The Past is Alive

General Westmoreland isn't even buried yet and the press just loves to point out that we "lost" the Vietnam War. That debate is too long to discuss here but, even if it was a "loss" it was not a conventional loss. We did not have to surrender any land to anyone. We did not have to disarm. We did not falter economically and need other nations to help build us back up. We weren't forced to rewrite our Constitution. Yes, we lost 59,000 men and that is not trivial. All told, estimates say the Vietnamese (all sides) lost around 2,000,000. Fourteen years after we left Vietnam, the Berlin Wall fell. Vietnam may have been a tactical loss, but it wasn't a strategic loss. I think our commitment to Vietnam - showing that we will die for a cause - helped facilitate the fall of the USSR.

The press will use Westmoreland's death as an excuse to bring the Vietnam War into the daily news in order to stoke the "Iraq is Vietnam" prattle again. The press will compare Vietnam to Iraq and, instead of fostering debate and pointing out differences between the war against Communism and the War against Terror, they will do so with the preconception that Iraq is already a loss.