Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Actually, to a great degree, yes. (But, count in "pacifist pols", too.)
I was one of those rabidly-anti-war types - SDS, etc. - whose massed millions eventually caused us to limit our involvement to unwinnable levels, and then pull out. (A great regret of my life, as I now see that I was completely on the wrong side of that.) We didn't lose that war - we simply allowed ourselves to be led in dishonest and untruthful ways into a great national consensus that was flat-out wrong. We were sheep, led by the PC of those times and an oversimplistic, and, I think now, racist, view of life. I fear the same fate for our fight in Iraq. We could easily win this, but, if we get convinced by more lies, we won't - we'll underman a battle while concentrating on placards and banners that don't reflect reality.
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This is all much too big a question to hash out here. Suffice it to say that it seems to me that whether we could prevail in Vietnam was also a question of what was actually happening in Vietnam, and it seems telling to me that your post has more to say about "the PC of those times"* on the home front than it does about the conduct of the war. As for recent op-ed pieces,
this one strikes me as a good response to the preening from that blog.
*
Sebby won't care, but those must have been some pretty cutting-edge folks to be so far in front on the PC thing.