How the left lost the war in Vietnam

Robert F. Turner:

Today marks the 31st anniversary of that shameful day Col. Bui Tin led a column of North Vietnamese tanks into Saigon to complete the military conquest of South Vietnam. It didn't have to happen, and many contemporary critics of our involvement in Iraq are drawing the wrong "lessons" from that experience.
One of the most common myths is that President Johnson took America to war without congressional or popular support. Actually, Johnson sent combat units to Vietnam pursuant to a 1964 statute approved by a margin of more than 99? percent of Congress (which, on its own initiative, more than tripled his appropriations request) -- and Johnson's Gallup Poll approval rating shot up from 55 percent to 85 percent.
Another widely accepted misconception is that the war could not have been won. To be sure, there was a learning curve associated with guerrilla tactics, and the arrogant incompetence of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara -- who ignored the consistent warnings from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA that his strategy of "gradualism" could not win and was actually encouraging the enemy -- cost a lot of lives.
But, as Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis observed last year in Foreign Affairs, historians now acknowledge we were winning the war by the early 1970s. Even more remarkably, this is admitted by Col. Bui Tin and other former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officials. Their only hope, in the final years, was that Jane Fonda and the American "peace" movement would persuade Congress to pull the plug, which it did in May 1973. In a very real sense, a misguided Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Indochina.
Perhaps the most alarming myth is that there was no reason for America to go to war in Indochina in the first place, and the entire experience was based on "lies." I remember as a staff member sitting on a couch in the Senate chamber and listening to Sen. Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, denounce the State Department for alleging that the "National Liberation Front" in South Vietnam was controlled by Hanoi.
In his view, Vietnam was merely a "civil war" in which America was on the wrong side. I don't believe he has commented on the May 1984 Vietnam Courier article out of Hanoi that brags about the Party's May 1959 decision to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and send tens of thousands of armed forces south to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. I documented that decision in my 1975 book, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," along with refuting the silly idea the NLF was independent of Hanoi.
Stopping communist aggression in Indochina was important, as the war was viewed around the world as a test case about whether America could effectively deal with the threat of "national liberation wars."

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There is much more. Because the left wanted to lose in Vietnam, we still face the problem of insurgencies around the world that we would not had the left not lost the war. We have the chance to correct that problem in Iraq, but the left is working furiously to lose this war to. The antiwar left is the biggest impediment to victory in Iraq. It wants to lose, becuase it wants to maintain the myth that insurgencies cannot be defeated, thereby inhibiting the use of force by the US. A US victory would not only discredit the left, but it would demoralize enemies of freedom around the world.