Be very careful - what you wish for
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/180263/
How to lose a war
Bradley R. Gitz
Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007
Perhaps the most immoral decision ever made by any agent of our federal government was Congress’ decision to pull the rug out from under the government of South Vietnam.
The decision to abandon Saigon was actually taken in three steps. The first came in June 1973 when Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment prohibiting further U. S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. As Henry Kissinger has bitterly noted, that act decisively undercut the ability of the Nixon administration to enforce the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords that had been signed just a few months earlier. The second step was Congress’ decision to cut its aid appropriations for South Vietnam by nearly half for fiscal 1974-75. That cut thoroughly demoralized the South Vietnamese government and military and, as archival records from North Vietnam later revealed, led Hanoi to begin preparing its final offensive. The ugly story finally came to a close just a few months later, when the newly installed “Watergate” Congress refused desperate requests from the Ford administration for emergency American aid with which to resist Hanoi’s Sovietsupplied invasion. A modest application of available air power would have turned the tide, but Congress instead abandoned a long-time ally to its totalitarian fate and thereby made a mockery of the deaths of more than 50, 000 American soldiers. So much has been written in error regarding Vietnam that we forget that the war had been essentially won by the beginning of 1973. A combination of the failure of Hanoi’s 1972 Easter offensive, the emerging détente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the trouncing of the anti-war candidacy of George McGovern in November 1972 had dashed North Vietnam’s hopes for taking South Vietnam.
The final inducement to seek peace came with Richard Nixon’s Christmas bombing of the north, a step which the late historian Douglas Pike always maintained would have won the war as far back as 1965 had it been employed.
The security situation in the countryside of South Vietnam had improved dramatically by the early 1970 s, with the Viet Cong having been effectively swept from the villages and rice paddies due to the losses suffered during the Tet offensive and the subsequent effectiveness of Creighton Abrams’ “clear and hold” tactics.
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 gave the United States and South Vietnam virtually everything we had sought in five years of frustrating negotiations. Promised a generous level of American aid and swift American retaliation in response to communist violations of the peace accords, South Vietnam appeared to have been saved.
Becoming embroiled in Southeast Asia might have been a mistake in the first place; becoming involved to the extent we did almost certainly was. But Vietnam was never the unwinnable war that antiwar orthodoxy claimed. Despite all of the errors dating back to the Truman administration and the sacrifices that exceeded the value of the interests originally at issue, we had essentially achieved our objectives, at least until Congress began to throw that victory away step by step. What captured Saigon in the spring of 1975 was not a guerrilla offensive by a nonexistent Viet Cong, but a full-fledged conventional invasion from the north directed and armed by the Soviet Union. The reason South Vietnam was unable to resist that offensive was because our Congress had weakened its military capabilities, left it politically isolated and refused to allow us to help when help was most needed. It is with this horrible lesson of pusillanimity and dishonor that one must view current Democratic Party proposals to cut off funding for the war in Iraq. Remarkably, senators like Patrick Leahy are now actually advocating going further than Democrats did back then, proposing a cutoff of funds not just to an allied government following a peace settlement but to American troops still fighting the enemy in the field. Even more remarkable have been the comments from Leahy and some of his colleagues holding up the cutoff of funding to South Vietnam as a model for how the war in Iraq should be ended. One wonders if he and the others in the surrender-now clique have heard of the boat people, the killing fields of Cambodia or any of the other horrors that befell Southeast Asia after we left the region.
The lesson in all of this is that it is remarkably easy to end wars, be they in Vietnam or Iraq. All you have to do is decide to lose. Just like the Democrats.
Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.