Guess What? We Almost Lost A War.
Back in 1963, you may recall that Lyndon Johnson got us into Viet Nam because he didn’t want to be the first President to “lose a war.” Last week, Joe came about as close as any American President has ever come to admitting that we lost a war. Too bad he didn’t have the guts to tell us what everyone except the media and the politicians seem to know.
The last time we won a war was 1945. We didn’t win in Korea, we certainly didn’t win in Nam, nor in Iraq, nor this time around in Afghanistan. But at least we never lost, right?
All I know is that one side wins a war when the other side decides it’s time to stop fighting. Either they stop because their army has been destroyed, or because their army won’t fight. Then the winners sit down with the losers and tell them what’s going to happen next.
That’s what we did in 1945. We sat down first with the Japanese and then with the Germans and told them what was going to happen next because we won, and they lost. And what happened is that we kept some boots on the ground — their ground — boots which happen to still be on Japanese and German ground to this day.
We didn’t have a single American soldier bivouacked on German soil until May 8th, 1945. We didn’t have a single American military personnel sitting in Japan until August 15, 1945. There are now 34,000 G.I.’s in Germany and 55,000 in Japan. That’s proves we won and they lost.
What we tried to do in the wars we fought in Nam, Iraq and now Afghanistan was pretend to win by keeping enough troops around the capital city so that the so-called allied government could continue to exist in some fashion or another, and the rest of the country could, as Grandpa would say, “chob en drerd,” which means stick it up your you-know-what.
That strategy worked in Nam until 1968, when during the Tet holiday, the Viet Cong started dropping 40-mm howitzer shells on Saigon, which was then followed by elements of the North Vietnamese army riding around in tanks. Now how they got 40-mm howitzers and tanks down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never explained. So what? At least we never ‘lost’ in Nam.
This strategy is still working in Iraq. We now have only 5,000 American soldiers sitting in and around the ‘green zone’ in Baghdad, which is the neighborhood where you can allegedly walk down a street without getting blown up or shot. There’s still something called the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) operating along the Syrian border, but we keep killing the ISI leaders on a regular basis, so that bunch, win, lose or draw, seems right now to be contained.
As for Afghanistan, I love how everyone is now convinced that Joe’s hasty pullout was done without regard for the safety of Americans or the security of our so-called ‘allies.’ Know what? We’ve been saying the exact, same thing about the situation in Afghanistan this year that we said about Viet Nam back in 1968: the city is secure but ‘they’ hold parts of the countryside.
Has one, single political expert or pundit even considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe the Taliban were planning to assault Kabul over the next couple of weeks? Is there the slightest chance that we would have been forced to send in more American troops to rescue the remaining American G.I.’s who weren’t killed in this attack?
Now we are getting stories about how the Taliban are going around and picking up all the fancy military gear that we’re leaving behind. What about those Stinger missiles we gave them to shoot down Russian choppers back in 1989? Think those things become like stale bread just because they sit around?
We are the only Western country that has never ‘lost’ a war. The French were defeated by Germany in 1870 and 1940. The Germans were defeated in 1918 and 1945. The Russians were defeated in 1917 and the Soviets were defeated in 1989. Even the Brits were defeated in the Crimea: ‘into the valley of death rode the six hundred.’
Every time the United States fights a war, the Pentagon draws up all kinds of plans for how we are going to win. Do you think that bunch sitting across the 14th-Street Bridge in Alexandria has ever drawn up a battle plan for when or if we might lose?
We don’t lose, remember?
