Quagmire This

The Lord of Truth directs us to this article by Peter Kann, which hammers home one of my favorite points -- quit comparing Iraq to that war-that-the-left-likes-because-America-lost. Or if you plan to do so, at least point out the real similarities..

First, during the wars in both Vietnam and Iraq, the American people have retained their common sense and consequent sense of commitment far longer than the elites who claimed to lead or represent them. During Vietnam, the elites, from the college campuses to the media to the halls of Congress, tired of fighting well before the larger American public which, even by the early '70s, continued to show significant support for the war effort and rejected the cut-and-run calls of the McGovernites. But eventually, the persistent pessimism of the elites took its toll on the public.

Today, as antiwar activists wave their placards, as media coverage from Iraq focuses almost entirely on the several American soldiers killed each day, and as politicians begin distancing themselves from a war for which they voted, there are clear signs of a similar but compressed syndrome.

Second, in the case of Vietnam, the war was lost less on the battlefield than on the home front. North Vietnamese leaders themselves have frequently credited "the peace movement of the heroic American people" as important to the communist victory. Few military authorities would any longer dispute that the vaunted Tet Offensive of 1968 was a significant military defeat for the North Vietnamese, or that well into the early '70s the military balance on the ground had shifted in favor of the Americans and South Vietnamese.

Covering the Tet Offensive, I, too, was stunned into initially seeing it as a communist triumph. Traveling the Vietnamese countryside in the years that followed, I came to see the military progress we were making. But even as the balance of power on the ground shifted in one direction, the balance of politics at home was shifting in the other.

And so, by the early '70s, with antiwar protests mounting in the streets and antiwar sentiment seething in Washington, we accelerated our military withdrawals, Congress cut off military aid to a South Vietnamese government we had committed to support, and the U.S. was left to negotiate a fig-leaf surrender. We then stood by to watch the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam under a massive North Vietnamese assault. One need not argue that Vietnam was ever a fully winnable war to suggest that political rather than military realities led most directly to that grim outcome. And, as today's senators complain about casualties, begin to seek certain dates for troops withdrawals, and argue that the price of persistence is too high, the similarities to the Vietnam era are all too recognizable.

This time, the counter-culture has to deal with the fact that it no longer controls all means of mass communication. And the American people are far tougher than the elites recognize. We will finish the job -- and we will win.