Quote Originally Posted by Bong30
Strongly disagree......

Left wing pussies like walter chrokite, and Jane Fonda, along with Many others made it an Impossible war to win.

You cant fight a war with one arm tied behind your Back. Cambodia. in Vietnam to start.

You cannot win a Politicaly Correct war....like Now

THe Insurgents are killing Inocent people cause they know americans have no stomach for death.....any death. The President layed it out nicely last night.

The Libs Just think with their Harts...Killing is bad...yes it is, but Being run over by comunism and Islam is no day at the beach.

Peace Fengzi
1000+ years of Vietnamese history made it an impossible war to win, not "left wing pussies". The pressure put on the govt by the left wing pussies may have prevented us from turning Hanoi into a dusty crater but that's about it. True, if our hands weren't tied we probably could have defeated the official govt of North Vietnam but we'd just have been left with a situation similar, if not worse, than what we have in Iraq today.

I actually wrote a 69 page( I can remember because it seemed so unbelievably long at the time) paper on this exact topic back in school. It's pretty complex but I'll give you the condensed version. For most of it's history, Vietnam was under the control of one or another foriegn power. From well before the birth of Christ(if you belive in that) to the mid 1800's, Vietnam was under the control of China in one form or another. Then the French, then the Japanese, then the French again. Finally the Vietnamese defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and it seemed they were finally independent.

No sooner had Vietnam finally gained it's "independence" than we, in our post WWII McCarthistic anti-communist hysteria, started messing around in their politics. Instead of just letting them work it out for themselves we orchestrated the whole Geneva conference and then set up Diem ( a rich Catholic in a nation of poor Buddhists) as the leader of our puppet government in the south.

During this period the vast majority of Vietnamese were poor farmers. If the Communists won, they'd poor farmers. If the capitalists won, they'd be poor farmers. These people didn't give a damn about political ideologies. What they did care about, however, was finally being independent. The vast majority of the people we were fighting against weren't fighting for communism, they were simply fighting against yet another foriegn power fucking with their shit.

You see, this wasn't a war of attrition. We had a kill ratio of 40-50 Vietnamese (NVA and Viet Cong) for every 1 American killed. In that regard we were clearly winning. Unfortunately this was more of a battle for the minds of the people and in that area we lost very badly. This is why the communists had a nearly endless supply of soldiers willing to be sent off and killed by the Americans. With this type of situation you have to ask yourself just what will it take to achieve victory? If it means killing every man, and a lot of women too, between the age of 12 and 55 is it worth it? That's pretty much what it was going to take. Yes, we could have taken out the government of the North but the insurgents would just keep on coming for eternity.

The current situation in Iraq is vastly different from what we faced in Vietnam but there are a lot of parallels as well. Unlike the beloved Uncle Ho, Saddam was a hated dictator. In taking him out we have generated some good will amongst many Iraqi's. We just need to make sure we don't squander it away if we have any chance of winning. Unfortunately, it's obvious that our current administration gave no thought to the social and/or economic factors (in Iraq) involved in winning this war. Bush only thinks in terms of "if we kill enough we will win" and that is what will cost us in the long run.