I can remember being in Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War. By then the U.S. was well on its way to chalking up over 58,000 combat deaths. I think Nixon was in office by then. Lyndon Baines Johnson had literally lied America into a vastly expanded war although we wouldn’t learn about that until the famed Pentagon Papers were revealed by Daniel Elsberg, an analyst who, during the Nixon administration, concluded that Americans had a right to know how badly things were going.
For those too young to know about Vietnam, other than we lost, the U.S. had already been in a long Cold War with the Soviet Union since the end of World War II and there was a theory that, if Vietnam fell to Communist control, a whole string of other nations would as well. It was called “The Domino Theory.” Divided between North and South, the Communists in the North wanted to unite the nation. In the 1950s, the U.S. had fought in Korea when the same scenario unfolded. The stalemate of that war continues today. Under Kennedy, “military advisors” had been sent after the French, Vietnam’s former colonial power, pulled out. Under LBJ it escalated into a full-blown U.S. conflict.
It took several years, but after seeing the carnage on their television news every night, most Americans began to think it was the wrong war fought in the wrong place. It would be the first war America lost and, as it wound down, nobody cared much. We just wanted to get out and bring our military home. Ironically, the lessons of that war would be applied by one of its participants, Colin Powell, who, when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, applied what was be known as the Powell Doctrine. No future war would be fought with anything less than overwhelming force. It was the principle applied in the Gulf War and again in Iraqi Freedom to astonishing success.
Powell would tell you, along with the other Neocons surrounding Bush43, that they emerged from the Vietnam War determined to rebuild America’s military into the most powerful the world would ever see. Defeat leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It would take until Ronald Reagan to make that goal come true. Reagan would leave Bush41 a military second to none. Modern warfare, a totally integrated fighting machine, began in the Gulf War and it restored national pride.
In the years that preceded the Gulf War, however, the U.S. looked like a paper tiger. That impression didn’t happen overnight. The Islamic Jihad had its first victory in 1979, seizing control of Iran along with our diplomats. The mullahs made Jimmy Carter look so lame, Reagan was elected. But Reagan, too, was tested in 1986 when more than 280 U.S. Marines were killed by a suicide bomber in Beirut. He pulled our troops out. Later, though, he would bomb Libya. Its dictator, Muamar Quadaffi, after last year’s Iraq invasion, decided it was time to give up his arsenal and end his flirtation with Islamic illusions of brotherhood.
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the rest of the story:
http://www.tysknews.com/News/not_vietnam.htm 
Point/Counterpoint
04-08-2004, 01:06
Iraq is NOT Vietnam.... 
