130 replies to this topic

[Tinman]

Going back to the original discussion topic: Could the US have won the war?
Militarily, yes!
Politically, no!

The Christmas bombing in 1972 brought Hanoi to its knees. High ranking Hanoi officials like General Vo Nguyen Giap admitted to this. US troops could have marched into Hanoi without much resistance. The North Vietnamese military had three years to recover and made the final attack in 1975. If Nixon had continued the bombings over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and Cambodia, it would have been over, but because he was facing impeachment threats from the US Congress, he had to abort. So, yes, if the US had continued fighting, the war could have been won....but how much longer and at what loss of American lives. Remember that 58,000 Americans soldiers died, while 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died, 400,000 North Vietnamese/VC died, and 3-4 million civilians killed during the war. In US history books, there has always been more emphasis on the number of US troops killed during the war, and less mentioning of the sacrifices made by the South Vietnamese. Somehow, the US started blaming the South Vietnamese for not defending their own country....just look at the numbers.

Politically, there was no solution for the communist question. Communism was more appealing to a country made up of 90% poor peasants. US policy makers knew this and did not have a viable solution. Remember that this was the Cold War between the superpowers United States and Soviet Union. The US had to take a stance against the spread of communism, as they did in Berlin and Cuba, since the Kennedy administration. The Korean War ended in a stalemate, and then Vietnam was the staging for Korea, part II.

The US troops did not lose Vietnam. It was the US politicians and Pentagon policy makers.

[LYY]

The US had to take a stance against the spread of communism, as they did in Berlin and Cuba, since the Kennedy administration.

JFK?

He was "removed" for not endorsing a high profile US engagement into the Vietnam war - a typical way the Lord of the War clear the hurdle that stands in the way.

[LYY]

Politically, there was no solution for the communist question. Communism was more appealing to a country made up of 90% poor peasants. US policy makers knew this and did not have a viable solution.

except JFK ... that costs his life.

[Tinman]

JFK?

He was "removed" for not endorsing a high profile US engagement into the Vietnam war - a typical way the Lord of the War clear the hurdle that stands in the way.

Are you saying that there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK because of his policy in Vietnam?
Please formulate an argument based on facts and not conspiracy theories.

[LYY]

Are you saying that there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK because of his policy in Vietnam?
Please formulate an argument based on facts and not conspiracy theories.

http://mcadams.posc....du/context1.htm

[Tinman]

http://mcadams.posc....du/context1.htm

Just another conspiracy theory as to the assassination of JFK. Other examples include:
1. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Russian agent
2. Fidel Castro and the Cubans, in response to the Bay of Pigs, and Castro's assassination attempt
3. the CIA
4. the FBI- because JFK's affair with Marilyn Monroe, and another girl associated with the mob
5. the mob/mafia--because Robert Kennedy was going after the mob and organizied crimes

The movie JFK by Oliver Stone went through a list of conspiracy theories, but in the end, it's just another conspiracy theory. Like the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan....it was just another "mad man".

In a democratic society such as the United States where bipartisanship between the Republicans and Democrats are dominant, the executive, legislative, and judicial branch of the government are constantly bickering and arguing over political issues, but they still deeply respect the law of the land and no branch would attempt to overthrow the country's leader. These politicians were elected by the people and have to answer to the people. Such an action like assassination would jeopardize their party's survival.

[LYY]

http://mcadams.posc....du/context1.htm

if you read the material in this link properly, it is a "mirror" that dispel conspiracies.



A key point you have pointed out earlier:

Politically, there was no solution for the communist question. Communism was more appealing to a country made up of 90% poor peasants. US policy makers knew this and did not have a viable solution. Remember that this was the Cold War between the superpowers United States and Soviet Union. The US had to take a stance against the spread of communism, as they did in Berlin and Cuba, since the Kennedy administration. The Korean War ended in a stalemate, and then Vietnam was the staging for Korea, part II.

The US troops did not lose Vietnam. It was the US politicians and Pentagon policy makers.

All the arguments in the link failed to "see" a key point in JFK - he knew the "weapon" to communist problem. But the weapon has little to do with the military industrial complex ...

[Tinman]

All the arguments in the link failed to "see" a key point in JFK - he knew the "weapon" to communist problem. But the weapon has little to do with the military industrial complex ...

Please clarify the above statement. I'm getting the feeling that you are under the assumption that America is the Lord of War???

Recently, there was a forum titled "The Presidency and the Vietnam War" held in Boston, MA at the JFK Presidential Library, March 10-11, 2006. Televised on C-SPAN. There were panels of ex-cabinet members of the JFK, Johnson, and Nixon administration, with first hand accounts of what went on in the White House, plus presidential tape recordings, during the Vietnam War.

All evidence leads to the conclusion that Johnson carried over Kennedy's policy in regard to US intervention in Vietnam. So whether JFK was dead or alive, his policy continued on with the Johnson administration.

[LYY]

All evidence leads to the conclusion that Johnson carried over Kennedy's policy in regard to US intervention in Vietnam. So whether JFK was dead or alive, his policy continued on with the Johnson administration.

Quote:

Another consideration is discussed by the preeminent historian of the war, Stanley Karnow:

Early in 1963, South Vietnam's rigid President Ngo Dinh Diem was cracking down on internal dissidents, throwing the country into chaos. Fearing that the turmoil would benefit the Communist insurgents, Kennedy conceived of bringing home one thousand of the sixteen thousand American military advisers as a way of prodding Diem into behaving more leniently. Kennedy's decision was codified in National Security Action Memorandum, or NSAM 263. Its aim was to "indicate our displeasure" with Diem and "create significant uncertainty" in him "as to the future intentions of the United States." Kennedy hoped the scheme, which also scheduled a reduction of the U.S. forces over the next two years, would give the South Vietnamese the chance to strengthen themselves. (In Mark C. Carnes, ed. Past Imperfect, p. 272)

Thus the "withdrawal" was not the first step in surrendering Vietnam to the communists, it was part of a strategy to get the sort of government in Saigon that could win the war. Indeed, displeasure with the government in Saigon eventually led the U.S. to acquiesce in a coup that toppled the Diem regime.


The real intent of JFK is to institute the right government that represents more people interest above personal greed so that a genuine spirit of democracy can be better nurtured and spread in Vietnam. This is not easy. But he is an idealistic president and he read the needs of the Vietnamese.

All evidence leads to the conclusion that Johnson carried over Kennedy's policy in regard to US intervention in Vietnam. So whether JFK was dead or alive, his policy continued on with the Johnson administration.

Could the US win the cold war?

This is what matter most to JFK ...

Militarily Might? - difficult - as the Russian was spending more resources to feed their military arsenal. The Military industrial complex serves to provide a proper military stand-off in global context.

Politically? - there are chances - if the communist idealism is a fallacy. BUT that takes TIME ...


IOW, Vietnam is a political frontier for JFK.
Any military activities is to be kept low and minimum as per my post above:

JFK?

He was "removed" for not endorsing a high profile US engagement into the Vietnam war ...

Edited by LYY, 27 March 2006 - 02:20 AM.

[Hoa Phau]

could the us win the cold war? YES

The soviet union made enough threats as part of their plans. but america, and NATO, can create something to neutralise the threat made by the soviets.
there are protests against coomunism in sov bloc countries, in which their govenment was trying to supress it, but their protests made was supressed by soviet arms, due to the warsaw pact these sov bloc countries signed.
but then, these protests turned to resistance, some resorted to arms, others hear upon the voices created by america and europe to promote democracy and to inflict damage against soviet propaganda. Like in DDR, where many east germans hear West german radio and watching West german television, in which President Erich Honecker called as: Defection via Television.
I think the cold war might end up in american victory, militarily and politically because of enough domestic support in sov bloc countries. the people in the iron curtain have holes to escape, becoming refugees in america and other democratic countries.
The military around europe against the Sov bloc have better equipment made by England, America, France, and even Germany, these weapons they have are mostly modern, in which the soviet union might end up beaten in terms of firearms they have. The soviet union also got scare of the MX missile created by america during the regan era, but america didnt use it, for any reasons.

The Salt treaties, disarmament, Glastnost, Perestoiska are also one of the causes america won, maybe because the soviet union, even they have a stong military, also have a weak economy and daily life. the elections in which the CDU won against the SED in east germany marks the countdown to german reunification in the late 80's. that is political victory for america against the soviets!

[MC420]

Hi Folks:

I've just recently found this article which is related to this thread perhaps could also have additional value to those who are interested in this topic.


Blinded by six myths Greg Sheridan
April 30, 2005

THE Australians were the best performing allied troops in Vietnam, though they got, then and now, precious little recognition for it.

The Australians were less brutal than the South Koreans, less profligate with casualties, and more disciplined, than the Americans. Though their number was small, the Diggers did their job well. But the war's growing unpopularity in the 1970s meant that they were never honoured as they should have been, at least not until the mid-'80s.

Still, of late our Vietnam veterans have risen very high. Tim Fischer was deputy prime minister, Peter Cosgrove is Chief of the Defence Force, soon to retire, and Michael Jeffrey is Governor-General. All of them served in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War, though it ended 30 years ago, never really goes away. It pervades our discussion of Iraq, it is the metaphor on everyone's lips, in the US it damaged John Kerry in his run for the presidency last year.

In Australia the most visible manifestation of the Vietnam War is our sparkling and brilliant population of Vietnamese Australians. More than 200,000 of them, 1 per cent of our population. No one guessed, in 1965, that they would be the outcome of our involvement in the Vietnam War.






Yet we seldom listen to their stories or anything they have to tell us about the war. Our cultural elites have disappeared the South Vietnamese from history. One of the most evocative sights in the Sydney Anzac Day march last week was the big delegation at the end. All Asian men, marching behind the haunting flag of South Vietnam, the three red stripes across the field of yellow.

The television commentator seemed flustered by their presence and kept referring to them as South Koreans.

Yet these Vietnamese had been our allies, our brothers-in-arms. Now they're our citizens. Thirty years ago today, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the communists.

It did not fall to the Viet Cong, the guerillas of popular legend, but to a completely conventional military invasion by the army of North Vietnam.

Fifty thousand Australian soldiers served, and 500 died, trying to prevent this. Did they die in vain? Were they puppets of the Americans?

The truth is that Vietnam was a morally just war. The chances of success were high. And there was a strategically compelling case for us to be involved.

The narrative runs like this. During World War II the Japanese took control of Vietnam, which before that was a French colony. At war's end ****, the Vietnamese communist leader, declared independence.

The French decided to re-establish colonial rule in Vietnam and the communists led the resistance to them. After the French were defeated in 1954 the communists took control of the north and independent nationalists, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, governed the south.

It is boilerplate orthodoxy, taught at times on every campus in the US and Australia, that Ho was popular throughout Vietnam. Yet when he came to power in the north, a million people

fled south, with only 100,000 going the other way.

It's a funny thing about communist revolutions, they are always more popular in the West than with their own people.

After consolidating a typically barbaric communist regime in the north, Ho turned his attention to the south and throughout the '60s ran an escalating military campaign against it, with the purpose of subjecting the whole of Vietnam to communist rule.

The Americans began to help the south in the early '60s and towards the end of that decade briefly had 500,000 military personnel in Vietnam. Australia sent a contingent in 1965, which peaked at 8000, and which stayed until 1971.

The Americans too had withdrawn most of their troops by late 1971. South Vietnam fought hard for its independent existence. But the scandal of Watergate crippled first the Nixon and then the Ford administrations in Washington, which radically reduced aid to South Vietnam. The north, munificently backed by China and the Soviet Union, ultimately invaded in 1975.

The primary tragedy was endured by the South Vietnamese, hundreds of thousands of whom were enslaved in a vast gulag of re-education camps after the communists took power. Later in the '70s the Vietnamese communists enacted one of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century by persecuting their ethnic Chinese minority into flight. Thus we got the boat people.

The Americans, and by association the Australians, were humiliated by the defeat of their allies in Vietnam, their societies radicalised, and the use of American power became more problematic.

Yet over the past 10 years a significant revision of sentiment has occurred in the US, and to some extent in Australia. A whole slew of revisionist books such as A Necessary War by Michael Lind, A Better War by Lewis Sorley and Unheralded Victory by Mark Woodruff have re-examined the case for the Vietnam War and found it compelling.

Not that popular opinion, in either Australia or the US, had ever turned decisively against

the war. Elite opinion certainly had, but in the only true tests, national elections, the anti-war candidates always lost in the US and Australia.

Gough Whitlam's victory in 1972 had nothing to do with Vietnam because Australia had already withdrawn all but a handful of itstroops.

The revisionists attack what we might call the six myths of Vietnam.

Myth one is that **** was a nationalist rather than a communist. William Duiker has written the definitive biography on Ho and although it is a fawning and hagiographical work, Ho's life as recorded in it is one of abundant and lifelong devotion to communist ideology. Ho was a founding member of the French Communist Party. He worked full-time for the Comintern (the Soviet agency for promoting communism in other countries) for decades. He worked at the direction of the Soviets and always in their interests. When he ruled North Vietnam, he established a completely orthodox communist system. It is actually condescending to Ho not to take his own word about his beliefs, to think that somehow or other when he proclaimed his communism he really didn't know what he was talking about.

Myth two is that South Vietnam could never have won. The Americans under general William Westmoreland, appointed to Vietnam in 1964 and relieved in 1968, ran the war most incompetently. They overmechanised the South Vietnamese army and tried to make it a replica of the US Army, though never properly equipped. They thought they could do all the fighting themselves. Instead of running an intelligent counter-insurgency operation, they ran a mass war of attrition and manoeuvre, which was ineffective against a guerilla enemy.

Westmoreland was replaced by the much more effective Creighton Abrams. It is from the Westmoreland period that all the legendary tales of US incompetence and overkill have grown. Abrams, under Richard Nixon's instruction, implemented the policy of Vietnamisation. US troops withdrew rapidly and the South Vietnamese took their place. And they fought well and bravely. Neil Davis, the famed Australian cameraman, always preferred to go on patrol with South Vietnamese troops because he thought they were better soldiers.

In any event, when the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive in 1968, breaching the truce they had negotiated, they were wiped out as a military force and virtually all the serious fighting after that was carried out by members of the North Vietnamese army.

Under the terms of the Paris peace agreement of 1973, the South Vietnamese government was to continue in office and the US kept huge air power in Thailand and in the South China Sea. When the motorised divisions of the North Vietnamese army rolled southwards in 1975, they could have easily been destroyed by US air power, but by then Watergate had rendered Washington impotent.

It is true that it would have been difficult for South Vietnam to have defended indefinitely its long, narrow neck, which bordered Cambodia and the North Vietnamese supply trail. But it would not have been impossible.

Another option would have been for the South Vietnamese to withdraw into a more defensible area, abandoning some of the centre. Such garrison states in Asia have prospered, like South Korea and Taiwan. There can be little doubt that had South Vietnam survived as an independent state, it would today be rich and democratic, as are South Korea or Taiwan, instead of still being an impoverished and alienated redoubt of Stalinism, though certainly somewhat softened in the south compared with the north.

Myth three is that the communists enjoyed majority support in the south. The communists certainly never did anything foolish like subjecting themselves to elections after they took power. In contrast, millions of people in the south took part in elections under the nationalists. Millions later fled their homeland as refugees from the communists. If this is popularity, I'd hate to see what unpopularity looked like.

The general slanders to which the South Vietnamese are always subject in popular presentation of the Vietnam War are as cruel and unjust as they are untrue. In Hollywood films the South Vietnamese men are always presented as cowards, corrupt or pimps, and the women are almost always prostitutes. The truth is millions of South Vietnamese dreamed of and worked towards a normal society and a free life without communism. We are lucky to have these people in Australia and we should stop defaming them.

Myth four is that the Vietnamese communists were not Stalinists. As late as 1979, decades after Stalin's death and discrediting, official Vietnamese Radio was broadcasting paeans to Stalin's "defence of the purity of Marxism-Leninism". Ho was a lifelong Stalinist and imported his land collectivisation policies, in which tens of thousands of North Vietnamese designated as "landlords" were slaughtered, directly from Mao Zedong's China.

After conquering the south the communists established a huge gulag of re-education camps, in which hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese suffered, and suppressed any trace of political or religious pluralism. Even today the children of minor civil servants in the old South Vietnamese regime suffer systematic discrimination in Vietnam.

Myth five is that the Australian or US Left actually cared two hoots for the human rights of Vietnamese. As soon as the Americans were banished, the Left

lost all interest in Vietnam's human rights, which are appalling even today.

As the Australian scholar of Indochina Stephen Morris wrote last year: "As the evidence of Indochinese communist behaviour began to reach the West, there were three possible responses open to those who had supported the communist victories. The first was to admit the brutal and murderous nature of the new revolutionary regimes and the error of past political support for them ... The second possible response was to admit what was going on but try to justify it, usually with some bizarre form of moral relativism ... The third possible response was to deny the evidence of repression, either totally or in part, and thereby retain one's pride and prejudice."

Morris omits a final option, which was the option of the Australian Left: simply to ignore everything and never bother with Vietnam again.

Myth six is that an early communist victory would have had no adverse strategic consequences. The communists had won power in China in 1949. They controlled North Korea and had invaded South Korea. Indonesia had one of the largest communist parties in the world. Large communist insurgencies challenged Thailand and the Philippines. A swift consolidation of communist rule in Indochina in the '50s or '60s would have presented the region with a fatal momentum of communist success. The consequences for Australia would have been catastrophic. Even the tragedy of Vietnam bought Southeast Asia time to develop societies that were resilient and sturdy.

The greatest tragedy of Vietnam is that the US ran out on its South Vietnamese allies when they needed it most. As a small power, Australia could not possibly have changed that course of events. Later, when the time came, like the US, we took huge numbers of Vietnamese refugees.

They are the truest glory of the Vietnam War. But our soldiers who served in Vietnam also deserve nothing but thanks.