Submitted by GWScott, Jan 31, 2007 17:55

I served as a military advisor in South Viet Nam in '67 and returned in '73 with the Foreign Service. In '67 I could not have driven unarmed 20 miles outside of Da Nang safely. When I returned in '73 I discovered that the guerrilla war had been won and South Viet Nam, for all practical purposes, was secure. At that point I could have driven the 500 miles from Da Nang to Saigon. But whatever the degree of pacification within the country, the North was poised to invade, and SVN was stragetically indefensible (given that the Ho Chi Minh Trail, running through Laos and Cambodia, was off-limits to any real South Vietnamese operation). The only effective counter to the North was the threat of strategic air power to threaten the North with retaliation. The USG neither gave the South Vietnamese the means to deploy the threat themselves, nor could we do so on their behalf once the Congress cut off the aid and passed the War Powers Act. Once the North Vietnamese understood this reality, the defeat of the South was inevitable. One cannot, of course, say that the GVN would have survived otherwise, but the stragegic air threat has kept the peace in Korea for more than 50 years. Kissinger and Nixon are not blameless, and nor are the South Vietnamese, but the acts that GUARANTEED the defeat of our allies and the subsequent loss of tens of thousands of lives in Viet Nam (not to talk of Cambodia or Laos) took place on the floor of Congress.

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