Revisionist Me

There is some growing (but fiercely resisted) realization that we really did win the Vietnam War. If we hadn't cut off Saigon from supplies and air support, South Vietnam would be free today.

I'm proud to say I called this back in college during a political science class. I was shocked when the TA agreed with me. Ahead of my time, I was.

UPDATE: I suppose the point is that even less than a decade after the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese invasion, when the Vietnam War was still widely viewed as wrong and doomed to failure, I gave my opinion on my analysis of what happened. So I think I have credibility when I argue that we won in Iraq.

Further, I don't think that it is accurate to say that we were failing in Iraq until the miracle of the surge. We were making progress in the war. But just as the spring 2004 Sunni-Sadrist uprisings signalled a new phase of the war that we had to win; after we turned back those threats, by early 2005 it looked like we were once again in sight of turning over responsibility to the Iraqis.

But the early 2006 Samarra mosque bombing eventually ignited sectarian killing on a scale we hadn't seen until then. Iran and Syria weren't done trying to win. And al Qaeda still hoped to build their caliphate on the bodies of Iraqis and American troops. I thought we'd built up Iraqi civilian and military institutions up to the point that we could have continued our glide path out without the surge. The surge worked better than I hoped, faster than I hoped, and eliminated the major problem I saw for the surge--that heightened expectations would not be met and that would sour the American public on staying long enough to allow the Iraqis to complete the win--the way we failed to do in South Vietnam.

The surge won and gave us the great advantage of winning before we left rather than having a hard, messy Iraqi-led fight after we left. But still too many can't see we won that war. So go figure.

I still fear that President Obama just wants a decent interval before failure that keeps the failure out of his record. I draw hope from the fact that nobody as tough as North Vietnam is on Iraq's borders ready to exploit our absence with a conventional invasion (although I won't say I have no worries).

Anyway, we'd be better off if a South Vietnam that had reached South Korean levels of 1990 existed today. We'd have a much wealthier and tougher ally to block Chinese South China Sea objectives.

Funny enough, China might have better relations with North Vietnam today if we'd stuck around long enough to complete our battlefield win in South Vietnam even if North Vietnam was no better an ally for China than North Korea is today.

Anyway, right or wrong, I'm just giving my views on events. So when some organization contacts me to offer me talking points on issues of the day that might be of interest to my readers--even with the offer of money--I'm not biting.