Military history misconceptions #1

The idea that South Vietnam was conquered in 1975 by an invading North Vietnamese army rather than liberated by a nationalist insurgency is unlikely to be a popular view at present. Contemporary antiwar tropes are reinforced by regular assertions that the US is not capable of conducting successful counter-insurgency campaigns, or even that insurgencies cannot be defeated. The effect of the constant restating of flat-wrong interpretations of the course of the later stages of the Vietnam war has been to hamstring public debate on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, making it very difficult to judge those wars and their place in national strategy, in so far as it can be said to exist, on their own merits or demerits.

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