THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS ALWAYS WRONG (via Ed Driscoll):

“When I Left, We Were Winning”: The conventional wisdom re: Vietnam is deficient. (Mackubin Thomas Owens, April 13, 2004, National Review)

What does it mean to say that Iraq is turning into Vietnam? Simply that this war, like Vietnam, has become unwinnable. It is, of course, conventional wisdom to assert that the U.S. was predestined to lose the Vietnam War. According to this orthodoxy, the Vietnamese Communists were too determined, the South Vietnamese too corrupt, and the Americans incapable of fighting the kind of war that would have been necessary to prevail.

Despite its origins as a staple of left-wing political opinion, the claim that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was inevitable now transcends ideology. When conservatives deny the claim that Iraq is like Vietnam, many do so because they believe the conventional wisdom about Vietnam. Bill Bennett's op-ed in the New York Post on Sunday reflects this view. But the ubiquity of this view was really driven home to me in the early 1980s when the editor of a conservative opinion journal rejected an essay of mine that he had commissioned me to write concerning whether or not the U.S. could have won the war in Vietnam.

In this essay, I concluded that, in fact, the U.S. had won militarily by 1972. Despite continued pressure, US-ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) military successes against the North Vietnamese in 1968-1971 had helped to stabilize the political situation in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The improved political situation, combined with economic improvements, was solidifying the attachment of the rural population to the South Vietnamese government. Although much remained to be accomplished, the overall performance of ARVN forces during the Easter Offensive of 1972 indicated that "Vietnamization" was working.

I argued that had the United States made it clear that it would continue to provide air and naval support, the RVN would have survived as a political entity. But despite his sympathy with my point of view, the editor chose to kill my piece, arguing that I had not provided enough hard evidence to support my argument against the entrenched conventional wisdom.

Several years ago, Lewis Sorley provided the evidence I lacked in a remarkable book entitled A Better War. Building on his excellent biographies of Army generals Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson, Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress." [...]

[W]hile one must acknowledge the shortcomings of the South Vietnamese and agree that the U.S. would have had to provide continued air, naval, and intelligence support, the real cause of U.S. defeat was that the Nixon administration and Congress threw away the successes achieved by U.S. and South Vietnamese arms.

The proof lay in the 1972 Easter Offensive. This was the biggest offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. The U.S. provided massive air and naval support and there were inevitable failures on the part of some ARVN units, but all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day "Christmas bombing" campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, "you had won the war. It was over."

Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker, cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?

First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a cease fire that permitted PAVN forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms. Sorley describes in detail the logistical and operational consequences for the ARVN of our having starved them of promised support for three years.

Of course, the Asiatic is different than us and neither desires freedom nor has the capacity to live in a democratic society...

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2004 12:50 PM