In The Future, Every War Will Be Vietnam For 15 Minutes

Today we learn JFK was advised by morons. Well, at least one.

America's unwise, unwarranted, and sadly unwinnable war in Afghanistan--hastily initiated and then abandoned for Iraq by President Barack Obama's ideologically blinded predecessor and dumped into Obama's lap in the worst possible way--is beginning increasingly to smell like the 1964-68 war in South Vietnam that swallowed up the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Something smells, all right. Remember when Iraq was the unwinnable war and Iraq-Vietnam parallels were all the rage? Now, in a hilarious irony, our unexpected victory has become the fashionable excuse for losing in Afghanistan.
It all sounds familiar. A powerless leader (whether Vietnam's Diem or Afghanistan's Karzai) with a corrupt family and little support in the countryside, who refuses to undertake the reforms (land, tax, electoral, and administrative) that the U.S. president tries to press upon him, therefore endangering the regime's stability against the guerrilla extremists (once communists, now Taliban).

It's hard to believe Sorensen was actually around for the Vietnam War, let alone advising the leader of the free world. The guerrillas lost that war; they were never a factor after their decimation during Tet. It was an NVA armored column, built in Russia, that took the South for Communism (also rounding up and imprisoning their erstwhile guerrilla allies), and that only happened because we abandoned them. This isn't exactly hard to find out, either.
The Kennedy-Johnson team, like the Obama team, was called "the best and the brightest"--but nobody's perfect.

I don't actually remember anyone accusing Obama's team of being the best and brightest. I do remember one calling himself a Communist, another saying in public that Mao was her favorite philosopher, and another being Joe Biden. They were last seen picking a fight with Fox News that everyone agrees was idiotic, and getting in another public fight with their own handpicked general over the strategy they announced earlier this year.
But the Vietnamese people, who had long resisted complete occupation and domination by the French, Japanese, and others, were not so easily grabbed, and were determined to drive any would-be occupying power from their land,

And thus they heroically drove their own South Vietnamese government from the land, after signing the Paris Accords to get rid of us. On the other hand, the Communist bloc were determined to enslave the country, and after we left they did so despite all native resistance.
There was little the U.S. could do to stop the flow of arms and enemy combatants into South Vietnam across its porous border with North Vietnam, just as there is little the U.S. can do now to stem the flow of arms and enemy combatants pouring across Afghanistan's porous border with Pakistan

Sure there was: we could bomb the North. It worked so well we forced them to sign a peace treaty, which kept the South free until Congress announced we would not, under any circumstances, bomb them again. (I've been studying Clausewitz this week and I have yet to encounter the chapter of On War in which he explains the virtue of publicly announcing one's pre-emptive surrender. Must be toward the end.)
The United States was not responsible for Vietnam's suffering under colonialism, nor was it responsible for Afghanistan's suffering under colonialism; but in neither country did American soldiers or diplomats know much about the history, language, culture, traditions, or needs of people that the U.S. hoped to win over.

No, but idiots like yourself are responsible for Vietnam's subsequent decades suffering under Communism and current status as one of the poorest, most repressed populations in the world. Re-education camps and ag-slavery aren't fun no matter what your history, language, tradition or culture.
I erred in predicting at the outset of this essay that Afghanistan could become, in the future, Obama's Vietnam.

What the hell. Why didn't you go back and fix the outset of this essay then? Are you using a typewriter? How do you not have an edit function?

Anwyays, it's too late. Every future war has already become Vietnam, and not the real Vietnam but some ideologically defeatist revisionist-history version where our efforts were always foredoomed for reasons that bear little resemblance to reality.

The best we can hope for is that such comparisons will be swiftly debunked, preferably within 15 minutes of their appearance.

posted by Dave on 10.30.09 at 06:42 PM





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Comments

The most distresssing thing about reading the Sorensen piece is that people take him seriously as a historian. The man merely mouths conventional 'wisdom' as cranked out by the sort of journalists who think M4 barrels get white hot. How can he possibly write useful history?

Yours,
Tom DeGisi

Tom DeGisi   ·  October 30, 2009 07:27 PM

Dave , you are a brave man to have the guts to actually finish that load of crap,I started to read the article earlier and had to stop it was so ridiculous in it's naivete and revisionism if that's possible,Great Fisking!
Bob

Bobnormal   ·  October 30, 2009 09:54 PM

but in neither country did American soldiers or diplomats know much about the history, language, culture, traditions, or needs of people that the U.S. hoped to win over.

Base slander against our soldiers.

Obama's diplomats? It's probably spot on, considering that Hillary (who wanted to know who painted Our Lady of Guadalupe) and J Effen Kerry.
They're probably wondering why their Arab translators are having such a hard time talking to anybody.

Veeshir   ·  October 30, 2009 10:55 PM
Will   ·  October 31, 2009 03:20 AM

Give Sorensen his due, he is a great writer. But always remember: Sorensen registered as a conscientious objector during WWII !!!

artwebster   ·  November 1, 2009 05:03 PM

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