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Originally Posted by Botnst
Yeah, I read the "Art of War". Nice little book.
When you say, "we didn't know the enemy in...", which "we" are we talking about? The military assesment is a lot different from the political one and in our country, the military one is guided by the civilian. The military asks, "How can we defeat XXX with minimum loss of men and materiale?" That is their job. When they go to work on accomplishing that job they're pretty effective most of the time. Sometimes they screw-up--the military is good, not perfect. But if allowed to do their job they usually do it pretty darned efficiently.
The civilian side is a whole lot messier. Especially in a democracy. We never have a clear victory in a democratic government. One side does not utterly and completely defeat the other side resulting in total capitulation and complete change in regime. Instead, battles and campaigns are won and lost but the war continues. At the present time one group holds power but in a few years, they'll be out and largely forgotten and a new, shiney reform movement will be in place that will never agian make the mistakes of the other side. Riiiight.
So in Vietnam, had the military been unleashed, we'd have won decisively and probably moved into Laos and Cambodia crushing the commies along the way. At what cost? MacNamara and LBJ flinched at the cost, Ho did not. Ho won. Had we won, would the people of Vietnam be better or worse off than today?
We are still in S. Korea. Who is better of, the people of S. Korea or the people of N. Korea?
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Your post is a good one and I'm going to have to chew on it for awhile. In short (yeah, right
), I think calling the Vietnamese gooks and assuming that we could just roll over them in their own country was a profound underestimation of their toughness. This is almost stating the obvious, I guess. Plus, I don't think we realized that they could fight for weeks on a small bag of rice and what they foraged in the jungle. I remember a story an American soldier told of how he and his crew were taking a lunch break in a relatively secure space they had surrounded with razor wire, etc. All of a sudden, this little unarmed Cong guy comes up and like a contortionist, rapidly slithered and manuevered his way through the multiple reems of wire and stood up and just defiantly looked at them. The soldier said it was like he was showing them, "You can't stop us, we're not afraid of you." They shot him but he said everyone was a little spooked by the whole thing. He said he felt at that moment that they weren't going to win this one.
Likewise in Iraq, I don't know if Cheney and co. actually believed that we would be welcomed with chocolates and flowers or if that was just part of his selling of a war he wanted at any cost, but like it or not, he was wrong. The proof is in the pudding. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier photo-op is another example of not knowing the enemy. The beginning of the beginning was accomplished, maybe. Thinking that we could just send in a bunch of contractors to rebuild Iraq and make everyone happy was not knowing the enemy. Yeah, if the insurgents would let them rebuild it, it might help and if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass when he hops.
Like Bush said during the '04 campaign, "Results matter."