I'm currently reading Mark W Woodruff's "Unheralded Victory: Who won the Vietnam War?". Highly recommended for history and military buffs, this book makes it painfully clear that the American forces, together with South Vietnamese army and other allies...convincingly won every military engagement of the war,...in the process almost completely destroying Viet Cong and inflicting staggering casualties on the North Vietnamese Army....It all comes down to November 2.
...In Vietnam, for over 50 thousand Americans killed in action, 1.1 million North Vietnamese troops perished in fighting, the deadly ratio of some 20:1. This is quite similar to another American defeat, Mogadishu in 1993, where the engagement immortalised in "Black Hawk Down" cost the lives of less than 20 American soldiers but anywhere between 500 and 1,000 Somalis. Military actions in Iraq, both during the major combat operations phase as well as during significant anti-insurgency operations ever since, have resulted in similar ratios of enemy deaths....
When reading Woodruff's book I was struck by how much the Vietnam War resembles the current conflict in Iraq - not in the way that the left says it is - a military quagmire - but in the way the left wants to make it so. What we have in both cases is a highly successful military operation conducted under restrictive rules of engagement, resulting in serious defeat of enemy forces but portrayed by the media as an inconclusive stalemate at best, while at the same time the public support for the action is being white-anted by a small but influential section of the elite....
...Let's hope and pray that this time around the rush to disengage from the "quagmire" will not again live an Asian country at the mercy of the enemies of freedom.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The Will to Win
Arthur Chrenkoff reminds us why the will to win is all-important:
