If only...
How would things be different today if we had not lost Vietnam anyway?
Vietnam is a trading partner and part of the global fee markets surge. They are a market for U.S. goods and we for theirs. Vietnam is a member of the WTO and they have a seat on the UN Security Council. We have a negative trade balance with Vietnam. We export to them an annual average of about $2.5 billion in goods and services. They export to us an average of $10 billion a year, up 258 percent in the last four years. Would that be different today if we stuck it out in Vietnam? Would the trade imbalance be even greater, or what?
Nam is a tourist attraction for Americans. We love Vietnamese food.
Soviet communism collapsed without the help of Vietnam's victory over the greatest military force in the world.
But Vietnam remains a communist government!
We would have won nothing we didn't get by losing. That's the truth of it.
We probably save ourselves some money when you think about what we would have needed to spend to prop up an artificial "democracy" rather than the self-determined government they have today with all its lack of human rights and its corruption.
But look at what we lost. We lost 60,000 American troops, many more physically and psychologically wounded for life, which created a boon for the homeless industry here at home.
Twenty-three percent of America's homeless population is composed of veterans, almost half of those from the Vietnam War. Eighty-nine percent were honorably discharged and two-thirds of them served three or more years. For recent service veterans, unemployment is 11.2 percent, which is 4 percent higher than the similar age group in the general population.
So, when President Obama called for 30,000 new American troops (at a cost of $1 million a year each) what does that mean?
It means that among those who make it back, about 3,500 of them will not be able to find work and a number will be homeless and troubled by alcohol, drugs and mental problems.
The President was sincere and moving in his call to essentially support the reissue of the Busy policy, but there are two things I don't understand here. After 9 years of war:
- What leads us to believe that terrorists train and recruit only in Afghanistan as opposed to, say, Tampa, FL, or London or in Somalia? It's as if we believe that if you "win" in Afghanistan and that country suddenly becomes a full-fledged, uncorrupted, democratic republic with a capitalist economy relying on something other than exporting heroin (fat chance), terrorism will be defeated because that's the only place to train terrorists? Terrorists don't wear uniforms and they don't have a home field. Terrorists are like roaches, they are impossibly durable and they adapt to a nomadic life on the move according to their needs. They live on hate, and that's some mighty good eatin' in the Middle East.
- There will now be 100,000 American troops plus NATO troops and an unreliable (in every sense of the word) number of crack Afghani troops. And when I say "crack" I mean the kind you smoke, not the kind you're proud of. All this firepower (about 200,000 all told) is assembled to defeat the awesome Taliban whose monumentally scary fighting force numbers about 10,000!
Look, we've launched unmanned intelligence-gathering drones with regular and infrared cameras from German to survey Afghanistan for 24-hour periods, sent all the pictures to Washington in flight and returned the drone back to Germany unharmed. If we have to do something in Afghanistan, then I support VP Biden's call for drones and Special Forces. If you can find Taliban miles above the earth, what do you need 100,00 guys for? If you find them, use Special Forces to close the deal. You know the Taliban will know where our guys are.
