Memoir: From The Other Side

Bob Parks in his latest "Outside the Wire" newsletter:

I'd like to share with you the most amazing quote I ran across today

"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.

"But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"

- General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Commander of the North Vietnamese army, from his memoir


Isn't amazing how history seems to repeat itself?

Here we are, the United States of America, and up until a few weeks ago, while we have men and women on an active battlefield, there are politicians and media personalities actively declaring our military defeat.

Not only to the nation, but also to the world.

We've had our media gleefully repeat the false accusations of battlefield atrocities by our service people; accusations that were begrudgingly proven false, only after being presented as fact throughout the world, on both friendly and enemy newscasts.

Those false allegations, along with the white flag-waving pundits, probably did more to boost the morale of al Qaeda than any military strategy employed before The Surge.

And even with the reports of a stabilized, and even vibrant economy re-emerging in Iraq today, the political naysayers are still defiantly parroting the words of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, "The war is lost."

Our anti-war types probably considered General Giáp, like Al Qaeda today, an intellectual inferior. However, they are well-educated and learn from their mistakes. All al Qaeda has to do today is wait us out. We have them up against the ropes. They just need to wait and see which Americans cut them first.
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Sincerely,
BP's Signature
Bob Parks
Host Outside the Wire