MARK STEYN ON VIETNAM

This piece is probably indicative of the agit-prop the wingnuts have been pushing about Vietnam. The purport is to show that the dirty fucking hippies were wrong then and they are wrong now about Iraq. The italic text is from Steyn's column.

At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest ...

Kerry DID get it right and Tommy Franks agreed with him. Here's someone a little more authoritative than Mark Steyn on getting it wrong in Vietnam:

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

Robert S.McNamara,
IN RETROSPECT:THE TRAGEDY AND LESSONS OF VIETNAM
by ROBERT S. MCNAMARA WITH BRIAN VANDEMARK


Professor Bernard Lewis' dictum would be self-evident: "America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."

Harmless? Saddam and his sons are dead.

Because what was lost in Vietnam was not just a war but American credibility. ... "The West" as a whole was infected by America's loss of credibility. ... But if you lived in Damascus and Moscow and Havana, the Vietnam war was about America: American credibility, American purpose, American will.

There are several problems with these statements but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, credibility. I find the following statistic all the credibility America needs:

March 2, 1965 - Operation Rolling Thunder begins as over 100 American fighter-bombers attack targets in North Vietnam. Scheduled to last eight weeks, Rolling Thunder will instead go on for three years.
The first U.S. air strikes also occur against the Ho Chi Minh trail. Throughout the war, the trail is heavily bombed by American jets with little actual success in halting the tremendous flow of soldiers and supplies from the North. 500 American jets will be lost attacking the trail. After each attack, bomb damage along the trail is repaired by female construction crews.
During the entire war, the U.S. will fly 3 million sorties and drop nearly 8 million tons of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped during all of World War II, in the largest display of firepower in the history of warfare.
The majority of bombs are dropped in South Vietnam against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army positions, resulting in 3 million civilian refugees due to the destruction of numerous villages. In North Vietnam, military targets include fuel depots and factories. The North Vietnamese react to the air strikes by decentralizing their factories and supply bases, thus minimizing their vulnerability to bomb damage.