Before going into the thread topic, I want to correct an earlier factual error. Dr. Strangecraft, please check out
this link on the Ku Klux Klan:
The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866. Founded by veterans of the Confederate Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused
as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the freed slaves. It quickly adopted violent methods. A rapid reaction
set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning it, and Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue their activities in
the South. The organization was in decline from 1868 to 1870, and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action
under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).
Note that the purpose of the KKK was not, as you suggested, to "promote a second secession," but rather to resist Reconstruction. Its goals were to
have the occupation of the former confederacy by U.S. troops ended, to return to local political control rather than dominance by "carpetbaggers,"
and to resist the movement towards racial equality. The failure of the secession and the end of slavery were dead issues and the KKK did not attempt
to reverse them.
Although the KKK as an organization was suppressed by the Grant administration, its goals were substantially achieved. U.S. troops ceased occupying
the South in 1875, the Democratic Party returned to political dominance in the South, and the former slaves were settled into a condition more or less
equivalent to serfdom. They remained non-slaves, but had not achieved genuine freedom nor social, political, or economic equality with whites.
I would also like to point out that your analysis of the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. does not take into account the fact that, while North
Vietnam certainly did possess regular military units, these units never achieved a military victory against the U.S. forces. The victory was
political: the U.S. was not willing to go on paying the price to prevent the Communist victory. That victory could have been prevented indefinitely,
but this would have required an unending stream of U.S. casualties until Doomsday, and the nation decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.
That essentially is the strategy of terrorism, which is a tactic used against a stronger enemy, an enemy that one cannot defeat on the battlefield.
The goal is to raise the price of not meeting one's demands high enough that the enemy gives in, because it does not care about the issue as much as
you do.
I will have some things to say about whether we are "winning" the war on terrorism in another post.
