Dayan & Creveld.

This is coolbert:

Here according to that most distinguished Israeli military historian as found at TheShalomCenter web site REASONS for American defeat in Vietnam. As posted on the Internet in 2004, only when the low-intensity insurgency in Iraq had initially begun.

Reasons for American defeat in Vietnam as originally observed and enunciated by the great Israeli general officer Moshe Dayan. Dayan in the aftermath of the Six-Day War [1967] traveling to Vietnam in the capacity of a civilian and reporting on the war in a series of articles for the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv. [that series of articles became a book!]

"that the most important Israeli newspaper of the time, Ma'ariv, proposed that he [Dayan] go to Vietnam as a war correspondent he jumped on the idea. The articles he wrote were published in Ma'ariv as well as the British and French press."

Dayan as a military man with the most illustrious career and with prescience identifying and elaborating on those weaknesses and liabilities that the American military in Vietnam faced. Weaknesses and liabilities that in the opinion of Dayan doomed from the onset the American effort to failure.

Reasons to include:

* "First, according to Dayan, the most important operational problem the US Forces were facing was intelligence, in other words the inability to distinguish the enemy from either the physical surroundings or the civilian population"

* "Second, as Dayan saw clearly enough, the campaign for hearts and minds did not work"

* "The third and most important reason why I [van Creveld] think Vietnam is relevant to the situation in Iraq is because the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position where they were beating down on the weak"

With regard to that third and most important reason, those thoughts are more or less those of van Creveld and NOT Dayan? The psychological dimension to warfare especially within the realm of a low-intensity anti-insurgency cannot be denied. Vietnam whether right or wrong was perceived as an instance of the most powerful by far nation on earth as beating up a poor and weak nation and doing so without a whole lot of justification.

The war in Vietnam was lost in the streets of New York City and not on the battlefields of South Vietnam? This is largely the consensus of the military historian, Dayan and others at the time seeing the picture clearly much more than most?

coolbert.