The Vietnamese are an exception to everything
There’s an episode of The West Wing that aired right after September 11. It’s a special standalone episode about terrorism in which the idol for fifteen year old debaters (Rob Lowe) says that terrorism has a 100% failure rate.
This statement, meant to comfort Americans after the tragedy of 9/11 seems false to me. Now, before I go on let me just plainly say that I in no way endorse terrorism, but I think the West Wing argument has considerable holes. It depends on what qualifies as terrorism. In terms of 9/11 I would count that as a failure because —as defined in the West Wing— those attacks were meant to be the beginning of the destruction of the United States of America.
That didn’t happen. If anything Iraq is more likely to be dismantled —but who knows how that war is going to turn out really.
What about Vietnam? William J. Duiker in his book Sacred War writes how during the Tet Offensive, the Northern Vietnamese killed civilians:
In Saigon, Viet Cong sapper units attacked civilians and military installations and occupied radio stations. In the most publicized incident, one suicide squad attacked and briefly occupied the ground floor of the new U.S. Embassy, located only a few hundred yards from the presidential palace in downtown Saigon.
In the end, the Tet Offensive was regarded as a failure by the Vietnamese Communists but their larger goal of repelling the United States, establishing a single, self-ruled, Communist country was achieved. Actually, even though the Tet Offensive was regarded by the Northern Vietnamese as a loss, it was extremely difficult for the Johnson administration to convince the public that the Tet Offensive was a failure for the Communists and a win for them. So, although the National Liberation Front (the Vietnamese Communists) weren’t walking that road to achieve their goals, the victory was along that line.
My Graduate School Instructor (think TA) for my Vietnam War class notes, though, that the Vietnamese were fighting in a “civil war context.” Modern day terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda are not the same. Those groups, like the PLO and IRA, are “making a claim to political legitimacy and rejecting another’s in some contexts; al-Qaeda is doing something else entirely.” So maybe the comparison isn’t applicable.
