The Melancholy Korean

Jesus of Nazareth: 

μακάριοι οἱ εἰρηνοποιοί, ὅτι αὐτοὶ υἱοὶ θεοῦ κληθήσονται.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Colonel Herbert Schandler, professor, Department of Grand Strategy, National Defense University, Washington, DC:

The claim most often made by military analysts and historians since 1975 is that the military was denied victory because of constraints placed on U.S. military power by political leaders in Washington. This view may be summarized as follows: The war in Vietnam was a war of aggression by communist-controlled North Vietnam against our noncommunist ally, South Vietnam. According to this view, more than sufficient U.S. military might and strategy were available to stop that aggression, to defeat North Vietnam, and thus preserve the independence of South Vietnam. That this did not occur is due to U.S. political leaders having ‘tied the hands’ of the military. Military leaders and historians holding this view have bitterly denounced the policy of limited and gradual application of military force (in the air and on the ground, in both North and South Vietnam), as the principal cause of our failure to defeat the enemy and achieve a military ‘victory.’

Had the U.S. military been allowed to attack at will and without limits, many believe, the U.S. victory would have come quickly and decisively. In this way, Hanoi’s aggression would have been halted, and the territorial integrity of South Vietnam would have been maintained as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

Now, nearly twenty-five years after the end of the war, and nearly a half-century after the United States first became involved, the evidence points to the conclusion that to believe that the U.S. military was denied a victory it could have and should have won in Vietnam is an illusion—a dangerous illusion if acted upon in future U.S. conflicts.

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In the end, no matter what it came to be called, the U.S. ground war in Vietnam was a war of attrition. Success in this kind of war did not depend on the ability of American forces to inflict a decisive defeat on the enemy in South Vietnam. It depended instead on how long the North Vietnamese were willing to feed the war pipeline with men and material. If they were willing to pay the price, the enemy could keep large numbers of American forces tied up indefinitely and continue to inflict casualties on them.

Robert Fisk, journalist:

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, but when I arrived two weeks later their armour was still barrelling down through the slush from the Amu Darya River, the Oxus of antiquity, which Edward Durand had agreed with the Russians should be the northern frontier of this frost-covered land. Save for a few isolated cities, the Soviet army appeared to have crushed all resistance. Along the highways south and east of Kabul, Russian military encampments protected by dozens of tanks and heavy artillery controlled the arteries between the rebellious provinces of south-eastern Afghanistan. An ‘intervention,’ Leonid Brezhnev had called his invasion, peace-loving assistance to the popular socialist government of the newly installed Afghan president Babrak Karmal.

Otto von Bismarck, Imperial Chancellor of the German Empire and Prussian Foreign Minister:

Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.