Winning’s Everything
Saturday, May 6, 2006; Page A17
“In war, we have to win,” said Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.”
“This was on television about 20 years ago, a PBS series about the war in Vietnam. Giap was sitting behind a desk, as I recall, a picture of lethal ease. He seemed amused to think he knew something that the Americans still hadn’t figured out. He added: “Absolutely have to win.”
continued–
“For me, a former Marine corporal who’d heard some Viet Cong rounds go past at Chu Lai, Giap spoke and the heavens opened — a truth seizure, eureka. I finally had a useful, practical explanation for why we had lost after the best and brightest promised we were going to win. And nowadays, thanks to Giap, I have a theory, no more than that, about why winning is so elusive in Iraq.”
“I suspect that the people who run our wars, particularly the best and brightest, know when we fight a war that:
“We have to be fighting for freedom and national security.”
“We have to get the will of the country behind the war.”
“We have to maintain a strong economy to pay for the war.”
“We have to have allies.”
“We have to have God, freedom, the inevitability of history or some other philosophic entity on our side.”
“We have to have well-trained and motivated troops armed with the latest weapons.”
“Sure enough, we started out with all of that in Iraq, as we did in Vietnam.” …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501475.html
We had all of that? Really? We had “fighting for freedom and national security” as a motivating factor? Whose freedom and whose national security is it?
What do you think?
Terms of ‘Winning’ and ‘Loosing’ out of your Vocabulary!!
When you Invade a Small Country there is No ‘Winning’ and Everyone loses!!
Vietnam is Still contending with the After Affects of their Conflicts with the French and than Us, neither of which they Deserved, so a No Win there, but they are dealing on a Much More Mature Process than this Country is.
There Is No Such Thing As Conventional Warfare, and No Matter The High Tech Toys Of Destruction One Invades With, the Invaded Will Stand The Invaders Down, in a Guerilla/Insurgent Conflict with a Never Ending Corp of Recruits of those Desvestated By The Destruction within their Own Country!!
Those key insights point up just how insidious is the problem. The very words we use–without the slightest pause to think about them–betray how war is automatically accepted as a winning or losing proposition, when, as you so astutely point out, these are bound to mislead us.
And yet, Bush, the self-proclaimed “war president” of our time, relies on the automatic acceptance of the idea of “winning” wars versus “losing” them.
As I hope this entry shows, there are still many, many people–including many Vietnam war veterans themselves–who still take it for granted that we can speak of that and other wars as “won” or “lost”.
Thank you for your most welcome reply and your insights. Bush should have much to learn from you if he were capable of such learning.
P.
Sitting in sky boxes. That’s Bush’s idea of where important people are when you “win”. As to the rest of the people, its not important, except for taking their money, in as many ways as possible.