why was the war in afghanistan and iraq called the vietnam war

Neither North Vietnam nor the Taliban was defeated and in neither case was their ideology destroyed. Unless the enemy is defeated kinetically and its ideology destroyed, nation-building cannot succeed. Nation-building only works when the enemy accepts defeat, as in Japan and Germany at the end of World War Two. The second lesson is the same from both wars. There again, the fear of escalation caused them to not even try. Obama and Trump were able or willing to stop Pakistan, Russia, China, and Iran from supplying the Taliban with funds and arms. We lost in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for that exact reason. That lesson is, if you don’t fight a war in a manner calculated to win it decisively, you will lose it inevitably. The principal lesson we should have learned from Vietnam is one we clearly didn’t. A Vietnam-era sort of anti-war sentiment consumed us after the Iraq invasion of 2003 and has dominated the media and much of American politics ever since. New generals spoke of the progress their predecessors had in Vietnam and advised their presidents badly. There was no draft, but our new adversaries were adept at disinformation, and the media quickly and often republished their messages. Bush after 9-11 and in the first two years of war in Afghanistan. We were united behind President George W. Popular songs had lyrics asking, “what are we fighting for?” Actress Jane Fonda visited North Vietnam while American POWs were being tortured in the “Hanoi Hilton.” The anti-war movement was so strong that President Johnson was forced not to run for reelection. By the late 1960s, our nation was divided by the draft, and anti-war that protests swept the nation. During the Vietnam conflict, presidents and generals always spoke about progress and body counts, of “Vietnamization” of the war, and examples of supposed success in nation-building. The place to begin that debate is with the lessons we should have learned from the Vietnam War but didn’t.Īmerican political unity doesn’t last as long as some wars demand because our politics are so quickly polarized.

Politicians and pundits have already begun debating the lessons we should learn from the Afghanistan War.

Why was the war in afghanistan and iraq called the vietnam war