Fall of Siagon
US Embassy in Saigon, 30 April 1975

While OSAPian, as a Vietnam-era veteran, thinks the comparisons between that conflict and the war in Iraq made by those on the radical Left are pretty stupid, there are some offered by others more rational that do fit. One of them is not legislating a timetable for withdrawal of combat forces.

American troop levels in Vietnam stood at over half a million when Richard Nixon took office in 1969. His vietnamization policy resulted in a series of orderly withdrawals, starting with 25,000 in June of that year and 60,000 in December. By 1972 there were about 24,000 American troops in country; only 50 and a small, resolute Marine embassy security company remained after MAC-V stood down early in 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

While those who soldiered on during the long withdrawal are without doubt the most unfairly maligned men ever to serve our country, their sacrifices left a Republic of Vietnam that was fully capable of defending itself against insurgency and a nation, however flawed its government, that would have been able to withstand the North’s invasion in 1975 had promised American air and sea power been available. It was not for reasons we’ll get into in a bit.

US Army units in Vietnam during the draw down mounted aggressive combat operations like the campaign in Cambodia and Lam Son 719 well into 1971, depriving the enemy of sanctuaries that had been used unhindered for years. American air and naval fury stopped the Easter Offensive in 1972, decimating the North Vietnamese army in the process. The Christmas bombings that year forced the communists back to the peace table.

Nixon had a clear exit strategy, one quite different than what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi want to force on President Bush and our forces in Iraq.

It should be remembered that even though Vietnam was not a popular war, a vast majority of the American people supported Richard Nixon’s conduct of it as evidenced by the trouncing he gave the Democrat Party’s peace candidate in 1972.

It is also important to recall, getting back to timetables, Nixon approved and ordered them, not Congress. In 1973 Congress did prohibit funds for any use of military force in Indochina, giving a North Vietnam still licking its wounds after the Easter Offensive defeat the green light to start planning the final push.

Congress administered South Vietnam’s coup de grace early in 1975 by cutting off all military assistance to that country.

The Korean War was also unpopular but supported by most Americans at the time. In Korea and Vietnam, Desert Storm too for that matter, military force was used not to defeat the rogue nations we were at war with but to restore borders status quo ante naked aggression while standing up governements that could defend their people. President Eisenhower, like Nixon, was not timid about using force to accomplish those aims and his threat to use nukes made the 1953 cease fire possible.

Eisenhower did not have an “exit strategy” in Korea, nor did the nine presidents who succeded him. Not one Congress has demanded one. Our 8th Army remains there 57 years after the war started.

We didn’t hear the Democrats demanding withdrawal timetables for Clinton’s military adventures in the Balkans. They aren’t proposing an Afghanistan bug out despite US causualty rates that are, per capita, higher than those in Iraq and a threat condition that will require American combat forces for years.

Corregidorsurrender 1 2
Surrender at Corregidor, 5 May 1942

It is ironic Harry Reid declared the Iraq War lost within a few weeks of the 65th anniversaries of the Fall of Bataan and Corregidor’s surrender, both events catastrophic military defeats that stiffened the resolve of the American people to see a terrible war through to victory. What a difference of few generations make.

USS Arizona
USS Arizona, 7 December 1941

Back in September, OSAPian wrote this in a post entitled Why Who’s in Congress is Important:

During the summer of 1941 the US House of Representatives, by a vote of 203 to 202, continued selective service and allowed President Roosevelt to retain mobilized national guardsmen and other military reservists on active duty … Had the isolationists prevailed, and one vote gone the other way, over 500,000 men under arms — half the strength of the Armed Forces of the United States — would have been discharged a few months before Pearl Harbor.

The votes by Congress paved the way for defeat in Vietnam. Like the 202 isolationists who came within one vote of crippling our World War II effort before it began, these representatives saw themselves as men of peace.

There is no precedent for what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are tryng to do. In the case of the Vietnam votes, American troops were already home. While every important country in the world except the United States was at war — and the Japanese were already planning Pearl Harbor — when Congress nearly demobilized half of our military in 1941, no US forces were in combat.

The Democrats and their roundheeled Republican allies are voting to force defeat on a military at war that has not lost a battle.

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