Quote Originally Posted by Granite_State View Post
Definitely agree, I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum politically from The Nation, but I take his larger point about a revisionist history of Vietnam being used as an important rhetorical point in the debate on Iraq. Like Malaya, which Steve Metz for one has noted as being so exceptional, how we see Vietnam has a lot of relevance to how we see the entire viability of counterinsurgency.
I agree to a degree, but also consider that political types will pull out anything they can find to make their "historical" points.

Vietnam is a hard one to consider because in the pure Maoist sense there were two wars going on at the same time, IMO. You had the insurgency, which was a real threat in parts of the country and not so much in others, and the conventional force element that was being pumped into the South by the North. The Vietnamese genius here was the willingness (and ability) to shift back and forth between the two styles of war almost at will. Note that this was not without some internal problems (with Tet being the best example of this...although the VCI losses during Tet DID solve one major problem for the North: it removed any local leadership competition from the field), but at the end of the day they were willing to outlast us and the government of the South (which did more harm than good to its own cause).

For many years both the Right and Left held up Vietnam as an almost isolationist banner to keep the US from getting involved in anything beyond its borders, and for the same reason: both sides argued (from their own reasoning bases) that you couldn't defeat an insurgency. As always this ignored the complex nature of both our reasons for getting into Vietnam, the situation we encountered there, and the aftermath. So in a sense Vietnam for political individuals is more a symbol than a historical reality. I've argued before that the best comparison between Vietnam and Iraq can be found in the responses of our own military and governmental institutions to the situation...not on the battlefield.