Iraq: Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time

[bemildred]

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For all the talk of the "controversial" Vietnam War, while it was being fought, the war was not all that controversial. It was popular with Americans up to around mid-1967. After the Tet Offensive in early 1968 it became wildly unpopular, right up to its conclusion in 1975. After 1968, no US politician of any import advocated continuation of the war to victory, and when North Vietnamese tanks rolled unopposed into Saigon in April 1975, most Americans felt relief that they were finally done with the place.

But as the United States feathered its hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and metastasized in the national consciousness. The US lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam War had to be disposed of down the memory hole.

On May 28, 1984, at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, president Ronald Reagan said, "Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought for freedom, a truly noble cause ... This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest levels of government."

Since the nation no longer actually had to fight the Vietnam War, the United States was discovering that it now actually liked the Vietnam War. The revisionist-history project as applied to the Vietnam experience was gathering full force. The war was no longer a bloody, fatally mismanaged fiasco - it was now a "noble cause".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF06Ak05.html