Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Could you put this in english?
(read General Vo Nguyen Giap's "How We Won The War.")
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When you say that "half their efforts" were dedicated to changing our hearts and minds, you're using the sort of mindless cant that Orwell complained about in "Politics And The English Language." Half? How many North Vietnamese died trying to change our hearts and minds?
What you mean is that the North Vietnamese recognized that public support for the war in the US was crucial, and acted accordingly. Fine. It's still not a war we were ever going to win, in any meaningful sense of the word. We could have occupied Hanoi. And then what?
It's a conservative ur-myth that we lost that war because the home front let the soldiers down. We lost because we weren't ever going to win.
