President Bush should go to Fort Bragg, gather around him the brave men and women serving in the U.S. military and stand with them as he vetoes the Iraq emergency supplemental funding bill congressional Democrats send him. Then he should challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to come to Bragg and explain to our troops why the Democratic leaders want to repeat the greatest mistake of the Vietnam War.
More than any other factor, the U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia was harmed by micromanaging politicians in Washington who continually subordinated common sense and military strategy to artificial timetables, public-relations spin and diplomatic initiatives. The communist tyrants of North Vietnam continually used these intervals to rearm, resupply and recoup their immense losses, while patiently waiting for the clearly superior U.S. military forces to be withdrawn under mounting domestic political pressure. It was thus almost anti-climatic when in 1975, Congress permanently ended U.S. military aid to South Vietnam, even as that sad nation’s last defenders were being mowed down by the victorious North Vietnamese forces.
A disturbingly familiar process is now shaping the U.S. war effort in Iraq, but in an accelerated and politically telescoped way, thanks to the 24/7 news cycle and the immediacy of the Internet. In the short span of approximately five months, Reid has moved from promising full funding of the war to declaring the war lost. Reid’s myopic assertion of defeat came despite repeated statements to the contrary by the top U.S. commander and the increasingly prolific and passionate assurances of many of those serving under him. The congressional Democratic leadership is determined to defund the war, while imposing a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from combat in Iraq.
There is another sense in which Democrats are now repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. Despite it being a clear U.S. victory in terms of casualties inflicted and territory occupied, North Vietnam “won” the war’s most decisive battle, the 1968 Tet Offensive, because that’s how the American media reported it. Tet thus was the turning point in the war because it “proved” the North could strike anywhere in South Vietnam, including most spectacularly inside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Now in Iraq, because al Qaeda and Iranian surrogates among the insurgents still mount murderous suicide attacks, most notably in the Iraqi Parliament building in the heart of the Green Zone, the Senate’s leading Democrat pronounces the war irretrievably lost. It’s as if the politicians and mainstream journalists insist on seeing a totally different battlefield than those actually fighting on it.
The U.S. military didn’t lose the Vietnam War; politicians in Washington lost it. It would be tragic indeed now if, after four decades of warnings about the lessons of Vietnam, we are to repeat the worst mistake of all — losing our will.
