Saturday, January 01, 2005

Why the U.S. Will Lose in Iraq

I've often heard that the reason we lost in Vietnam was due to the protesters in the U.S. and the media that covered them. That always struck me as ridiculous, since we started losing in Vietnam before the protests even really started. The following is part of an essay by Stewart Nusbaumer called "Why the U.S. Will Lose in Iraq":

It was claimed that those long-haired antiwar demonstrations, “the war at home,” brought about our defeat in Vietnam. And that the press was complicit: the liberal press was defeatist, and this defeated our noble effort in Southeast Asia. And the politicians, those back-stabbing Washington politicians, they refused to allow our military to win the war. In this post-war discussion in the 1970s, not blamed: were those who advocated the failed U.S. intervention in that far-off civil war; those who failed to design a strategy to counter the political and guerrilla war of the Vietnamese and those who hubristically ignored the fact that U.S. intervention would stimulate the great power of Vietnamese nationalism, which in the end defeated our internationalism, or if you prefer our imperialism.

It was irrelevant that the U.S. military won nearly every military battle, since we lost the psychological and strategic wars to the Vietnamese, to the North Vietnamese and to the Viet Cong, It was their country and they outlasted us in their country. Never underestimate the power of nationalism, even in this global world, to ignite “rag-tag armies.”

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