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Originally Posted by aklim
Did moral authority help the people who died in the Bataam Death March or the Hanoi Hilton? Tell them about moral authority and see if it changes much of what happened. I suspect we punished some of the officers in the march while I can't remember what happened to the officers in charge of the Hanoi Hilton. Can you refresh my memory on that?
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I'd be happy to. What do you expect someone to do when you're bombing their cities? They shot some of the planes down and imprisoned the pilots. Unfortunately, our purpose behind bombing the cities, countryside, and wherever was ill conceived. No return on investment. Didn't anyone ever read about Brer Fox and the Tar Baby?
The good Americans that got stuck at the Hanoi Hilton were acting from commendable loyalty. Doesn't mean that losing another 70,000 Americans and killing 2 maybe 3 million more Vietnamese than what we did so that we could bring the HH guards to trial would have been prudent.
Down side of our heroic and crucial victory in WW2 is that it launched a wave of belief that whenever we choose an enemy, God will not be in his heaven till the foe's been utterly crushed and we stand victorious. Lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. We won in WW2 ultimately because our moral authority was greater, which led to greater support. We lost in VN because the other side had more to lose than we did. We were never going to match them in sheer numbers. And it was launched on a lie: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Heard of it? I want a book report on that by tomorrow.
The war was beyond lost. We were fools. Get over it.