Leftist Myths of the Vietnam War

Another good article from Commentary Magazine, this time about the Vietnam War. It is long, but well worth the read to the end of page 2.

The piece dispels many of the Leftist myths that have been poisoning America for 40 years.

It also gets to the heart of why we finally just gave up on this 10-year war that cost 58,000 American lives:

Tragically, the Johnson administration never accepted that it could win a war it was in fact winning. As H.R. McMaster shows in Dereliction of Duty (1997), the overarching theme of the Johnson years was not reckless war-mongering but its opposite: indecision followed by halfway measures, and a growing pessimism leading to more halfway measures. It was this that encouraged the North to extend its efforts in 1964, enabling its Vietcong auxiliary to regain lost ground. The same indecisiveness plagued the American approach to bombing, employed by Johnson and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara largely for political rather than military objectives, i.e., in the vain hope of convincing the North to come to the bargaining table. Until 1968, in fact, Washington’s carefully planned bombing campaigns barely had an impact on the course of the fighting.

The article also points out how the Leftist media helped us lose a war we weren't losing, examining the Tet Offensive which was a brutal loss to the communists:

To be sure, all this made no impression on the American public. That was because the press had presented the Tet offensive as a stunning Communist success and a signal that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The suddenness of the attack had caught not only the American military by surprise, but also the American media. After the war, one of their own, the Washington Post’s Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup, documented exactly how the major media proceeded to turn the reality of American victory into an image of American and South Vietnamese defeat.1 Basing themselves on that image, Walter Cronkite and others clearly felt they now had definitive grounds for mistrusting their government’s word and for concluding that, just as the antiwar movement had declared, victory in Vietnam was not and never had been a possibility.

Does any of this sound strangely familiar, as in recently familiar? There are definitely parallels between Iraq and Vietnam...but not the ones the Left wants you to believe in.

You can't win a war that you don't believe you can win. Sadly, that's a lesson that America's Left still hasn't learned after 40 years.

Maybe it's a lesson they don't really want to understand. It would require a bit of moral certainty...and that's something the Left avoids like the plague.