View From a Height

When Does "Warning About" Become "Rooting Against?"

The self-styled "Progressives," continue to live in the past. Someone should renew their subscription; they've obviously been reduced to pulling out the cardboard boxes with the old newspapers and love beads...

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the national election based on the incomplete returns reaching here. . .

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.

If these guys are this heavily invested in this story line, they're certainly not leaving any doubt about their policy. And for those of you who've forgotten how well it worked out the last time, I refer you to that decade of American triumph, the 70s. You know, first time tragedy, second time farce, and all that.

Fortunately, there's an antidote to this sort of simplisme - actual scholarship. Brought to you by Mack Owens of No Left Turns. It's a review of Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam.

The defenders of the conventional wisdom will reply that Mr. Sorley’s argument is refuted by the fact that South Vietnam did fall to the North Vietnamese communists. They will repeat the claim that the South Vietnamese lacked the leadership, skill, character, and endurance of their adversaries. Mr. Sorley acknowledges the shortcomings of the South Vietnamese and agrees that the US would have had to provide continued air, naval, and intelligence support. But, he contends, the real cause of US defeat was that the Nixon administration and Congress threw away the successes achieved by US 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 US 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 NVA offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?

First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced the government of RVN to accept a cease-fire that permitted NVA forces to remain in the south. 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. Mr. Sorley describes in detail the logistical and operational consequences for the ARVN of our having starved them of promised support for three years.

Please, please, please Read the Whole Thing. And then this. And then this.

This war is similar in the ways that benefit us, and entirely different in ways that benefit us.