willbeurdaddy
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Joined: 4/8/2006
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SilverMark
Will....sorry pal, simply put, you are WRONG!...
Sorry, but simply put that is revisionist history spun by the left to soothe the collective conscience and guilt over their treatment of our returning soldiers.
"What makes the conversation about Sorley's thesis especially interesting now, of course, is, as McChrystal asked Karnow, whether there is anything to be learned from Vietnam that would illuminate the way forward in Afghanistan. To be clear: there is no precise parallel to draw between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Every war is different. But the revisionists' view of Vietnam does shed some light on the issues facing Obama about war leadership. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable—which is clearly the common wisdom in America—but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap. As President Eisenhower liked to say, if you fight, "you must fight to win."
Even George Herring tempers his assessment:
"The war could not have been won at a price we were willing to pay,"
I dont subscribe to the "the media and hippies lost the war" theory. It was a lack of will and a conscious decision not to risk escalation. A classic case of politicians running a war, not the generals.
"America's best chance to win in Vietnam may have come earlier in the war. In 1964–65, the top military leadership understood that to defeat the North, it was necessary to go all-out. As historian Mark Moyar points out in his groundbreaking work, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954–1965, that would have meant a massive bombing campaign, mining Hanoi's port, and sending troops into Laos and Cambodia to cut off the North's all-important sanctuaries and resupply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But LBJ's advisers were reluctant—fearful, in part, of dragging China and the Soviet Union into a larger war. The military pressed—but not very hard. As Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster shows in Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, the top brass made the classic mistake of telling their political masters what they wanted to hear."
LBJ was more concerned with the Great Society than he was with victory. It is an error that Obama may well repeat in Afghanistan.
< Message edited by willbeurdaddy -- 6/15/2011 8:03:01 AM >
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Hear the lark
and harken
to the barking of the dogfox,
gone to ground.
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RE: CNN tries to hide its bias, but too late - 
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