This thesis is still somewhat new and controversial--but there is enough truth to it that it is beginning to stick. Whatever the failures of American strategy in Vietnam, there is no doubt that the anti-war left pushed for American failure and accomplished it by persistent and vigorous legislation. And that is the crucial issue. If the architects of the Vietnam War in the Johnson administration can be criticized (as Moyar does) for not doing enough to win the war, the later anti-war left actively pursued American defeat and humiliation as their goal. They didn't merely want us to withdraw; they wanted us to lose, and they did whatever was necessary to make sure that happened.
So instead of being a story of the failure of imperialist, war-mongering Republicans, the Vietnam War was the story of two separate failures by Democrats. The Democrats who started the war held back from using the force necessary to win it--and the Democrats who ended the war deliberately knocked all of the remaining props out from under the South Vietnamese government to ensure the defeat of an American ally.
This is the wider Vietnam story that the left has never understood. They have always regarded Vietnam and Watergate as the glory days they long to relive. It was a time in which their political faction was temporarily triumphant, hounding two hated presidents out of office in disgrace.
But for everyone else, those events and their aftermath--the whole "national malaise" of the 1970s--was a painful period of national humiliation, for which we are still paying the price. The collapse of American power and credibility, combined with the "Vietnam Syndrome" that enshrined timidity as the cornerstone of American foreign policy, emboldened the Soviet Union and encouraged its invasion of Afghanistan--which gave birth to the "mujahadeen," the movement that gave Osama bin Laden his start and established his reputation. It also led to President Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, which assured the success of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution.
So the twin pillars of the contemporary Islamist threat--al-Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran--owe their origins to the collapse of American power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. What new disasters wait to be spawned in the aftermath of a self-imposed defeat in Iraq?
And the terrible thing is, it didn't have to be that way. By 1974 and 1975, American draftees were not being killed in Vietnam. The Left succeeded in getting us out of Vietnam. Unfortunately, the Left really wanted us to lose in Vietnam. So they cut off funding for South Vietnam, refused to let our Air Force or Navy help our ally, and stopped anyone else we provided aid to from supplying South Vietnam. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam.
What shocks me is the statement that this view of a war we could have won is only recently emerging. When I was but a lad, in an introductory political science class at the University of Michigan, my teaching assistant asked me what I thought would have happened if we hadn't cut off aid. I told him I thought that South Vietnam would be independent today. To my shock, he said that he thought that was quite possible. He was to become a Navy officer, as it turns out. I hope he's an admiral by now.
I welcome the new thesis. Will the dominoes first unleashed in 1975 keep falling? Or do we finally stop the Left's childish game of overturning the board when they don't like the results?
UPDATE: Mark Moyar explains his research on the dominoes that didn't fall:
It is also a mistake to assert, as many have asserted in recent days, that the United States never should have intervened in Vietnam in the first place because Vietnam was predestined to become capitalist. In my research, I found that American intervention in Vietnam saved Indonesia from going Communist in 1965. It probably also prevented countries such as Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and Malaysia from becoming Communist or pro-Communist. Furthermore, American intervention fractured the Sino-North Vietnamese alliance and tamed China. In the absence of these developments, socialism might well have persisted in Vietnam and other Asian countries to this day.
President Bush has shown that he is up to speed on the latest historical discoveries on Vietnam. Those who are inclined to disagree should first get up to speed themselves.
I don't know why this is a new discovery. This concept has always seemed rather self evident. Even though we didn't need to lose in 1975, losing in 1975 preserved a lot that would have been lost if we'd been defeated in 1965 or hadn't fought at all. Remember, we fought in Vietnam as part of the Cold War struggle against communism. Without that context, we never would have fought there. So you cannot evaluate the Vietnam War withoug judging the whole Cold War context. Honestly, those historians ridiculing President Bush over his analogy are just making fools of themselves. It's almost as if they value their politics above their history!
