From: Monte Davis 

"Frank Haber"  wrote:

>(Dolchstoálegende)
>
>Fifty points for referential historicity.

Most pop history presents the 'stab in the back' legend primarily in the
context of Hitler's hatred for Jews, communists, German social democrats,
and any other anti-Germans de jour. But it was also vital in generating
support for new adventures in 1938-1941: "Hey, since we didn't really
lose that two-front war the first time around, let's give it another
go."

The Vietnam version is subtler, in that it sets up a straw man of military
victory or defeat. Hey, guys: I cheerfully stipulate that the United States
could have invaded and occupied, or for that matter annihilated, North
Vietnam in 1964 or in 1975.  Tet 1968 was a military disaster for the VC.
US troops won virtually every engagement of battalion size or above. We did
not lose the war. OK?

What we *did* lose was the belief that with our military presence as a
shield, the South Vietnamese government and army and people -- with
internal resources at least matching the North's, and a hell of a lot more
military and economic aid from us than the North got from China and the
USSR -- would in some finite time become able to maintain their
independence on their own. Hey, guys: they didn't. They were not
appreciably closer to it in 1973 than in 1965. We tried to help in many
ways, but we didn't know how to make it happen.

This isn't anti-war rhetoric, it's fact in black and white. Mark, Jeff,
Gary: take a break from Fox and read the Pentagon Papers for the mid- and
late 1960s; read what Nixon and Kissinger and MACV were saying to each
other in 1970-1973. It's plain as day that *they* increasingly realized it
wasn't going to happen, and that by 1973 they knew that "peace with
honor" meant only a decent interval before the debacle. It's right
there in the cables between Washington and Saigon and the Paris
negotiators.

The problem with the American Dolchstoálegende is not so much that it
fosters frothing about Jews -- I mean, about lefties/Cronkite/Democraps.
That's x-treme politics as usual. The real problem is that it encourages us
to substitute an easy question (do we know how to win wars?) for a hard one
(do we know how to foster stable democracies under unstable conditions?)

-Monte

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