“The Vietnam War lasted almost 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. Much shorter if you only count from the 1965 landing of 3,500 Marines in Da Nang to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Nixon gets a lot of blame for how the war ended. Ford gets his share, too.
But the Vietnam War is Johnson’s fault.
More than 300 bodies litter Mount Everest — avalanches, exhaustion, frostbite.You could say that’s a failure of the rescuers.
Or you could say the climbers should have just kept their asses on the ground in the first place.
The failure is NOT the way we END wars — it’s the way we START wars.By the end of 1965, that 3,500 troop number had swelled to 184,300. By the end of 1966 it was 385,300. In 1967 it was 485,600.
It peaked in 1968 at 549,500.
Nixon didn’t take office until January 20, 1969.
We have far less control over getting people back home, than we do over sending them there in the first place.Sometimes we just need to keep our ass on the ground.
The Paris Peace Accords signed January 27, 1973 established a cease-fire between communist-backed North Vietnam and America-backed South Vietnam and mandated full withdrawal of all US troops in 60 days.
In March, Nixon said US forces would go back in if the North launched a full offensive into the South after we left.
We were leaving them in good shape.
As the calendar turned to 1975, the American-aligned South Vietnamese had twice as many combat troops as the communist-backed North. The South also had twice as many tanks and three times as much artillery.
That was in January.
By April, the South had collapsed.
The North Vietnamese and the communist-backed South Viet Cong had completely rolled over every front held by the South Vietnamese except Saigon, the South’s largest city, which now stood surrounded by 100,000 communist-backed troops.
US helicopters desperately began evacuating US personnel and South Vietnamese allies who had befriended us.Operation Frequent Wind began on April 29 and operated continuously into April 30, helicoptering out 1,400 Americans and 6,000 South Vietnamese. Combined with the ones who self-evacuated, we brought 140,000 South Vietnamese into the US.
***
Bush launched the War Against Iraq with no legal provocation; no act of war committed by Iraq; no justification under our own rules of engagement.The war was a total disaster — Bush committed crimes against humanity, carried out war crimes, squandered our moral authority, abdicated our just power derived from our example of integrity.
And just before he walked out the door, he negotiated a binding agreement as to the date-certain for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and left it to President Obama to be falsely blamed for “cutting and running.”
We were leaving them in good shape.
We had spent years and billions training and arming the Iraqi Army.
And then as President Obama began following the binding Bush-negotiated troop-withdrawal agreement, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” who had come to Iraq directly at the invitation of Bush’s honeypot challenge, changed its name to ISIS and said “boo” and the Iraqi forces threw down their guns and ran like spooked little schoolyard kids.
***
After an initial military-advised troop-surge, President Obama began the final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in 2014.
We were leaving them in good shape.
We had been there 13 years.
We had spent billions training and arming the Afghan Army.
On May 27, 2014, President Obama announced America’s combat involvement would totally cease by the end of the year, with a residual force of 9,800 troops remaining in the country.
And then…
October 28, 2014…
The United Kingdom and the United States handed over all bases to the Afghan military and ceased all military operations.
On October 28, 2014.
SEVEN YEARS AGO.
We’re not “just up and leaving in the dark of night.”
We’re not “abandoning our Afghan allies.”
We’re not “breaking promises to those who helped us.”
Why in the HOLY FUCK didn’t they get their asses on a plane during the last SEVEN FUCKING YEARS?
The same thing that’s happening now, started happening seven years ago.
So what did President Obama do? When all of the armchair quarterbacks who got their military science degrees from the same seat over the shit hole that present Trumpers got their degrees in immunology, caught a collective case of the vapors and commenced clutching their pearls and weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth over the poor little allies who we were “abandoning,” President Obama paused the drawdown and left more troops there to give our allies more time to leave.
So why the fuck didn’t they?
They have had seven years.
Why is everyone acting like we handed control of the country over to the Afghans just yesterday?
They’ve had SEVEN FUCKING YEARS.
If we sent another 100,000 troops back into Afghanistan to stay for seven more years to allow for an “orderly withdrawal” they are just going to stay the fuck where they are and then do a last minute run for the border when we leave in seven years.
This is cultural.
They don’t WANT to leave. They want us to stay there forever to fight their battles for them while they use the 45-year-old specter of a rooftop in Saigon to force us to strain and drain our resources until we’re fucking bankrupt.
We should have left in 2014.
And Biden has no choice.
Because Trump did to Biden in Afghanistan, exactly what Bush did to President Obama in Iraq.
In February of 2020, Trump reached a deal with the Taliban that required the US to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.
Trump reached a troop-withdrawal agreement and left it to his Democratic successor to execute it.
Trump had FOUR YEARS — from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 — to conduct an orderly withdrawal. But he both sent in more troops and set a date-certain for someone else to bring them all home.
Leaving a country always poses a huge risk.
That’s why we leave behind equipment and supplies — “moving day” is too dangerous.
There was very little we could have done differently in Saigon.
There is nothing we can do now except postpone this exact same scene to a future date.
The lessons we thought we learned last time and the lessons we need to learn this time are not lessons about withdrawal.
The lessons we need to learn are about how to avoid going in the first place.
Sometimes we just need to keep our asses on the ground.”
- Cree Hardegree
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