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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9klk7iSCII
McCain:
"Congressmen, we never lost a battle in Vietnam. It was American public opinion that forced us to lose that conflict."
Paul:
"Shortly after the Vietnam war ended Col. Tu and Col. Sumner met and they were talking about this and the American Col. said, 'your know we never lost one battle', and Col. Tu the Vietnamese said, 'Yes, but that's irrelevant.'"
I understand McCain went through a lot in Vietnam, and his emotions make it so he doesn't want to admit it was all in futility. Like Paul said after the debate, he is basing his policies on emotion and his emotional investment in this war.
Aside from war veterans who were tortured in Vietnamese prison camps, does anyone else get a pass at this though. Isn't saying that we could have won the Vietname war a sure sign of insanity in American politics?
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Clearly we could have won the war. Clearly the American public wasn't willing to do what was necessary to win the war. Part of that unwillingness was propoganda from the anti-war movement that distorted the realities of the battle itself, part of it was genuine pacifist beliefs, and part of it was genuine and changing cost/benefits analyses.
I don't see insanity entering into any of the above.
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Yep. The turning point really was when we pounded the living [censored] out of the North Vietnamese during the Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite went on national television, and lied to the American people that the Tet offensive was a huge military loss, and that the war was not winnable. We killed ten times as many of the enemy as they killed of us, and Cronkite said we lost. So the politicians forced us to leave Vietnam when the war was winnable, and the consequences were absolutely tragic.
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I don't believe the long term consequences were nearly so tragic as the war advocates would have had the American public believe at that time.