What Happened in January
There are ironic military anniversaries this month that have resonance in the present. On the 14th in 1943 Roosevelt met Churchill in Casablanca to discuss war strategy. This was nearly a decade after Churchill first warned his country and the world about the menace developing on the Continent, and it was the second year of U.S. participation in WWII. On the 17th in 1991 the air attack on Iraq began in Operation Desert Storm. This is now remembered on the left and in the media as the “good” Iraq War. On the 28th in 1973 Peace was declared in Vietnam, fourteen years after the first American soldiers were killed there. On the 30th in 1968 the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, which has become a mythical American military defeat.
It is mythical because the idea of a defeat is totally wrong. The battle, which began on the Lunar New Year, lasted about three weeks. At the end of that time the Viet Cong offensive military capability was decimated: they were never again able to initiate a credible attack. But, the belief that the outcome was just the reverse was reinforced, if not promulgated by Walter Cronkite and the media at the time. It was also the deciding factor in America's leaving Viet Nam in such a mess five years later.
During the 2004 presidential campaign Newsweeks’ Howard Fineman was heard to say on TV that “often when Cronkite said, ‘...and that’s the way it is,’ it wasn’t.” Tet was one of those “wasn’ts.” Even President Johnson must have believed Cronkite because he is reported to have commented that if he had lost Cronkite, he’d lost America. Apparently, no one in his administration thought to inform the American people otherwise.
On January 3, 2007 Prime Minister Tony Blair commented on the impact the media is having on the war in Iraq. He said, “[Islamic terrorists] have realized two things: the power of terrorism to cause chaos, to hinder and displace political progress especially through suicide missions, and the reluctance of Western opinion to countenance long campaigns, especially when the account it receives is via a modern media driven by the impact of pictures.” Saying that he believes it will take at least 20 years to defeat the extremists, he went on to point out that “…terrorism cannot be defeaterd by military means alone, but it can’t be defeated without it.”
In Vietnam the Necessary War self-described liberal 1960’s war protestor Michael Lind writes that, “The United States fought the war in Vietnam because of geopolitics, and forfeited the war because of domestic politics.”1 Today the left, with Ted Kennedy and Dennis Kucinich leading the way, is trying to repeat history. But, no matter how many comparisons are drawn between the two conflicts, the significant difference between Vietnam and Iraq holds great peril for the Middle East, for the United States and ultimately for the world. That difference is that under no circumstances were the communist Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, or their patrons the Russians and the Chinese going to follow the departing troops back to America to attack our homeland. We know, as do the politicians who are advocating that we pull out of Iraq, whether immediately or euphemisitically in a phased withdrawal, that the Islamic extremists will do just that. We know because they have already done so.
Lind conlcudes the book’s preface by writing, “Let there be no doubt: There will be ‘Vietnams’ in America’s future…Preparing for the…unconventional wars of the twenty-first century will require both leaders and publics in the United States and allied countries to understand what the United States did wrong in Vietnam-and, no less important, to acknowledge what the United States did right.”2
Before 9/11 we had a decade full of warnings. For twelve years Saddam Hussein ignored U.N. sanctions and in fact used that organization to further enrich himself. In addition, during this time, he daily shot at our Air Force protecting the no-fly zone. There was never any question that one day, particularly if he succeeded in shooting down a plane, Saddam would have to be dealt with.
The desire of the extremists to attack within America and the ability to do so was clear with the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in February 1993. We then had the bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar Towers, the African Embassy bombings, the declaration of war against the United States by Osama bin Laden in 1996, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Just as the English government ignored Churchill in the 1930’s, the American government pretended that these military attacks could be handled by cadres of FBI lawyers and decided not to take the hard decisions necessary to protect the future of the country.
Also on January 3, 2007 Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States was laid to rest in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since his death on December 26, 2006 pundits repeatedly re-assesed his 800 plus days in the White House with particular attention paid to his decision to pardon former President, Richard Nixon. For the most part, these pundits were the same media people and politcians who wanted nothing more than to see Nixon go to jail in 1974. Yet, with the perspective of thirty years they now acknowledge that having the “long national nightmare over” then was a good thing. At the time they called Ford, the consummate athlete, a klutz and stupid to boot.
If retrospect tells us that getting into Vietnam was necessary despite the mistakes that were made once there, can we not speculate that retrospect with give us the same assessment of Iraq. Will the passage of time and the passing of the need to secure political advantage for the next election bring some wisdom and a global perspective to what we have going on today?
- Lind, Michael, Vietnam the Necessary War (New York: the Free Press, 1999) page xiv.
- Lind, page xviii.
posted by Gunston Hall Moderator at 4:15 PM
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