by James Ruhnke

Created on: April 29, 2009

What "WE" have learned. If "we" means the USA as a nation, I would say we have learned very little. Iraq and Afghanistan are two wars which prove my point. So, instead of what we have learned from the war in Vietnam, the question is, "What SHOULD we have learned".

First, never get involved in the internal affairs of another nation. If a nation is a threat to our security that nation should be warned and if the warning goes unheeded, declare war. If the threat is not serious enough to declare a war then don't start giving out warnings. Never threaten unless you intend to carry out the threat. It is that simple.

What really gets this nation involved in foreign military adventures is our system of democratic politics. Because we have allowed political parties to exist we have unintentionally inserted a conflict of interest into our system. Every election cycle, the party which is out of power needs to find an issue with which it can return to that power. Take, for instance, in 1960 John Kennedy used an issue which claimed that we were way behind the USSR in intercontinental missiles. He knew that the claim was without any basis in fact and also knew that the Republicans could not prove he was wrong because to do so would tip off the Russians as to the extent of our intelligence regarding their missile capabilities. So, luckily for us, when Kennedy took office his Secretary of Defense inadvertently told a news conference that the missile threat did not actually exist. This flub was quite an embarrassment to the administration but it also saved this nation a lot of time and money countering a major Russian threat which did not exist!

In Vietnam, the political rhetoric in this country was all about communism and falling dominoes. Unlike the "Missle Gap" rhetoric, this particular bit of untruth was never revealed and it continued to appear in print so often that the public had no choice but to believe it. This, in turn, caused each succeeding administration to act in ways which would keep South Vietnam from going "Red". Instead of being able to let South Vietnam die a natural death, our American political rhetoric had trapped our politicians into a military commitment which never had any chance of attaining our goals.

It is easy to see from these examples that the real problem is the existence of political parties in America. Instead of working together to secure our nation our politicians are constantly looking for ways to get on top of the other party. So, we obviously have not learned anything from our past mistakes and the proof of that is sadly evident in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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