Max Boot’s “Another Vietnam?”, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, looks at several lessons that we should have learned from the Vietnam War beyond the obvious ones to which President Bush referred in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars the day before yesterday. Unfortunately, the Left’s utterly ahistorical narrative has become conventional. Mr. Boot revisits what really happened in Vietnam and points to similar dangers that we face in Iraq:
- The danger of prematurely dumping allied
leaders. . . . In the early 1960s, American officials were frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 1963 the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup against him, in the hope of installing more effective leadership in Saigon. The result was the opposite: a succession of weak leaders who spent most of their time plotting to stay in power. In retrospect it’s obvious that, for all his faults, we should have stuck withDiem. . . . - The danger of winning militarily and losing
politically. . . .By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow andBeijing. . . . - The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border. This a parallel that Mr. Bush might not be so eager to cite, because in many ways he is repeating the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, who allowed communist forces to use safe rear areas in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to stage attacks into South Vietnam. No matter how much success American and South Vietnamese forces had, there were always fresh troops and supplies being smuggled over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
And, finally, if Congress insists that we treat Baghdad as dishonorably as we did Saigon:
- The danger of not making plans for refugees. One of the great stains on American honor in Indochina was the horrible fate suffered by so many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who put their trust in us. When the end came we left far too many of them in the lurch, consigning them to prison, death or desperate attempts to escape.
As the saying goes, Read the whole thing.
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