"In Vietnam it took 500,000 troops and that didn't solve the problem. So we have to take a different approach," Murtha told The Cable in an exclusive interview. "I think that's what McChrystal is trying to do," he said, referring to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, who recently delivered a status report to the White House on the situation there.
Excuse me? What rot.
We actually defeated the Viet Cong by the time we withdrew our forces and left a South Vietnamese army capable of holding off the Soviet- and Chinese-backed North Vietnamese army--provided we continued to support the South Vietnamese logistically at least.
What sunk South Vietnam was the refusal of Congress in 1973 to 1975 to allow America to support our Saigon allies in the face of the north's conventional military threat that ended up rolling into the south's capital in 1975 behind mechanized spearheads.
John Murtha, who served in Vietnam, is now in Congress where he can at least get one thing right about the Afghanistan-Vietnam comparison--Murtha can undermine anything our troops achieve with their blood with the stroke of a pen.
