very well indeed.

JFK and later Johnson had very bad advice and the military of that day was loaded with people who had little respect for leadership within their ranks and the ‘leadership’ was being yanked around by the desk set back in Washington causing the deaths of thousands of American men and women. A recipe for failure all around is to allow this sort of meddling to happen again. Patience and hard work from our smart military not advice from Howard Dean or any other Johnny-come-lately using the Bully Pulpit of campaigns or politicians who want failure, so denounce the on going efforts in Iraq.

So far, Iraq is a stunning success in a very short period of time. Dean and Clark represent the failures of Viet Nam; their rhetoric is from the past, it didn't work then and it won't work now, they are actually aiding the enemy as was done in Viet Nam - Just MHO.

[OESY]

Amen. Better to be respected than loved.

[livius]

Ping to Only1Choice - this is the WSJ article I mentioned earlier that coincided with your points.

[Only1choice____Freedom]

Thank you I was looking for it!

[OESY]

Let me rephrase my last post: Better to be respected for our strengths than loved for our weaknesses.

[BJungNan]

Iraq another Viet Nam?

There sure are a heck of a lot of people here at home trying their best to turn it into one.

[Eva]

Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal is not taking any comments, so I thougt I would post my comment here.

I was a college student during the Vietnam War, with a boyfriend (now husband) stationed at the mouth of the Mekong delta in '68. I was too young and immature to grasp all the rammifications of the war, but I knew that the protesters were wrong. I saw the anti-war movement as a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who were using their new found liberalism to hide their own selfish fears and avoid taking responsibility to support the country that gave them the freedom to live their privileged lives.

I was partly right, I now believe that was only half of the story. The US suffered a defeat in Vietnam, not "in country", but in this country. We suffered a great psychological defeat to the leftist interests who manipulated and exploited a generation of pampered college students into believing that stopping communism was not their battle.

Vietnam was just a battle in the war against the left, don't let them win another battle in Iraq.

[flair2000]

I grew up in the 70's/early '80's and remember being told that Vietnam was "Nixon's war". It wasn't until I reached adulthood that I started to figure out that wasn't the case. I think if wasn't for the internet and the fact that there are a few more conservative voices out there now days, people in my age group might still think Vietnam was "Nixon's war".

[Only1choice____Freedom]

Let's not forget what happened AFTER the pullout.

There was a reason for the millions of boat-people.
After the Americans left, the bloodbath began. Millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered in the killing fields and elsewhere. The toll on the non-communists was staggering.

I don't recall any of the mainstream media mentioning the aftermath of our retreat from victory due to Democratic influence. These fools have cost millions of lives. Why do they even have a soapbox any more?

Here's an idea - let's take the oppertunity to learn from our mistakes instead of just recognizing them when we repeat them.

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

...a self-inflicted wound arising from an essentially dishonorable strain of American neurosis.

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

BTTT

[1Old Pro]

What are the strategic differnces netween Iraq and Vietnam?

It's obvious, Iraq is no Vietnam.

[Prodigal Son]

Good read.