No, the communists won the Vietnam war. This can be seen by the fact that they control all the territory.

Why pretend that war isn’t as much about the political circumstances that it is fought in as the military force that can be brought to bear? Your country isn’t good at long wars. Very few are, at least when they are wars in foreign countries. The population gets bored, politicians start to drift away from the lack of short term victories, they start to think of their long term futures as they watch public support drift away. If they didn’t have to think of re-election things might be different, but that’s not a good direction to go in, is it?

Short and direct wars are your forte. Small ones where the public are hardly involved work well. Ones where the people genuinely believe that they are in mortal, fight-for-your-life danger work. “Cabinet wars” just don’t work so well in a liberal democracy. After the initial hype, people just didn’t think that Vietman was worth it. The same has happened to Iraq. The same would happen for any war of choice. It happens to any liberal democracy that tries this stuff.

That’s not a comment on the military, it is a comment on the populace and politicians who represent them. And it isn’t a bad thing, because to change it you would have to control the population, propegandize them more or simply ignore their wishes, petulant and ignorant though they may be.

Linebacker was a operation over North Vietnam.

The NVA lost half of their artillery.

We won the Vietnam War. I was there as a USAF F4E weapon systems officer at DaNang AB RVN from 1971 to 1972. My undergraduate degree is in Asian Studies. I am also a retired military officer.

We won every battle we fought. No unit ever surrendered.

The Tet Offensive was disaster for the communists. Walter Cronkite falsely declared the war lost. Of the 84,000 VC only 10,000 escaped death or capture. Not a single military objective did they achieve. The Viet Cong ceased to exist as a fighting force.

The North Vietnamese launched their Eastertide Offensive in April. On 26 April, my BOQ was hit by a Soviet 122 MM rocket.

Unlike Tet, which had been a Viet Cong insurgency, this new Spring was a conventional operation with large armor, artillery and infantry units advancing on Quang Tri, An Loc and Pleiku. Nixon was furious that the NVA would attack during an election campaign and after he thought the Paris Peace Talks appeared to be making progress.

On 28 April the weather broke and we brought tactical air power into the fight. The ARVN fought very well with American air support. Of the 200,000 NVA troops that invaded the South, 100,000 were killed. Half of their tanks and half of their armor were destroyed. General Giap was relieved.

Operation Linebacker began with the suppression of enemy air defenses and then moved to hit real targets unlike the BS LBJ/Bobby McNamara raids that were an attempt to “pressure” north Vietnam. The US Navy mined the ports and harbors, trapping Russian, Chinese and Canadian ship. We hit the bridges, airfields, air bases, rail yards, power plants, steel mills, communications infrastructure and every military base in the country. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho began to make more progress.

On the 18th of December 1972, Le Duc Tho walked out of the talks. Nixon ordered Linebacker II - 100 to 150 B-52 sorties per night - to carpet bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. Friends who were POWs tell me that when they heard to sticks of 106 Mk82 500 pound bombs rumble across Hanoi they went wild. The guards, who for years had abused them, were terrified. In ten days, Hanoi was helpless, unable to muster any air defense. On 29 December 1972, Le Duc Tho returned to the table in Paris and agree to everything we asked. We agreed to one condition - NVA troops could remain in the South. Nixon promise President Thieu that if the NVA moved out of their positions we would return and defend them.

What I just described is, by any standard, a military victory.

However, the Democrats could not allow a Nixon victory. They hounded him from office and used their majority in Congress to cut security assistance to South Vietnam from $1.4B to $700M, ensuring that they would be unable to defend against another attack. To add insurance, the Congress added the Case Church amendment to the 1975 Defense Appropriation Bill precluding the US military from any action in, over or in the waters of North or South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.

Democrats (some of the same people - Kennedy, Murtha, Obey, Byrd) are in the same position with regard to Iraq.

When we leave the Iraqis will finally be motivated to take charge of their country.

I thought you folks were opposed to the welfare state? How is our enabling different
from making our own citizens dependent on governmental aid?

Secondly - You sir, are a loon.

Dragging out the old canard about not knowing squat unless you’ve carried a rifle in combat is pure sophistry. Perhaps you should consider that yours is the perspective that is flawed, given that it is gleaned from only what you were able to see 50 yards in front of you. I daresay that gives you one point of view - a valid one, I’ll admit - but what it does not give you is a corner on truth or knowledge. So get off your arrogant high horse and realize that you suffer from most of the very things you are railing against.

As for the rest of your tiresome rant, you are nothing except an old fashioned isolationist. America is too evil for the world hence, America should not sully the world with its grasping, conniving commercialism and cultural imperialism. I’d say that also is simple minded sophistry but I hate repeating myself.

This crap is very simple: as George Ball said, call it a victory and leave - let history sort it out.

We unfortunately have a country which cannot collectively keep its pecker in its pants, always eager to inflict some version of “freedom” and “democracy” on some other sovereign countries, serially and in tandem. It is authors like these, and the “proprietor” that have not the depth to understand the problem is very simple and construct chimera, false threads, fairy tales, vague theories — that is what self professed public intellectuals do. LEAVE, 45 days to clear Iraq into Syria, Kuwait, etc. as waystations to the US, forthwith. Leave the equipment and let them settle their own scores. Quit constructing blowback after blowback.

Quit excoriating the so-called left. The right has brought us the most corrupt, criminal, incompetent and venal regime since Caligula or Nero, six years of it, and reconstruction of civil liberties alone will take 10 years. The bastard mafia now in power came and shat upon what it did not break and maul from courts to congress. And, it did it intentionally. We need to get about cutting throats here in the US, mostly regressive right-wing reactionary throats, most in the Republican Party and its fellow travelers. We have seen the rightwing future and it does not work, nor is it moral, of any value whatsoever or viable. So, stop speaking about what you know nothing of.

I am retired military, been in combat, worked my ass for the Army, paid my taxes and then saw the country, and my tax money, overtaken by madmen and madwomen intent on some absolutely insane mission from their gawd with their hair on fire. To sit here and read this makes me understand just how the fish rots from the head down, until it has reached the likes of you all. A corrupt government, and there is no denying that certainly (denial is not a river in Egypt as you think) qualifies you all for the looney bin. I am not left, I damned sure am not right, I damned well am for GOOD GOVERNMENT by people who are not too DAMNED smart. To hell with public intellectuals with their nostrums and snake oil,
their slick presentations, their fronting for corporations who give them sustenance. They all contributed to this nightmare in Iraq, the result of which was evident in 2002 when the MSM would not publish any warnings from those of who had walked these paths.

Now, suddenly, it is Iraq’s fault and problem. Well, I be damned, the propaganda machine is working overtime again and again. We dont have the right to dispose of Iraq since we never had the right or duty to invade yet another sovereign country, for perhaps the 9th or 10th time in 120 years (starting with Hawaii in the late 1800s) with disasterous results worldwide. And, just for fun, I do wish someone would take Kissinger to the world court and string him up. If he dies first, decapitate him body, tear it into quarters and send them to the furthers ends of the earth (like Cromwell), and put his head to rot on a lamp post infront of the White House.

What tripe. You are really ready to continue to kill both Iraquis and Americans just for some damned ethereal ideal which you cannot even express in the English language. Get over it. It is done. We have many more important, no urgent issues to address.

Other than that, I do not feel strongly.

The real damage was the mortal wound stuck against the United States, the left became radicalized over the war and the right radicalized in response. Each side views the other with suspicion at best, usually loathing and pure hate. Civilized discussion is gone, now it is all venom and bile, and to top if off people have found out that bashing the other side is very profitable creating yet more alienation. It will take a generation before we recover from the war politically.

As far as the options go I favor #3. I don’t think Iran will have as much influence with the Shiites in the south, it is amazing how people who have gotten their hands on the oil money resent others trying to tell them how to spend it. The South is not monolithic, the factions of Shiites will be consumed in an internal power struggle and the Sunnis will be forgotten. If the Kurds will not do anything about the PPK, the Turks will educate them and nobody will care, they will suffer the consequences of their actions. The Sunnis might come out in the best shape, numbers too small to challenge the other regions so they would stay on the sideline, if oil is discovered they have a piece of the oil pie with no strings attached.

A permanent military platform in Iraq, from which to launch forays on this “long difficult war” was the goal from the beginning.

It would seem the Kurdish region is the benefactor of 3500 American dead and, what is it now, $500 Billion in treasure? Guarantee
you that is the fallback position for maintaining this beachhead. The Kurds have been cooperative, but also are very tribal.
Will THEY tolerate a permanent US military presence? I doubt it. The Turks? They’ll
go ballistic. What will happen in Baghdad?
The Iranians will not allow it to create
instability for their home turf. Yes, many
Iraqis will die. It’s time they took the reins and the responsibility for their own fate. All we can do is give them a chance.
We can’t do it for them. It’s their country.

Well, it sounds good to Mr.Bush as well, and look where basing your military strategy on fantasy has got us all so far.

“The Democrat position on this has been incoherent. Sometimes they say we should have listened to Shinseki and sent in a larger number of troops to obtain stability. At other times they make Rumsfeld’s argument for a light force so we’re not seen as an occupying power.”

The Democracts are no more capable of producing a different result from those I offered above than the Republicans are. No-one was ever capable of achieving any end other than those above from the first moment. We are where we are because option #1 was the only one considered.

“Everyone agrees we need to leave.”

You picked Option #1 which included permanent US bases to project forces in the region.

The Democrat position on this has been incoherent. Sometimes they say we should have listened to Shinseki and sent in a larger number of troops to obtain stability. At other times they make Rumsfeld’s argument for a light force so we’re not seen as an occupying power.

Everyone agrees we need to leave. We need to be just as careful getting out as we should have been getting in. Winning requires a military solution, specifically one that involves Iraq assuming its security commitments.