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I don't know about you, but I am seeing a hint of "Vietnam" all over again in the actions of the Obama Administration. With some of the decisions being made there appears to be a strong attempt to snatch defeat right out of the jaws of victory.

There is a pervasive sickness that seems to infect every politico who garners enough votes to land in that swampland we call Washington D.C. These people who start out as well meaning souls with dreams of improving humanity and the nation rapidly become infected with the Washington Beltway Plague, which has no known cure. Having this illness makes them susceptible to everything wrong-headed, including inflated ego, the belief they have an all-seeing vision, corruption as a given right, and a power thirst that will remain unquenched forever. It was a like-body of politicians who managed the defeat of Vietnam, and since history loves to repeat itself could still bring about our defeat in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

If this sounds crazy to you, a reflection on our war history might be in order. The war in Vietnam was seeped in political ignorance from the day the first shot was fired. Much of this is documented in the course materials of "Politics of the Vietnam War", a study conducted by Dr. John W. Garver at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007.

According to Dr. Garver, one school of interpretation is our political elite took us into an unjust war through a combination of ignorance and arrogance. It unknowingly allowed America to be tarnished with the stain of colonialism in the eyes of Asian peoples and by actions reminiscent of decades long occupier France, caused a nationalism movement in Vietnam under the guise of Communism.

The second school of interpretation is the United States lost because of a long string of political blunders, followed by an equal string of strategic blunders. In the first years of the war inept political leaders, along with their military lackeys, according the MIT study " chose ways of conducting the war that allowed Hanoi to play to its own strengths and to US weaknesses, thereby preventing decisive application of US power to destroy North Vietnam's ability to continue prosecuting the war." It has long been argued that the US defeat was brought about by unsound political and strategic thought that was compounded when put into action.

The final school of interpretation in the MIT papers is the claim, which has been echoed time and again by those who are combat veterans of that ill-fated war. According to this examination of events, the United States actually won the war after the countless blunders of the Lyndon B. Johnson and William Westmoreland years. Says Dr. Garver, "Under the leadership of Creighton Abrams, William Colby, and Richard Nixon by early 1973 the insurgency was destroyed and the South essentially pacified, while Saigon's armies had proved their ability to hold against North Vietnamese conventional invasion with US support."

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