The absurdity of the Vietnam “stab-in-the-back” theories

One of the staunch Iraq War advocates, one Max Boot who has boot-strapped himself into unjustified recognition as a military expert, has published an outrageous defense of President's outrageous mis-telling of the Vietnam war history. Says Mr. Boot (with my commentary entered at certain spots):

This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren't so grave. [Misleading strawman typical of these people.] After all, isn't Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.?

True, but that's 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia [This is truly dishonest: we had been out of Cambodia for four years, and were in no position to stop the Khmer Rouge from taking over], while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps "where tens of thousands perished." Many more fled as "boat people," he continued, "many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea." [Mr. Boot ignores the tens or hundreds of thousands being killed in continuing warfare before that.]

That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. [Wow, can you believe this stretch?] In the late 1970s, America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents." [Of course, our policy should be dictated by the powerless taunts of terrorists.]
……….
By 1972 most of the south was judged secure [passive voice: by whom] and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence [How "small"?] and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. [That is a deranged statement.]

The bottom line on whether the Vietnam War was “winnable” or not is this. It’s the same question the Iraq War supporters refuse to listen to, much less answer: what would it have meant to “win”? Nobody has ever suggested that Vietnam could be unified under the South Vietnamese government without at minimum bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” (Of course, there were some American barbarians who wanted to do exactly that.)

Yet, nobody has ever suggested that North Vietnam and the Viet Cong were not going to remain absolutely committed over the long haul to unification of the country, nor that South Vietnam would have the same commitment to unification. So that means we could have, at most, continued to prop up the South Vietnamese and protect it from complete takeover by North Vietnam. After over 20 years of supporting first the colonial French and then various Western-oriented, French-speaking South Vietnamese governments against the communists, supplying as many as 550,000 American soldiers, with almost 60,000 of them killed, several hundred thousand more seriously wounded or maimed for life, dropping more bombs on North Vietnam that we did in all of Asia and Europe in all of World War II, and spending billions and billions of dollars, the South Vietnamese government could not command sufficient loyalty from the people to defeat the insurgency and the armies of North Vietnam. South Vietnam was given 20 years of “breathing room” to establish itself. Without that, whether another period of support might have delayed the fall of Saigon that much longer is totally irrelevant. In the complex environment of Vietnam – a contrast to Korea, where divisions could be more clearly drawn and our presence justified as protection of the entire people rather than occupation or protection of a regime -- it was impossible to “win” until we had let the South Vietnam government demonstrate that it could establish control of its territory without American military participation.

Somehow, the neo-conservatives like Max Boot simply don’t get the concept of a “puppet government” -- that, except in very specific circumstances not involving an indigenous insurgency -- a government protected from its own people by the American military is not a government. It cannot command the necessary respect and support to continue as a government. The more we try to "win" in such situations, the more we guarantee we are going to "lose."