March 29, 2003
THE NADIR:
U.S. Forces Out of Vietnam; Hanoi Frees the Last P.O.W. (Joseph B. Treaster, 3/29/73, The New York Times)The last American troops left South Vietnam today, leaving behind an unfinished war that has deeply scarred this country and the United States.
If this was not the low point in American history, then this surely was: Senate Rejects Vietnam Aid Rise (John W. Finney, May 7, 1974, The New York Times). Yet few Americans have ever come to grips with the fact that the supposedly artificial South Vietnamese government and unwilling people fought on for over two years after we bugged out and a year after Ted Kennedy pulled the rug out. Regardless of whether you think we should ever have been there in the first place or how you think we conducted ourselves once there, you can't help but be ashamed that we not only refused to help defend them from the North but even refused to help them defend themselves.
If the Shi'a of Iraq are slow to rise and the Ba'athist believe they can win just by making the war bloody enough, much of the blame lies with ourselves, because the lessons of Vietnam (and of the Battle of the Black Sea, which Saddam seems to have gone to school on) are that we're an uncertain ally and a squeamish foe. Such is the price we continue to pay for the victory of the anti-war forces as regards Vietnam.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 29, 2003 7:21 AMOur Vietnam weakness incentivizes our opponents to inflict casualties upon us and to refuse to give up. It gives them hope and makes them fiercer enemies. Likewise, our betrayal of the Iraqis in 1991 is costing us now. We are paying the price for past sins. But we can atone for them.
Posted by: Paul Jaminet at March 29, 2003 7:44 AMVery well done. Because most educated men of my generation intentionally avoided service in Veirnam, the lie that the war was wrong and the myths of Communmist inevitability are repeated again and again. The truth is that the national leadership attempted to fight a war of policy with draftees, without rational use of air power, and without moral mobilization--how could we not have lost. The cowardice was both collective and individual. Time passes, lessons are learned, aging yellow-stripers leave the scene. I agree that we are now paying the price for Vietnam, but a new day is dawning.
Posted by: Lou Gots at March 30, 2003 11:58 AM