I was rather hard on William Tucker in today’s Collateral Damage, with good reason, but I also pointed out a few good moments in his essay “Call It a Democracy and the Hell With It.” One passage I didn’t quote certainly merits kudos:
- The entire Vietnam War was fought on the premise that we were creating a little “island of freedom” in Southeast Asia, that we could surgically distinguish between guerrillas and civilians, that we were winning the “hearts and minds of the people,” that the war could be “Vietnamized” by propping up a local constabulary (which is only hated all the more for collaborating with the enemy), and that putting in just another 100,000 to 250,000 troops would finish do the job.
Many conservatives still live with the fond illusion that if we had only “put everything we had” into Vietnam, we could have “won the war.” What is this supposed to mean? Sure we could have leveled the country and everything in it, but “pacifying” it? That would have meant staying another 30 years.
I have heard this line my entire life–the hippie protesters/liberal politicians/Communist media kept us from winning! And it’s complete BS, as I recognized some time around, oh, my ninth birthday. The sort of “winning” referred to simply means defeating the NVA/Viet Cong at any cost, which would have meant the utter annihilation of Vietnam and its neighbors. That would have been hard to sell as liberation, even for Henry Kissinger. So props to Tucker for having the guts to point that out, even though I still think he’s a kook.