Historians who think President Bush is right

Sunday Times:

WHEN President George W Bush invoked the memory of Vietnam to justify staying in Iraq, he was drawing on a new wave of revisionist history which maintains that America did not lose the war, but the will to win.

“Three decades later there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam war and how we left,” Bush said in a speech to army veterans last week. White House insiders admitted it was a risky topic which had previously been left to the antiwar movement. Americans generally prefer to forget Indochina and remember who won the cold war.

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In Triumph Forsaken, published last year, the historian Mark Moyar claimed that South Vietnam could have survived had the Americans not acquiesced in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, plunging the country into an “extended period of instability and weakness”.

Moyar is now working on a book about the second half of the war, in which he argues: “In the offensive of 1975, the North Vietnamese are moving around huge conventional forces that would have been pulverised by our air power.” By then, however, Hanoi was well aware that America was turning against the war and doubted that the US military would be able to act decisively.

Supporters of the Iraq war have also been delving into Lewis Sorley’s book, A Better War, which was rereleased in paperback this year. The war, Sorley wrote, “was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and the US Congress”.

The North Vietnamese have given this argument a boost over the years. In an interview after his retirement, Bui Tin, who received the South Vietnamese army’s unconditional surrender in 1975, recalled that visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda, church ministers and other antiwar protesters “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses . . . through dissent and protest [America] lost the ability to mobilise a will to win”.

James Q Wilson, a social scientist who is revered by conservatives, argued in The Wall Street Journal last year: “Whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle . . . among the people who determine what we read and watch. We are in danger of losing in Iraq . . . in the newspapers, magazines and tele-vision programmes we enjoy.”

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What history is telling us is that the center of gravity for US war efforts in in the Congress of the US and that is where the enemy hopes to win the war he cannot win in the kinetic battle spaces of Iraq. He is hopelessly losing that war and is holding on in hopes that his PR events will attract enough attention to give the Democrats some talking points in their desperate campaign to lose this war.