Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
wtf are you talking about? Vietnam did more harm to this country than any other war in modern times. It literally ripped this country in half, and now with these damn swiftboat ads it seems like we are reliving it again.
It splintered public opinion. Why? Because the general public didn't understand what was going on or what was at stake, and maybe we still don't. I, for one, hold the opinion that it was pre-emption: stopping the spred of communism (really, the spread of Russian power) into Korea and Vietnam cost the USSR more than it could afford and convinced them to stop trying to spread its empire. If we hadn't, Lord knows what kind of mess we would have been in. The cost of war is always too high, but sometimes it's the price that must be paid to prevent a more terrible price from being paid, whether or not history looks favorably upon the actions taken at the time. As one of my friends said recently, "I almost wish Gore would have been elected just so people could see how screwed up we are now." It's the same kind of thing: it's easy to second guess the action without knowing the alternate consequences.
It's funny, or kind of sad, reading Kerry's testimony about how he and the vets came back to a country "that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care," and now he, among others, is helping to give the Iraq war the same image. I don't think public backlash against the soldiers will be as bad, but I would imagine that a lot of them are going to come back with some pretty serious issues similar to the guys in Vietnam. People saying how useless the war is really kicks sand in their eyes, which is exactly what Kerry campaigned so fervently against in 1971.
[edit]Another excerpt from Kerry's testimony:
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.
This just strikes me as short-sighted. Sure, the Vietnamese were not at peace in the short run. Neither is Iraq now. However, in the long run, are they better off?[/edit]