Liberals get violent when their claims are challenged

[_Droopy]

most people hold a hodge podge of positions from both the conservative and liberal spectrum.

This is almost never true, in real life, and I've never noticed it to be true throughout my life observing, talking to, and knowing other people.

Most people, whether or not they have a consciously worked out, coherent political and life philosophy, have an internally consistent set of core values and beliefs which are manifest in numerous ways, including their politics. In the vast majority of cases, one's political philosophy, whether an organized, coherent body of ideas, or a diffuse, impressionistic, unreflected set of assumptions, prejudices, and received nostrums, are of a piece with themselves, and form a general tendency or core perspective.

People who hold a 'hodge-podge" belief systems usually also have hodge-podge minds with little intellectual coherence and only surface level thinking about serious issues. They are also usually people who, politically speaking, are attempting to straddle the fence in their own self interest and/or to just follow the crowed and not rock any boats (economic conservatives but social liberals, for example).

Most people, however, if they are liberal in one area, will be liberal in most others, and the same is true of conservatives.

[_Buffalo]

I'm sure your "holler" is a microcosm of the diversity of thought in the United States, Droopy (thought perhaps not the diversity of the United States gene pool).

[Guest]

Where? East Timor. When? About 15 years ago.Who? American backed Indonesian troops who massacred people on the way to a funeral right in front of her after beating the hell out of her.

Suharto's troops were not "American backed" in the sense of their actual behavior or more detailed aims. That's a loaded phrase that implies American collusion with or approval of Suharto's near genocide in East Timor. U.S. policy there was clearly deeply flawed and poorly thought out, but we didn't "support" Suharto in his actions (and the American weapons he used were not, under the conditions in which they were purchased, to be used in an aggressive fashion in conquest, but for defensive purposes only. The fact that he used them the way he did and that America abetted his actions is tragic and shows terrible judgement, but was a foreign policy mistake, not evidence of an ideological leaning of any kind).

I don't know all the ins and outs and reasons for the U.S. siding with Suharto in this instance, (and I highly doubt you do either), nor am I at all sure that the East Timorese separatists were pure as the wind driven snow. But the policy appears, in retrospect, deeply misguided (and come now, even if the U.S. had sold Suharto no weapons at all and withdrew all support, he would have gotten the military equipment he needed from somewhere else. America was not the cause of the genocide in East Timor. Suharto and his government were, followed by Islamic savagery throughout the region. This was clearly not our design or intent).

Over all, however, we led the world in defending it from and ending the threat of National Socialism and Japanese militarism in WWII. We resisted and, in the end, defeated the most barbaric, repressive, and rapacious political ideology the world has ever known, Marxism-Leninist socialism centered in the Soviet Union. We successfully resisted the expansion of this totalitarian slave system in Korea, and militarily defeated (but ultimately, not politically) the NVA and Viet Cong (whom we obliterated) on the battlefield in our attempt to prevent them from expanding totalitarian leftism into South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other South East Asian nations. We prevented Castro, on two occasions, from expanding his own form of leftist totalitarianism into Latin America, once by supporting the Contras, and again in Grenada. We liberated Kuwait and prevented Saudi Arabian oil fields from falling into Saddam's hands. We protected countless Muslims from Serbian genocide in the 1990s, and attempted to bring both sides to the peace table, and later liberated Iraq from one of the most savage monsters and international criminals of the 20th century and a major developer of WMD and purveyor of terrorism.

Our nuclear umbrella guaranteed the security of Western Europe from Soviet invasion and conquest during the Cold War, and we funded the rebuilding and reconstruction of Western Europe after WWII, and took strong measures to help Germany and Japan transition from totalitarian collectivist states to democratic societies.

Some American policies have been poorly thought out and have backfired, true, but overall, America has been a liberator of the oppressed and defender of the weak throughout the world against its enemies, including Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and primarily, for the bulk of the 20th century, socialism (while the Western Left has supported steep restrictions upon or extinguishing of democracy, liberty, free markets, individual rights, and human freedom everywhere in determined opposition to America's goals and values at every opportunity).

We're now locked in a vast civilizational confrontation with Islamism, the outcome of which, due primarily to the presence of mindless, anti-American fellow traveling "useful idiots" (of anyone who is against America and seeks its destruction generally, as with your communist forebears several generations ago, many of whom are still around and who have now transferred their support from socialist revolution to support of Jihad) and intellectual Quislings within the institutions of society key to winning that conflict, is not at all certain.

No mystery that people like you would also find a home in the Trailerpark.

[_Bond James Bond]

most people hold a hodge podge of positions from both the conservative and liberal spectrum.

This is almost never true, in real life, and I've never noticed it to be true throughout my life observing, talking to, and knowing other people.

Most people, whether or not they have a consciously worked out, coherent political and life philosophy, have an internally consistent set of core values and beliefs which are manifest in numerous ways, including their politics. In the vast majority of cases, one's political philosophy, whether an organized, coherent body of ideas, or a diffuse, impressionistic, unreflected set of assumptions, prejudices, and received nostrums, are of a piece with themselves, and form a general tendency or core perspective.

People who hold a 'hodge-podge" belief systems usually also have hodge-podge minds with little intellectual coherence and only surface level thinking about serious issues. They are also usually people who, politically speaking, are attempting to straddle the fence in their own self interest and/or to just follow the crowed and not rock any boats (economic conservatives but social liberals, for example).

Most people, however, if they are liberal in one area, will be liberal in most others, and the same is true of conservatives.

You win lol. Good luck getting that Associates certificate.

[_Bond James Bond]

...militarily defeated (but ultimately, not politically) the NVA and Viet Cong (whom we obliterated) on the battlefield in our attempt to prevent them from expanding totalitarian leftism

This is untrue. As is the idea that the Vietnamese War was about Communism for NVA and Vietcong and not the reunification of Vietnam driven primarily by nationalism.

[_Droopy]

...militarily defeated (but ultimately, not politically) the NVA and Viet Cong (whom we obliterated) on the battlefield in our attempt to prevent them from expanding totalitarian leftism

This is untrue. As is the idea that the Vietnamese War was about Communism for NVA and Vietcong and not the reunification of Vietnam driven primarily by nationalism.

What's untrue? At Tet (the major communist offensive in the spring of 1968), the NVA, which was the major ground force of the North Vietnamese military, was destroyed as a fighting force, which means that although it still existed, it was degraded to the point of having lost any meaningful effectiveness as a functioning military. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, were utterly obliterated throughout Viet Nam, and never recovered.
Average causality rations between the communist forces and U.S. forces was in the range of 30 to 1.

The idea that the communists were trying to "reunify" Viet Nam is leftist mythology. What the communists were trying to do was conquer South Viet Nam, period. The only reason Viet Nam was split into northern and southern sections at all was because after the Soviet Red Army defeated the occupying Japanese forces, they remained as an occupying force themselves and installed a communist regime allied with the Soviet Union and thereby created a Soviet client state in North Vietnam, just as they did in North Korea and the eastern portion of Germany and eastern Berlin. While Vietnamese nationalism was most certainly the propaganda tool utilized by the communist regime in Hanoi as a mask for their real intentions and motives, this claim collapses when one realizes that it was the communists, in the form of the Soviets and then Ho Chi Minh as leader and executor of Stalin's ambitions in South East Asia who split the country into two independent, sovereign states in the first place.

"National reunification" then makes no sense, as all Stalin and Ho Chi Minh wanted to do was extend communism and their own power into a sovereign nation that they themselves had divided in the first place. The only reunification sought was political.

The real irony of all of this is that the Tet Offensive was a catastrophic defeat for the North, and should have been, militarily, the end of the Viet Nam war for them, a war they had begun at the end of the Japanese occupation of Viet Nam during WWII, and followed for nearly thirty years. Political events in America, however, ensured that defeat would be snatched from the jaws of unambiguous victory in a particularly perverse (and disastrous, for the people of South Vietnam) way.

[_Bond James Bond]

What's untrue? At Tet (the major communist offensive in the spring of 1968), the NVA, which was the major ground force of the North Vietnamese military, was destroyed as a fighting force, which means that although it still existed, it was degraded to the point of having lost any meaningful effectiveness as a functioning military. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, were utterly obliterated throughout Viet Nam, and never recovered.

If the NVA and Vietcong were defeated why didn't they capitulate? It's not like the war didn't go on. Sure America killed a ton of Vietnamese, but to what end? The plan under Kennedy was Strategic Hamlets, then it was Search and Destroy under Johnson. The American military racked up huge body counts but without a goal it was just putting American troops in danger. We would have had further escalation under Nixon (look up Operation Duck Hook) if there had been no resistance to the war. People were sick of war for no purpose.

The North Vietnamese were backed by China and Russia so we weren't going to invade. If we had invaded and captured NVietnam (ignoring what Russia and China would have done) so what? The resistance would have melted into the jungles and mountains for another decade of guerrilla resistance. For the Vietnamese it was the same as in the American Revolution for the Continental Army: all you have to do is wait out the occupiers. No one has the will of a force defending its homeland.

Average causality rations between the communist forces and U.S. forces was in the range of 30 to 1.

It could have been 1000-1. When 70-80% of the population hates an occupying force all the resistance has to do is wait out the occupying force.

The idea that the communists were trying to "reunify" Viet Nam is leftist mythology. What the communists were trying to do was conquer South Viet Nam, period.

Yes because the US backed Diem regime wouldn't listen to his own people. Conservatively speaking 70% didn't want Diem. The vast majority of people hated Diem, with good reason. He was a pious Catholic, the population of South and North Vietnam was predominantly Buddhist. He was corrupt, nepotistic, and a puppet to the Americans. Why would the vast majority of Vietnamese like him? Not only was he of a different religion but he forcefully imposed that religious dogma. Lets not forget that the downfall of Diem was a religious rebellion by Buddhist priests over abuse by the forces of Nhu, Diem's brother in 1963.

There's a reason no political solution was attempted via ballot...Ho would have won! Ho would have embarrassed Diem in a straight election of the Vietnamese people. It wouldn't have been close. 70-30 would have been optimistic for Diem. Since Diem kept putting off any sort of political solution for the reunification of Vietnam, military force was used. Especially when the Vietcong were South Vietnamese rebels against their own puppet ruler.

The only reason Viet Nam was split into northern and southern sections at all was because after the Soviet Red Army defeated the occupying Japanese forces, they remained as an occupying force themselves and installed a communist regime allied with the Soviet Union and thereby created a Soviet client state in North Vietnam, just as they did in North Korea and the eastern portion of Germany and eastern Berlin.

Vietnam split into two parts in 1954 when the Vietminh whipped the French at Dien Bien Phu. A negotiated surrender allowed the French to withdraw to the south while the Vietminh stayed in the North. In 1955 Diem basically usurped power from the absentee Bao Dai and declared himself President of South Vietnam. The US backed him strategically as part of the containment policy and the rest is history.

While Vietnamese nationalism was most certainly the propaganda tool utilized by the communist regime in Hanoi as a mask for their real intentions and motives, this claim collapses when one realizes that it was the communists, in the form of the Soviets and then Ho Chi Minh as leader and executor of Stalin's ambitions in South East Asia who split the country into two independent, sovereign states in the first place.

Of course Ho would use the Soviets as allies. Diem had the USA. It's common sense. If it came down to a US imperial backed puppet winning or being a puppet to the Soviets of course they would take on the Soviets as senior partners. Look at it from their point of view.

"National reunification" then makes no sense, as all Stalin and Ho Chi Minh wanted to do was extend communism and their own power into a sovereign nation that they themselves had divided in the first place. The only reunification sought was political.

Wrong as I showed above concerning Diem and Bao Dai. If the US had not intervened to force the Geneva Accord meetings in 1954 to allow time for power in the South to be consolidated the NVA would have simply marched south and finished off their colonial oppressors, the French.

The real irony of all of this is that the Tet Offensive was a catastrophic defeat for the North, and should have been, militarily, the end of the Viet Nam war for them, a war they had begun at the end of the Japanese occupation of Viet Nam during WWII, and followed for nearly thirty years. Political events in America, however, ensured that defeat would be snatched from the jaws of unambiguous victory in a particularly perverse (and disastrous, for the people of South Vietnam) way.

Yes Tet was a major American victory, but the psychological effect was to show America that the Vietnamese would never give up even if we killed 100 for every American. You can't defeat a native population's birth rate unless you resort to genocide. If Some overwhelming military force invaded America would you give up to their will? I wouldn't. "“F” em" I'd say. Most Americans would be the same. That's how the Vietnamese were. That's how just about every native population would behave. After a while, even if an occupying force claims to be friendly, the native population grows to resent it.

We thought we were fighting a war against Communism, they thought they were fighting a war of nationalism against a colonial power. Why would they think otherwise? We bankrolled France in their bid to control Indochina starting in 1950 until the French were defeated after Dienbienphu. After that we backed the unpopular foreigner Diem beginning with his coup against Bao Dai in 1955. Diem was basically a damn Catholic Frenchman! He'd grown up and been educated in France for much of his life. He was of another religion and he allowed America to drive his policy. It would be painfully obvious that a foreign power, America, was in charge in SVietnam. It was just overt American authority after Diem was assassinated.

[_Droopy]

I should clarify one aspect of my analysis above which was incorrect. The Soviet Red Army didn't physically occupy and liberate North Vietnam from the Japanese. That's what occurred North Korea under Stalin's tutelage (as well as in East Germany) but not North Vietnam, so sorry for conflating the two countries. In point of fact, American soldiers originally assisted the Viet Minh in resisting the Japanese and liberating the country from their influence as WWII wound down (as we were, at the time, actually allies of convenience with Stalin).

If the NVA and Vietcong were defeated why didn't they capitulate?

The Viet Cong had essentially ceased to exist throughout Viet Nam, so they were really no longer in the mix. The NVA didn't capitulate because of the severe restrictions in strategy and tactics America had imposed upon itself during the war (such as failure to strategically bomb North Vietnam's war making infrastructure and close the Ho Chi Minh trail by taking and holding territory and denying the communists its usage) and hence, after Tet, the NVA went home to lick its wounds, but the United States did not press its advantage. The Ho Chi Minh trail remained open, and massive military and advisory support from the Soviets continued. They entered a stage of rebuilding and regrouping while the U.S. military did not pursue a thorough victory through continued pressure and destruction of their ability to funnel new arms and supplies into the South and rebuild them at home (the mining of Haiphong harbor was an example of what should have occurred with tenacious consistency, but was done in a half-hearted way and belated manner).

Sure America killed a ton of Vietnamese, but to what end? The plan under Kennedy was Strategic Hamlets, then it was Search and Destroy under Johnson. The American military racked up huge body counts but without a goal it was just putting American troops in danger.

This papers over the fact that the war was militarily over for the communists at Tet, and the Viet Cong had ceased to exist as a guerrilla movement. All that was required was the dedicated closing of the Ho Chi Minh trail (ground troops in force, not carpet bombing the jungle) and tactical bombing of the North's infrastructure (which Nixon later used successfully to bring the communists to the negotiating table) and the horrors that befell the South (and Cambodia) could have been avoided.

We would have had further escalation under Nixon (look up Operation Duck Hook) if there had been no resistance to the war. People were sick of war for no purpose.

Anti-war movement mythology. Troops began coming home in the late sixties after Tet, and we continued drawing down under Nixon until the very end. Nixon's entire strategy of "peace with honor" was a drawdown strategy, designed to replace American troops with South Vietnamese troops (Vientnamization) that were capable of independently defending their own country without direct American military presence. Nixon never escalated anything. American troops were coming home for the vast majority of both his terms.

The North Vietnamese were backed by China and Russia so we weren't going to invade.

There was never any need or desire to invade North Vietnam.

It could have been 1000-1. When 70-80% of the population hates an occupying force all the resistance has to do is wait out the occupying force.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. Tet occurred in the South, not in the North, and we were not an "occupying force" there, but an ally who had been asked, and as a matter of previous commitments regarding Viet Nam's security, to prevent the Imperial conquest and subjugation of Viet Nam by the North as a proxy for Soviet expansionism.

Yes because the US backed Diem regime wouldn't listen to his own people. Conservatively speaking 70% didn't want Diem. The vast majority of people hated Diem, with good reason. He was a pious Catholic, the population of South and North Vietnam was predominantly Buddhist. He was corrupt, nepotistic, and a puppet to the Americans.

The anti-war movement mythology regarding Diem is as ahistorical and tendentious as the rest of the refracted Soviet/Hanoi propaganda that formed the nucleus of its core claims. Diem was authoritarian, moderately autocratic, and corrupt, yes, but hardly much different that most previous rulers that had controlled the country prior to his time in office. The idea that he was a "puppet" of the U.S. is odd, given the substantial hostility to him within the United States government. Diem was a nationalist, strongly anti-communist but who wanted to remain independent of Untied States influence as much as possible as well, which earned him numerous enemies among U.S, Senators and Congressmen in the U.S. (as well as within the state department, who viewed him as a renegade who wouldn't follow their recommendations and directions).

Why would the vast majority of Vietnamese like him? Not only was he of a different religion but he forcefully imposed that religious dogma. Lets not forget that the downfall of Diem was a religious rebellion by Buddhist priests over abuse by the forces of Nhu, Diem's brother in 1963.

That was not Diem's downfall. Diem's worst enemy in Viet Nam was not the radicalized Buddhist priests, but the American Embassy and Henry Cabot Lodge (with the help of two now infamous left-wing journalists, Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam) and, in the end, the Kennedy administration, who orchestrated his removal. The American government took the attitude that he should start behaving as they wanted him to and take much more of their advice as to how he should be handling his internal and external problems, or step down. Diem wanted American help, but also to keep them at arm's length, while at the same time making sure his country (which was basically a peaceful, emerging nation at the time) didn't share the North's fate.

The idea he was anti-Buddhist should probably also be put to rest here (more "peace" movement propaganda culled from who-knows-where). Diem had an 18 member cabinet at that time, comprised of five Catholics, five Confucians, and eight Buddhists. Of his thirty-eight province chiefs, twenty-six were either Buddhists or Confucians. Some of the generals in his army were Buddhists as well.

Diem's primary Buddhist problem was with the radicalized Buddhists in Saigon and Hue who had been penetrated deeply by communist subversives and substantially politicized. These Buddhists were anti-American, pro-communist, and anti-Diem. Were their abuses? Sure, but this has nothing to do with the Viet Nam war per se, which was a project of the Soviet Union and Ho Chi Minh, not the people of South Vietnam, who overwhelmingly wanted nothing to do with communism. No more than a small handful of Buddhist temples in the South were actually engaged in protest and open hostility to its own government, at this time (note on another of the more egregious leftist myths of the Vietnam war: the Vietnam war was not a "civil war" within the nation of Vietnam. North and South Vietnam were separate, sovereign nations with completely different political systems. The North first instigated a long term project of subversion, propaganda, and terror throughout the country, and then launched an unprovoked, full scale invasion. Secondly, we knew then, and now know without doubt, due to much more recent scholarship and documentation, that the Viet Cong were fully creatures of the Hanoi regime, not indigenous dissenters (even though some of them were, indeed, recruited from the South).

There's a reason no political solution was attempted via ballot...Ho would have won! Ho would have embarrassed Diem in a straight election of the Vietnamese people. It wouldn't have been close. 70-30 would have been optimistic for Diem.

Not likely. In 1963 Marine General Victor Krulak distributed a report by an eight member Congressional delegation which found that their were no competent rivals to Diem as to leadership ability given the present crises he faced (and which also, prophetically, castigated what they described, even at this early date, as "arrogant, emotional,unobjecive, and ill-informed" reporting of the situation in Viet Nam by the American press, generally speaking).

The removal (and tragic assassination) of Diem was probably one of the greatest American policy blunders of the post-WWII ear, and perhaps of the 20th century. John Paul Vann, a highly decorated officer and major (and flamboyant) figure in the Viet Nam conflict, and who had as thorough an understanding of the political and military situation in Viet Nam as anyone at the time (and critic of both Diem and the South's military) said that "The basic fact of life is that the overwhelming majority of the population - somewhere around 95 percent - prefer the government of Vietnam to a Communist government or the government that's being offered by the other side."

Contrary to later leftist mythology, it was the North, not the South, that was inveterately opposed to holding free elections (and come on, the entire idea of people in the North of Vietnam voting in free elections is ludicrous. Ho would have won hands down in the North, and lost precipitously in the South, which is why he was dedicated to military conquest and Viet Cong terror from the very outset. Equally inane in believing that the South Vietnamese, many of which were refugees from Ho's police state and had a very good idea of what socialism was like, would have wanted anything to do with it at all).

As decorated Vietnam veteran and Harvard trained Vietnam historian Mark Moyar has said:

The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to South Vietnam's armed forces, America's forces, and a South Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South Vietnamese government as legitimate.

The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to South Vietnam's armed forces, America's forces, and a South Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South Vietnamese government as legitimate.

You have no excuse, Bond, at this late date, of relying on decades old Leftist media/anti-war movement mythology and useful idiocy, as reams of new scholarship have now put the old Cronkite/Karnow/Halberstam narrative to rest.

Vietnam split into two parts in 1954 when the Vietminh whipped the French at Dien Bien Phu. A negotiated surrender allowed the French to withdraw to the south while the Vietminh stayed in the North. In 1955 Diem basically usurped power from the absentee Bao Dai and declared himself President of South Vietnam. The US backed him strategically as part of the containment policy and the rest is history.

While Vietnamese nationalism was most certainly the propaganda tool utilized by the communist regime in Hanoi as a mask for their real intentions and motives, this claim collapses when one realizes that it was the communists, in the form of the Soviets and then Ho Chi Minh as leader and executor of Stalin's ambitions in South East Asia who split the country into two independent, sovereign states in the first place.

Its a bit more complicated than that, Bond. When Vietnam was split by the Geneva accords, the Viet Minh went back to the already communist dominated North while somewhere between 800,000 to a million Vietnamese went South. The accords also required free elections to be held with two years to determine who would rule a unified Vietnam. Mark Moyar points out in Triumph Forsaken that, in point of fact, the communists wanted no part of free elections, and, contrary to having "whipped" the French at Dien Bien Phu, the French were simply weary of their colonial holding there and had little will to save it. Poor tactics, insufficient manpower and equipment, and a strategy of fighting to stalemate (instead of victory, as the communists were wont to do) ensured a final defeat. As with America's later participation, the communists didn't win so much as capitalize on French fecklessness. Communist losses were so severe that the Viet Minh were more than happy to settle for a temporary partition to allow them time for "rebuilding the army before pursuing other gains."

Bao Dai and certainly most other Vietnamese (including Diem) well understood that, North Vietnam being the more populace part of the country, and being a totalitarian, one party police state, would easily win any "free" election on a nationwide basis. The U.S. understood this to be pure fantasy as well (just as the Soviet constitution is pure fantasy, in any substantive sense). The U.S. wanted a strong ruler without the taint of French colonialism, and saw in Diem the right man. Keep in mind that the accords were between the Viet Minh, which was at that time a revolutionary subversive guerrilla movement under communist control from the North, and France, which was in the process of leaving Viet Nam for good. Neither had any legitimacy as deciders of Viet Nam's future. Diem knew that free elections across the entire country would consign the nation to totalitarian oppression (as well as relentless religious persecution, not only of Catholics but of Buddhists and all traditional regions as well).

Nothing mysterious in any of this, including that Diem was not a perfect person or politician.

Of course Ho would use the Soviets as allies. Diem had the USA. It's common sense.

No, Bond. Ho was a dedicated communist revolutionary, trained in France, and focused on expanding socialist revolution to all of Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia from the very outset. He as an ally of China and the Soviets from the very beginning. "Puppet" would not be too strong a term, although Ho was certainly his own man in other ways.

If it came down to a US imperial backed puppet

There is no historically viable argument that Diem was in any way a U.S "puppet." Just more warmed over Comintern and Hanoi propaganda from another era as filtered through the useful idiots and fellow travelors in the American "peace" movement.

Secondly, in what way was U.S. involvement "imperial?"

"National reunification" then makes no sense, as all Stalin and Ho Chi Minh wanted to do was extend communism and their own power into a sovereign nation that they themselves had divided in the first place. The only reunification sought was political.

Wrong as I showed above concerning Diem and Bao Dai. If the US had not intervened to force the Geneva Accord meetings in 1954 to allow time for power in the South to be consolidated the NVA would have simply marched south and finished off their colonial oppressors, the French.

You have no idea what you're talking about (and this claim is inconstant with your arguments above that Ho wanted free election because he know he would win them. As you point out here, all he was interested in was the conquest and domination of the South in the name of Marxist revolution). The North was already under communist domination at that time, and the only question that remained for Ho was subversion, destabilization (through Viet Cong terror and propaganda operations) and finally, outright invasion).

Yes Tet was a major American victory, but the psychological effect was to show America that the Vietnamese would never give up even if we killed 100 for every American.

"The Vietnamese?" Who are you talking about here? The "Vietnamese" were never at war with America. The North Vietnamese communist state, backed by the PRC and then the Sovet Union, was:

1. At war with its own people (through its gulag system, state sponsored mass murder, engineered starvation, and general totalitarian repression)
2. At war with the state and people of South Vietnam
3. At war with the United States as a consequence of this and as a Sovet Proxy.

You can't defeat a native population's birth rate unless you resort to genocide. If Some overwhelming military force invaded America would you give up to their will? I wouldn't. "f*** em" I'd say. Most Americans would be the same. That's how the Vietnamese were. That's how just about every native population would behave. After a while, even if an occupying force claims to be friendly, the native population grows to resent it.

Regurgitate each and every late sixties-early seventies anti-war movement fairy story you wish, Bond, because nothing you say can save you from the fact that all of this was purely manufactured, tendentious propaganda that served an ideological purpose. It was never representational of reality and never anything approaching history.

We weren't fighting the "Vietnamese people." We were fighting the communist police state of North Vietnam, who itself was locked in a war of abject oppression of its own population and the people and government of South Vietnam. Let's repeat: the vast majority of South Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with communism. (and the vast majority of North Vietnamese, if the huge exodus from that country by refugees when Ho took power is any indication). The South was a conquering imperial power funded and backed by the world's leading totalitarian superpower.

We thought we were fighting a war against Communism, they thought they were fighting a war of nationalism against a colonial power.

Who? The average semi-literate North Vietnamese conscript? The 14 and 15 year old kids yanked out of school and given a gun and told to fight the Yankee imperialists? The politicians, intellectuals, and strategists within the North Vietnamese politburo knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew very well it had nothing to do with nationalism and everything to do with total power and control over the lives of all Vietnamese people in the name of a messianic ideology.

Why would they think otherwise? We bankrolled France in their bid to control Indochina starting in 1950 until the French were defeated after Dienbienphu.

The United States did reluctantly help the French in their attempt to hold on to Viet Nam, but only because of the threat of communist expansion should the French be forced out. But again, The communist's motives only commandeered nationalism as a popular vehicle for public consumption and foreign PR. The real motives were conquest and subjugation - the standard socialist motives since the October Revolution.

After that we backed the unpopular foreigner Diem beginning with his coup against Bao Dai in 1955. Diem was basically a damn Catholic Frenchman! He'd grown up and been educated in France for much of his life. He was of another religion and he allowed America to drive his policy.

One fatuous left-wing Grimm's fairy tale after another, all piled one on top of anther. Quite fascinating.

1. It was Bao Die who had the whiff of French colonialism about him, not the nationalist Diem.

2. Buddhism was a minority religion in Viet Nam. Viet Nam had a population of around 16 million at the time, composed of a number of religions, including about 1.5 million Catholics and 3 or 4 million Buddhists. The rest, including Confucians, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, animists and Taoists, outnumbered both.
Catholics were the most educated sub-group in the population, and were overrepresented in government, not because of any bias on the part of Diem, but because the French had historically favored the Catholic segment of society.

3. Diem didn't allow the U.S. to drive his policy. He wanted U.S. help but wanted to keep them at arm's length at the same time, which is why he became known and disliked at the State Department and by a number of American politicians as unruly, uncooperative, and much too independent, all of which eventually led to Kennedy helping to orchestrate his downfall.

It would be painfully obvious that a foreign power, America, was in charge in SVietnam. It was just overt American authority after Diem was assassinated.

Pure nonsense, of course, but anything to keep the home fires of "the cause" burning.

[_Morley]

If the NVA and Vietcong were defeated why didn't they capitulate?

The Viet Cong had essentially ceased to exist throughout Viet Nam, so they were really no longer in the mix. The NVA didn't capitulate because of the severe restrictions in strategy and tactics America had imposed upon itself during the war (such as failure to strategically bomb North Vietnam's war making infrastructure and close the Ho Chi Minh trail by taking and holding territory and denying the communists its usage) and hence, after Tet, the NVA went home to lick its wounds, but the United States did not press its advantage. The Ho Chi Minh trail remained open, and massive military and advisory support from the Soviets continued. They entered a stage of rebuilding and regrouping while the U.S. military did not pursue a thorough victory through continued pressure and destruction of their ability to funnel new arms and supplies into the South and rebuild them at home (the mining of Haiphong harbor was an example of what should have occurred with tenacious consistency, but was done in a half-hearted way and belated manner).

....

I stopped reading after this. Why? Because you couldn't be more wrong.

I was a Ranger-qualified staff sergeant who led a four-man LRRP team in the II Corp area in Vietnam in 1969-70.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail remained open because portions of it were in Laos. In the triple canopy jungle of the Central Highlands, changing the route of the trail was easy and happened often. Most of our missions were along the trail, both in-country and (although illegal) in Laos. Taking out the trail was impossible. (The whole agent orange fiasco was an attempt to neutralize the effects of trail.)

Both the NVA and the Viet Cong were viable and active long after the first Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong, though not as well-equipped as the NVA, were much more of a threat to us. I speak from personal experience.

[Guest]

Both the NVA and the Viet Cong were viable and active long after the first Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong, though not as well-equipped as the NVA, were much more of a threat to us. I speak from personal experience.

This can only be indicative of either deep, deep mendacity, or unbridled psychological denial ( or intellectual knavery) in the face the loss of an entire worldview. I don't know which and I don't care. That's simply not the history as its is now well understood. Unless your "personal experience" (such as it may or may not have been) is backed up by facts, historical documentation, and serious scholarship, you have nothing to bring to the table.

The historical facts are that the NVA was destroyed as an effective fighting force at Tet, and the Viet Cong were annihilated (I know of no serious scholarly historical source that denies this). Yes, they still existed, but they never recovered from Tet. The NVA took on most of the fighting from 1968 onwards. Your anecdotes (man, would I like to do the B.G.Burkett thing now and do a FOIA request on your military records), assuming they are even legitimate anecdotes, notwithstanding. We know this to be the case because of substantial historical documentation and post-Viet Nam war scholarship.

Anyway, here's what General Bui Tin, a former high level officer (Colonel) in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had to say about it, when asked by journalist Stephan Young how American could have won the war:

Q: How could the Americans have won the war?
A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.

Other choice revelations from Mr. Tin:

Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?
A: No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party, only one army in the war to liberate the South and unify the nation. At all times there was only one party commissar in command of the South.

And Tet?

Q: What about the results?
A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was.

And the 8,000lb Gorilla:

Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.

Give this up, your only making a fool of yourself in public for a long lost cause.

http://www.viet-myths.net/BuiTin.htm