www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050701-085018-1545r_page2.htm
Subscribe advertisement Real lesson of Vietnam By Victor Davis Hanson July 2, 2005 Fighting sometimes intensifies just before the end. Ulysses S G rant's horrible summer of 1864 almost broke the Union. The surprise of t he Bulge cost more American lives than the 1944 drive from the Normandy beaches. Okinawa was not declared secure until a little more than two mo nths before the Japanese surrender. It was the worst-thought-out campaig n of the Pacific and cost about 50,000 American casualties. Sacrifices are judged senseless by factors beyond sheer carnage. Whil e we are, of course, tortured over the American dead of the Civil War, W orld War I and World War II, we nevertheless find solace that those lost ended slavery, restored the Union, stopped the kaiser, eliminated Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, and made possible present-day South Korea. On the other hand, we agonize as often over the much smaller losses o f Vietnam, Beirut or Somalia precisely because we are not sure whether t hey led to any permanent improvement. Those who evoke Vietnam should think carefully of the entire lesson o f that tragedy. We hear daily how we once foolishly got into that chaos but rarely the lessons on how we got out. This present war is not just about the Sunni Triangle, but whether re formers of the Arab world will step forward to emulate a fragile democra tic Iraq that survives the jihadist counterassault. For the last three d ecades, Middle East autocratic regimes either attacked their neighbors o r reached understandings with Islamic terrorists to shift blame for thei r own failures onto an apparently unconcerned United States. That deeper pathology was at the root of the September 11, 2001, atta cks on America. If not stopped now, it will result in many more attacks to come here at home. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Insti tution, Stanford University.
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