Philippine-American War

[PanzerJaeger]

The emotional currents surrounding Vietnam still echo strongly in US politics and the media, which is why it gets hit so often that it's become a cliche. Vietnam is also overwhelmingly obvious evidence of the unimaginable idiocy of allowing politicians to run a war. Plus it's the clearest defeat of the US on the battlefield in recent memory.

Don't forget either that no few of the politicians who run our country now are related to or indebted to the politicians of that generation (Some are, or were recently, the exact same politicians in fact).

This is a case where the impact of the event far outweighs the realistic ability to compare it to Iraq.

'Gotta disagree with you there. The US military was never defeated on the battlefield in South Vietnam, despite all sorts of advantages given the North Vietnamese via Johnson, ill-suited strategy and tactics, and some pretty poor leadership, and would have had very few troubles taking Hanoi. In fact, IIRC, it was 2 years after the vast majority of US forces had left that the NVA took the South.

As you indicated, Vietnam was a terrible example of politicians creating an atmosphere of inevitable failure. They thought that Ho Chi Men would be comfortable with a Korea-like situation, but it should have been clearly obvious after a year or three that he would have to be clearly defeated or the US should no longer invest their containment resources in Vietnam. The legacy of that war led Kennedy and later Johnson to embrace the idea of "limited war" and create and a worst-case scenario where the communist forces were allowed half the nation to plan and train for all of their (failed) assaults, not to mention resupply the VietCong. Worse, by the time Nixon - who would have had no qualms about trouncing the NVA in NV and letting China sort them out - was elected, there was no public will left to do so.