Avoiding Mistakes in Iraq by Revising "Quagmire Quixote" Histories of Vietnam War

Napoleon Bonaparte once stated that “history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” During the Vietnam War, and in the intervening years since, liberal academia, in bed with liberal media, embarked on a joint operation I refer to as “Quagmire-Quixotism,” in which they tilted their collective eggheads against windmills of truth in Vietnam and published news headlines, body counts, and historical textbooks that ultimately convinced a majority of Americans that the Vietnam War was a mistake and the threat of Communism in the region had been exaggerated. American universities, including the one from which I obtained an M.A. in History many years ago, remain under the unyielding (even to facts) liberal rule of professors drunken with the wine of quagmire hysteria to the point that college course on the Vietnam War are anything but exercises in historical research or original thought.

To challenge the Quagmire-Quixotism professors with military facts or to place blame for failure in Vietnam on Congress, the Media, or the anti-war movement was truly a suicidal act for a graduate student, at least if one valued his/her GPA. Under silent protest, I dutifully digested Anti-American apology pieces posing as textbooks, such as America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, The Ugly American, and other quagmire folklore. Liberal academia, of course, did not curb its voracious appetite for debunking and rewriting long-accepted historical records with just the Vietnam War. Not believing any American should be revered, even if doing so might be in the national interest, liberal history professors and eager graduate students set out to discover and publish any and all salacious accounts of presidential behavior. The resulting collection of theses, dissertations, and textbooks provided us with such important “facts” as Jefferson’s alleged sexual encounters with slaves, Lincoln's manic depression and latent homosexuality, and the debunking of the cherished story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree.

The Founding Fathers, under the poison pen of these revisionist historians, went from wise and inspired to white and despised, as historical focus shifted only to their race, their wealth, and their allegedly selfish motives. One of my children once asked, “is it true that Christopher Columbus was an evil man who killed Indians and took them as slaves as gifts for the King of Spain?” That was an interesting dinner conversation, but that was taught as historical fact in our local school. Not content with indoctrinating college age students, academia published texts designed to sow the seeds of liberal anti-Americanism even among the very young.

Fortunately, after decades of indoctrination, serious students of history are ironically using revisionism to debunk the debunkers, and the history of the Vietnam War is fertile ground for rescuing facts that have been slowly drowning in academia’s quagmire. A case in point is Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Having previously examined sections of the book, I was pleased to see TigerHawk quoting from it to defend the “slow” development of the Iraqi military under U.S. training and supervision. The reminders of General George Washington’s battlefield errors and the pitiful training and organization of American troops in the Revolutionary War should give pause to those who believe that by now Iraq should have assembled a fully functional national military. Our expectations are too high and our patience seems to be shortsightedly wearing thin.

What piqued my interest was TigerHawk’s reference to Moyar’s book as “excellent revisionist history.” That statement caused me to reflect on the idea that while “revisionist history” used to be a pejorative term for works that debunked America’s heroes, history has now been rewritten to such an extent by liberal academics that “revisionist history” today refers to rewriting the rewritten histories and biographies dominating all current textbooks and classrooms. Years ago in graduate school I could scarcely have imagined that I would recommend a “revisionist history” to anyone. Yet when one thinks of today’s alternative media, such as Fox News, conservative radio, and Internet bloggers, it is clear that all of these are in fact current efforts at revisionist history, attempts to assure that liberal-hijacked media and academia cannot provide unchallenged the “version of past [or present] events” people will agree upon in the present or future. There are two sides to every issue, especially depictions of war, lest one focus solely on the horrors of war while neglecting the reality that at times it is a means to a worthy end.

Historical scholarship such as Moyar’s Triumph Forsakenshould be, but is not, welcomed in America’s universities. Spy the News! recommends Triumph Forsaken for anyone who believes Vietnam could have and should have been an American political and military victory. It is also a suggested read for Bush Administration critics who have accepted the oft-repeated mantra that Vietnam and Iraq deserve the quagmire label. The book extensively discusses impatience as perhaps the greatest contributor to America’s disgraceful withdrawal from Vietnam, with that impatience displayed by politicians looking to make names for themselves, the media, and some within the U.S. military itself. Impatience appears once again to be leading the U.S. to potential failure in Iraq, and without proper historical perspective, we may be doomed to repeat previous mistakes. Thankfully through alternative media, unchallenged biased liberal historical perspectives are becoming, ironically, a thing of the past.