Catherine -

The Best And Brightest thought their good intentions would trump two thousand years of recorded history and almost two hundred years of U.S. war fighting experience, and they were wrong.

The core of the antiwar movement began as responsible citizens and politicians that questioned why were bleeding without a plan to win. That was a valid question but it was rapidly hijacked by people who thought that we were no better than the communists and were comfortable portraying the little brown brothers as freedom fighters. The rise of the McGovern Democrats coincided with the Left’s explosion through campuses and the media and the meme of U.S. power = danger became established.

The Nixon exit policy was enacted after Creighton Abrams had reestablished local security to almost every population center in the South and eliminated the NVA south of the DMZ. Status quo 1972 was a South Vietnam willing and capable of defending itself, given logistical support. Our troops came home but the continuing successful defense by South Vietnam was inconvenient to the Left, desperate to remove any doubt of the defeat we had suffered…so they abandoned them during Ford’s administration and the North occupied in 1975.

Tet destroyed the VC infrastructure in 1968 but was portrayed as a defeat by The Most Trusted Man in America and countless other news readers. Abrams abandoned Westmoreland’s Hearts and Minds strategy and concentrated on locating and killing the enemy and training up ARVN units to the point they were actually worth the food they ate. When Nixon got around to mining harbors and bombing bridges, the peace talks were concluded less than a year later. By the time the battle on the ground was won the war at home was irretrievably lost.

Without sanctuaries and arbitrary limits on the application of our power the North Vietnamese would never have been able to get enough power into the South to destabilize it – or to inflict the fifty thousand dead we suffered. General Giap credited the antiwar movement with winning the war. That’s good enough for me.