Whatâs
Wrong Today:
Vo
Nguyen Giap, North Vietnamese General, died last week at 102. He was a
significant 20th Century person, having defeated France and then the
US in Vietnam. Subsequently, with Ho Chi Minh, he united his country.
He
was certainly important to American servicemen who served during the Vietnam era, like the Wrongologist. His guerrilla tactics bled the US and fractured our
country politically. We, like the French, underestimated his tactical and
logistical brilliance. Our generals had no answer for his strategy or his abilities.
Sen.
John McCain (R-AZ), who spent 5+ years in North Vietnamese prison camps, and who met Giap twice, once as a prisoner, and once long afterwards, said
in the Wall Street Journal:
was a master of logistics, but his reputation rests on more than that. His
victories were achieved by a patient strategy that he and Ho Chi Minh were
convinced would succeedâan unwavering resolve to suffer immense casualties and
the near total destruction of their country to defeat any adversary, no matter
how powerful. “You will kill 10 of us, we will kill one of you,” Ho
told the French, “but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
The
math of war is always terrible, and the numbers back up Gen. Giapâs viewpoint. Estimates of American dead are 58,200 with
303,644 wounded vs. 800,000-1.1 million North Vietnamese military.
More
from McCain:
US never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war. Countries,
not just their armies, win wars. Giap understood that. We didn’t. Americans
tired of the dying and the killing before the Vietnamese did. It’s hard to
defend the morality of the strategy. But you can’t deny its success.
Mr.
Obama, praising Vietnam Veterans, said at the 93rd annual conference
of the American Legion in 2011:
let it be remembered that you won every major battle of that war, every single
one
True.
But sadly, that is irrelevant,
we lost that war. The lessons learned from Vietnam still need to be remembered
when we see that we may yet stay longer in Afghanistan, or that we may get
sideways with Iran or Syria.
The
North Vietnamese had the same resolve that the American Revolutionaries had, to
defend the nation against invading forces. Why were the French fighting there?
Why did we manufacture an excuse to get involved and fight a war when we
weren’t attacked? We could ask the same questions about Iraq, Libya, Yemen and
Afghanistan, or about Grenada, or Panama.
Now in North
Africa, we are gearing up for more intervention. In an expansion of US military
action in Africa, we put boots on the ground in Somalia and in
Libya last week. This extends active US military involvement in anti-terrorism
efforts across the northern part of the African continent, from Libya on the
Mediterranean Sea, to Somalia on the Indian Ocean.
Exactly
how and when the United States decided that the Nairobi terrorist attack
was an attack on US interests, requiring a military response, is not clear. There
has been no public discussion in the US Congress on expansion of American
military involvement to now include anti-terrorism efforts in Somalia.
Getting
the Libyan guy we picked up last week is like scraping something smelly off your shoe,
but it still is an intervention in another Middle East country. Let’s remember that when we
last discussed Libya, Mr. Obama and most Congressional leaders said: âno boots on
the ground.â
Clearly,
the President and the Congress have been completely absorbed in the debate
over Obamacare and the shutdown of the federal government. The media have
been almost exclusively absorbed in this political fight and its consequences.
So whatever is happening in Somalia or in Libya was allowed to slip under the
radar.
We established
a separate Africa Command within the
Department of Defense in 2007 to provide the strategic and logistical
resources to make such interventions more likely to occur and much
easier to initiate in response to any perceived terrorist activity in Africa.
Africa may
well be another battleground for control of natural resources. Nigeria, Mali, Libya
and several other resource-heavy countries are facing Al-Qaeda-related
insurgencies. Some will certainly ask us for help.
But, arenât
these kinds of interventions and international adventures a major reason why our
debt ceiling has gone from less
than $1 trillion in 1970 to $17 trillion today? Aren’t the polarized “talks” in Washington the result?
We
have got to get control of our government. Both parties are working to throw
our money at a concept of Exceptionalism writ via military intervention. Very
little of what we are doing on the ground overseas benefits the nation.
Come
home, America.
