Word: viet
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...liberal exhortation "No more Viet Nams!" could be a prescription for appeasement, passivism and isolationism; the hardliners' rejoinder-"No more 'No more Viet Nams!' could translate into a recipe for macho bullying: "Let's go beat the stuffing out of somebody somewhere just to show that we're tough again." The danger of the first response is paralysis; the danger of the second is reflexive, un thinking action. Neither impulse makes for sound policy...
When U.S. fighters downed a pair of Libyan jets last August, two choruses sounded in counterpoint: "Hooray! We've finally put Viet Nam behind us!" and, from the other side of the stage, "Beware! The Gulf of Sidra may be another Gulf of Tonkin!" (thus the onstage, with clanking chains, the ghost of the 1964 naval skirmish off the coast of Viet Nam, which Lyndon Johnson used as a pretext to escalate American involvement there...
...Viet Nam syndrome has even clouded views of our adversaries' foreign entanglements. Some commentators, as well as some American Government officials, continue to toy hopefully with the idea that Afghanistan may turn out to be the Soviet Union's Viet Nam-never mind that Afghanistan is right on the Soviet border and that whatever else the leaders in Moscow have to worry about, they need not fear student marches on the Kremlin or peacenik political challengers in the next elections to the Supreme Soviet...
Still, it is inevitable, indeed understandable, that the Viet Nam analogy should arise in the context of the civil war in El Salvador. Precisely because the American debacle in Indochina was such a protracted, painful and preoccupying episode, it is sure to come to mind whenever the U.S. faces circumstances that are even superficially similar. Television coverage of El Salvador has provided some gnawingly familiar images: Marxist-led peasants vs. patrols of boy soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms and G.I.-style helmets, ambushes and massacres in the jungles, a trickle of American advisers into the embattled country, and, back...
...parallels to Viet Nam are far outnumbered by the divergences. Viet Nam is 9,000 miles from the U.S.; El Salvador is a near neighbor. The military-civilian government in San Salvador is its own worst enemy, in the sense that it has alienated its own people and embarrassed what few friends it has left in the world. Still, the junta bears little resemblance to the assorted cliques and strongmen that the U.S. supported in Saigon...