This reader makes some interesting points about Vietnam which you may or may not agree with. But he makes a crucial point about my lack of a decisive victory in the first episode of “What’s Your Problem?” with PB&J. My camera distracted me from making several intellectual kill-blows that would have ended the conversation in its tracks:

I enjoyed your debate with Peter Beinart again. Thanks for posting my comments last week. Unfortunately I have to say that you didn’t come out the clear winner in this debate. In your defense, it did seem like the technical difficulties were quite distracting. I think you conceded two of Beinart’s assumptions that enabled him to push the debate in his direction. For one, Beinart repeatedly mentioned how ridiculous it is that Conservatives think that Vietnam could have been won. You discussed some of the consequences of loss in SE Asia, but never challenged Beinart’s assumption that the conflict was unwinnable. I realize you probably didn’t want to rehash the “we should have won” argument, but when you consider that we saw great success in South Vietnam during the 70′s mostly through the provision of air support, it doesn’t seem all that ”ridiculous” to think a continued military presence there would have been any more futile than it was in South Korea (where we actually had to keep tens of thousands of troops on the border). There’s a legitimate argument on the other side, but conceding this point to the Left has given them the tool of Quagmire, which they utilize to prove that any war fought for America’s selfish interests is unwinnable. It may be true that this is a result of America’s limited historical knowledge, but America is not going to become more historically literate any time soon, so why give in on arguing about the war it does remember? So once Beinart had established the inevitability of defeat in Iraq via the Vietnam analogy, he then moved on to the second big assumption – that engagement in Darfur is good, because unlike Iraq and Vietnam, there is a chance of success there. At this point you should have pointed out that a) defeat in Iraq is not inevitable, and b) that Darfur is a huge region beset by ethnic and religious differences that are even greater than Iraq’s. Instead, Beinart pushed his arguments to their logical conclusion; that intervention in Iraq (as it was in Vietnam) is hopeless while intervention in Darfur is a worthy cause, ignoring the huge difficulties we would face there and instead using the nonsensical Leftist criteria that you’ve illustrated before – wars fought for national interest = bad and hopeless, wars fought for no national interest = good and acheivable. If we do leave Iraq, we’ll be falling into an unfortunate pattern: we engage in a war, the Left declares it a failure and pushes us out of the war, and then uses the loss as the evidence of the inevitablity of defeat. That’s the basic tool that Beinart utilized in your debate, and I wish you would have called him on it. If he and other Leftists continue to get away with it, soon defeats really will be inevitable.