Vietnam?
Reader comment on item: Further on Israel's Winning Its War

Submitted by rick (United States), Apr 9, 2006 at 15:21

Pipes says... :

"To which I reply that I experienced in 1975 the only defeat in U.S. history, when American troops retreated from South Vietnam. They did so not because the U.S. economy had tanked, the last bullet had been spent, or because of battlefield defeats – quite the contrary, military analysts agree that the U.S. side was winning the war on the ground – but because the body politic's will had been sapped. If the North Vietnamese and their allies could defeat the United States, why not Israel the Palestinians?

1. "the only defeat in U.S. history"?
Tell that to the South in the Civil War. However you frame it the North and the Unionists defeated Americans, not some foreign nation.

2."military analysts agree that the U.S. side was winning the war on the ground "?
Winning what war - the one left over from French imperialism after they were defeated in 1954? The US had no war to win. The only ones fighting to win a war were the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. The same people who defeated the Japanese, the French, then the Americans and later gave the Chinese a very hard fought "win" for the thier "victory" and then deposed Pol Pot - whom the Americans supported together with the Chinese in one of the strangest "bed fellow" stories one could imagine.

3. f the North Vietnamese and their allies could defeat the United States, why not Israel the Palestinians?

...There is no similarity. There are no "Vietnams" in the Middle East to begin with. One could make certain similarities in Iraq bit even there the analogy fails miserably. The "insurgents" are not national heros like Ho Chi Mihn but rather deposed Baathists who want a return to the depostism of Saddam and the subjugation of the Shi'ites. And Bush despite his very poor understanding of the Middel East has a more concrete plan than did Johnson in Vietnam. I don't think it will work because Arabs have such built in hatreds, intolerances and distrusts of any society remotely "open" but saying that compared to Vietnam it is "brillant".

Johnson, a Democratic, fought the worst war in American history. Iraq abounds with critical problems but Vietnam was a failure from its very beginning under Eisenhower and Dulles.

The "better" comparison is Lebanon and the Israeli retreat from the Hizbollah. That is the example that Hamas and others like. Of course, Israel in Lebanon is not Israel in Israel and that is Hamas' mistake. Israel weighed its options in Lebanon and decided to leave. There is no leaving Israel.

In fact, one could make a better argument for Israel to be the North Vietnamese than they are the Americans. Israel is fighting a nationalist war and the palestinians have just popularly elected in a free and open election, a party which doesn't even recognize the "Zionist Entity".

Palestinians supported the destruction of Israel in 1948 and now in 2006 are going backwards to 1948. No where else in the world do you have the lack of reality and ostrich-like thinking than one sees by the palestinians. And how can it be otherwise as all of their "ideas" are founded on distortions, outright lies and hate. Even so, the world has given them a legitimacy they do not deserve, funding that exceeds any other group in the world, special UN organizations which no other group has and so forth.

With a record like that it doesn't make a difference how cruel, unworkable or delusionable their methods and proposals are.

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