Vietnam--Grabbing Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Table source

During the Vietnam War, I taught at Yale a cousrse on American National Security Policy and another on war. I also gave a number of speeches supporting the Vietnam War effort. I argued that defending the South and Cambodia was necessary to maintain the credibility of American Cold War defense alliances in Asia (of which South Vietnam and Cambodia were members), and elsewhere. We were committed to defend alliance members if attacked.

A second rationale was the great likelihood of a blood bath if South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the communist North and Khmer Rouge. Both did in 1975. In the bloodbath which followed, the communists murdered millions. Remember the “Killing Fields. See my Statistics Of
 Vietnamese Democide and Statistics Of
Cambodian Democide . The above table gives the statistics for Vietnam.
Since then, the media have treated the communist takeover as an American defeat. This was not true militarily. Our forces actually defeated the North in every battle and overall destroyed their political/guerrilla front, the Viet Cong. But the Democrats who controlled our Congress succeeded in denying the South Vietnamese and Cambodian armies the supplies and air support needed to continue the fight. In effect, they handed Cambodia and South Vietnam over to the communists at a time when the North believed they were defeated and wanted to end the war.

Little has been written about this war won by our military and lost by the Democratic politicians and their supporting “anti-war” activists minority at home. Today many of these “anti-war” activist and communist supporters have influential positions in the academy, government, entertainment industry, and media. Now, Rear Adm. Jeremiah Denton has tried to correct this telling omission in his Vietnam War’s True Victory. Read it and understand what the Democrat’s would have done in the Iraq War, had President George W. Bush allowed them. He snatched victory from the Democrat’s jaws of defeat, and saved a successfully functioning, Iraq constitutional democracy.