It is entirely fitting that the war criminal Kissinger is deeply enmeshed in the war crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice. Perhaps in a better day not too far away, we'll see them all before a modern-day Nuremberg trial, sentenced to enjoy the pleasures of dining daily on lemon chicken in Gitmo for the rest of their days.

The lesson, to Kissinger, of Vietnam is that the President showed weakness and a willingness to cater to the anti-war arguments. If only Nixon had stayed the course, Vietnam was winnable (an assessment that then SecDef McNamara had already abandoned.) Its difficult to understand how that would be the lesson of Vietnam; perhaps the reasons or tactics for going into Vietnam were the ones that ought to be reexamined.

In one sense, of course, Kissinger may be correct.  Had the US stayed in Vietnam and escalated further in the early 70s, it's at least conceivable that the South could have been protected from being overrun by the Viet Cong.  Maybe.  Similarly, it is probably true that escalating our presence in Iraq will have a greater chance of staving off that country turning into a civil war-torn terrorist haven.

But what the wingnuts who trot out this argument this never consider is the cost-benefit analysis.  In both these instances, the country as a whole concluded that the benefits of keeping these countries from being overrun are not large enough to justify the enormous costs.  In a democracy, that's all that counts.  I suppose that in certain circumstances it is justifiable for the leader of a country to ignore the will of the people and do what he thinks is right.  But that is not a sustainable basis for a policy. 

Eliot Cohen's book "Supreme Command," the book everyone recommended to Bush before the Iraq War, that Vietnam was winnable but only if the strategy was changed. His point is that Johnson rather than being too involved was not nearly involved enough. One view was that if we "stayed the course" in Vietnam we would never have prevailed because the North Vietnamese were willing to take more casualties than Americans would ever have been willing to do.

In short Cohen says Westmoreland fought Vietnam as if he was fighting a land war in Europe. He kept lobbing artillery into Vietnamese villages which converted South Vietnamese into aids to the Viet Cong. Westmoreland was obsessed about cutting off supplies to the Viet Cong without ever realizing they were getting much of it from the South. Cohen believes Johnson should have really intervened and replaced Westmoreland and found a commander who followed the Marines small war doctrine.

In Iraq, it would seem that the strategy and tactics were, and are, wrong. Thus staying until victory with no change of plan. Whether it is too late is another question.

Kissinger's belief that you have to show how tough you are and how many casualties you are willing to take without too much concern with the strategy you are following on the ground is very strange.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

And not adding the "cost" of this strategy into the analysis is the fatal flaw for Kissinger and the people who agree with him.  At what point does the costs outweigh the "benefits" of reaching the objective?  How many US military casualties are "acceptable" in any operation that isn't directly protecting US soil or US citizens?

Liberals have been accused of the same thing by the RW when the left uses military action for "humanitarian" reasons.  It is referred to and denounced by the RW as "military adventurism".  But the RW neocons are all for military adventurism, the only difference between the left's military adventurism and the right's is the right does it advance US economic and geopolitical interests.

These military actions are generally aggressive by nature based on unsound rationalizations (i.e. the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Saddam's "alleged" WoMD program) and uncertain outcomes.  The only way to achieve those goals is to go in with overwhelming force, remove the legitimate government and occupy that country to prop up that government...which is what Nazi Germany did in their "Blitz" of Europe.  Is that Kissenger vision of US foreign policy in the US's best interests?  Not in the slightest as far as I am concerned...

What if we HAD won in Vietnam?

Vietnam would have a thriving economy.

They do now.

We would have diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

We do now.

China would not have gotten a toe-hold, and then turned every country into a communist ally.

They didn't. The Domino Theory was bunk. Heck, China isn't even really communist anymore.

We would probably have fewer Vietnamese refugess living here.

The Vietnamese have contributed culturally and academically in these years as fully participating citizens. Our cumulative SAT scores would be much lower in math without them!

We would not have to start more wars to prove that we can win the next one.
Well, that is the big difference, isn't it?

So one can only conclude that all the deaths; American and Vietnamese, and currently American and Iraqi were/are all for nothing except hubris.

Jan Knaus

I think Juliette, whom I have tremendous respect for, is mistaken in her characterization of the fighting effectiveness of South Vietnamese forces.

Furthermore, I think she misunderstands the nature of the Vietnam conflict after 1972 and the Paris Peace Accords. I also think a few of the comments in this forum also demonstrate a gross misunderstanding of how the VN war evolved after the Paris Peace Accords.

As has already been disclosed by Melvin Laird and Kissinger, the South were already capable of fighting by themselves after the last U.S. ground combat troops withdrew in the early 1970s. The South's divisions were able to hold their own provinces. People who were familiar and had on the ground experience there, from Rich Armitage to Jim Webb, to even the most dovish FSOs who were in Saigon in the last days, will affirm this. McNamara's contention that the war was unwinnable was accurate - but that it was unwinnable by Americans.

This is not to say that I believe American lives should have continued to have been lost in Vietnam. Absolutely not. The South Vietnamese could fight for themselves - so let them. The problem that arose is that after the Peace Accords were signed, the North stepped up its offensive operations and their Communist backers stepped up their assistance (in violation of the accords). The U.S., by comparison, cut U.S. military assistance (financing, materiale - I'm not talking about TROOPS) and economic assistance just as the Communist bloc nations were stepping up theirs and the global oil-related recession was beginning in the mid-1970s.

Kissinger has issues with how the U.S. cut that assistance to the South AFTER U.S. ground troops had withdrawn if you read his op-ed from 2005.

I do think, though, that his concern regarding how South Vietnam was lost is rather disingenuous considering that he was already ready to sell out the South Vietnamese after a "decent interval" to bolster his policy of engagement with the Chinese. Recent disclosures from the National Security Archives support this.

I will say this - Kissinger and some of the Right's obsession with "getting it right" in Iraq what they thought went wrong in Vietnam is the most perverse thing I think anyone can draw from the Vietnam conflict.

The two conflicts are as different as can be imagined. Say what you say about the fighting efficacy of South Vietnamese forces - the U.S. had a better chance helping them than they do with the current fighting ability of Iraq security forces. Secondly, the level of sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, and Shia/Sunni/Kurdish factor has no comparison with the VN Conflict.

It is disturbing that someone as practiced in the art of realpolitik as Kissinger would not advocate letting the Shiites take over our dirty business in Iraq, letting the resulting internecine conflict between Sunnis and Shiites possibly weaken Tehran in the process, while the U.S. makes a strategic withdrawal to the borders of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Gulf States. Where we can focus on shoring up our allies and containing the spill-over effects of instability in Iraq.

Ultimately, I think the choice is between trying to fix what is wrong with Iraq versus trying to control and manage all the fall-out from it. The window has passed from the former and we need to pursue the later.