Déjà vu All Over Again

I remember reading in my U.S. history book in high school about how the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. We didn’t actually get that far in the book in class. I just read ahead. What I couldn’t figure out, and what the history book never seemed to divulge, was how exactly we lost anything. How does a military superpower lose to a second-rate guerilla movement supported by a weak Communist government using cast-off Soviet hardware? I asked the same question when I watched the Soviet Union tuck tail and run from Afghanistan. The answer in those cases seemed to be WILL. The resistors simply had the will to hold out at all costs and their will outlasted that of their opponent.

In the case of Vietnam, set aside the struggling succession of barely legitimate governments in South Vietnam and look at why the U.S. stated it was going. I used to think it was just to bail out our French allies in a failed colonial ambition, but upon looking at the bigger picture, there was a real attempt to stem the flow of communism in that part of the world. The U.S. lost the will to continue fighting, but in truth its will was weak from early on. The right tools weren’t given to the commanders in the field and the war was often micromanaged from Washington, especially during LBJ’s Presidency. Eventually, the U.S. completely lost the will to continue on the half-hearted fight, even though the Army had thoroughly decimated the Viet Cong and was continually more than a match for the NVA infiltrators or even the main body of the North Vietnamese Army.

We didn’t lose any battles, but we lost the war, as the old saying goes. Even Tet was a U.S. victory, though you wouldn’t know it from the determined propagandists of the day like Walter Kronkite. He has of course admitted since that he did in fact lie regarding American success and failure in Vietnam because of his own personal beliefs and agenda.

The Army was undermined primarily by the politicians at home who were in turn suffering from continual protests and Leftist anti-war propaganda spread by the Radical Sons of the Boomer generation. No small amount of help assisted in the loss of the war from the agit-prop arm of the Soviet Union, whose KGB turned out some absolutely stellar (and false) propaganda parroted by all the great Lefties of the day from Fonda and Kerry on down.

Let’s fast forward to the current state of affairs. The U.S. is involved in another war half a world away. Our Army is still the best in the world and this time we even have allies and a much stronger native military to assist us. Daily the foreign fighters are killed and the local insurgency ebbs and wanes. We see communiqués and correspondence from leaders in the various terror organizations themselves stating that the U.S. Army’s presence and their inability to make them run back to America is causing them defeat after defeat. Their mood is grim. Is this cause for celebration? Not if you’re a Leftist in America, like Eleanor Clift. This is cause for mourning, because, obviously we’re losing.

“Bush lost a war we didn’t have to fight and shouldn’t have lost-and he’s saying the Democrats don’t understand the stakes.”

That line sums up the Left’s view of this war. When they say “It’s another Vietnam”, I think they genuinely believe it. It’s another attempt for them to undermine U.S. power and prestige and even fighting will in a time where our energy and resources if allowed to work will carry the day. The U.S. Army still has not been defeated and will not be defeated by the likes of what we face in Iraq. It is also only one piece of a very big war that includes Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and probably China. And those are just the ones we know are out to get us.

I still am at a loss, just as I was when trying to determine how we “lost” Vietnam if we won all the battles, in trying to figure out how, like Clift says, we lost the Iraq war. What mighty advice could she or her brethren offer to do better? Does she have any? Is there a solution that Dean and Kerry have been holding out on til they get back in power? Is that their October Surprise? Or is this just a pure hatred for the party that usually leans to the right, the Republicans and for American power and its use in the world? I’m tending a bit towards the latter. The Democrats have no better ideas on the war, because if they had, well for one they wouldn’t be Democrats, but also they would have trotted them out already and I’ve seen zippo.

It's difficult to look beyond the prism of today and the partisan hatred that both sides feel for one another. The certainty that I can see is that the left, personified in the national bulwark of the Democrats, is unable or unwilling to view history and our current place in it. Comments like Clift's show that they're still living in the fantasy land of means justify all ends without any consideration for our current reality. Enemies of the United States don't care about our partisan politics except how to use them to their advantage, and the Dems right now are providing the bulk of that support to them whether they like it or not.