War-Losing Faction

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, Jebbie, bend over and for your really-hates, I'll inject you your due reward.:p

All we really needed to do was to keep South Vietnam in supplies. Congress was Democratic-controlled at the time, and Nixon, who with benefit of national experience, hindsight and strategic reappraisal in prosecuting the Vietnam War, was employing a more successful strategy, Abrams' style rather than Westmoreland's, disgraced himself all the way out of office with the Watergate scandal. With the President too politically vitiated and distracted to get Congress to measure up to the demands of common decency to an ally, Congress' funds cutoff doomed South Vietnam as an independent political entity -- and more than a few South Vietnamese as living entities, let alone independent ones. Would a Republican-controlled Congress have been that feckless?

This is a grievance. It's also a shame.

National level Republicans do behave in a genuinely anti-communist manner. Their Democratic counterparts -- "have done everything differently."* And they've failed a lot and lost a lot thereby. When it came to coping with the major threat to the United States and the rest of the world of the twentieth century, the Democrats ran the gamut between singularly imperceptive incompetence and general failure, and they spent a solid fifty years staying hosed up. They're still in this habit, and they're still just as incapable.

I'm fed up.

South Vietnam's political fault lines seem really to be nothing more or less than the legacy of French colonialism and post-colonialism: in particular a policy -- seen also in Lebanon, to outcomes not very different -- of parceling out portions of a former colony's political power specifically to this or that faction/religion/definable group. The ruling South Vietnamese elite lacked close ties to the rest of the South Vietnamese population, particularly out in the sticks where the North's forces had freest hand. A political structure made from such rotten timber isn't going to handle pressure from outside at all, let alone anything approaching well. One good shove and crrraaackkkk, crunch!

Really, we went into Vietnam out of a humanitarian impulse. That we didn't succeed meant blood and sorrow, and no redress. That Vietnam has since enjoyed a measure of anti-Communist success, to the point where Communism is now maintained mainly as a sort of state religion to which one must outwardly subscribe at least if one wants to be an official, largely heals the ulceration.

*The words of Sen. John Kerry, a famous Democrat I can't be stupid enough to vote for.