Droopy wrote: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.
If the Vietcong and NVA were basically defeated after Tet in the Spring of 68, how did we lose another 20,000+ soldiers? Syphilis?
Also was America was right to violate the sovereignty of Laos with their activities against the Ho Chi Minh trail? And America had been bombing North Vietnam since 1965 with Operation Rolling Thunder. You'd think they would have capitulated to our bombing by 1968. I guess Walt Rostow was wrong on that one.
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).
So you would have been for escalation then?
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.
If the war was militarily over why then bomb the north and shutdown the trail? Seems to me that if there were still serious objectives like that the NVA wasn't finished. How dedicated is dedicated when it comes to the American closure of the trail? Should we have completely occupied Laos with a soldier for every jungle path?
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.
So Operation Duck Hook wasn't in the planning stages then? Besides escalation takes many forms. You don't need soldiers to drop bombs, only ships off the coast. Besides if the NVA were "almost" completely finished off while not an immediate pullout and hand over of power to SVietnam?
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.
We saw ourselves as a friendly ally. How do you think the rank and file Vietnamese who supported the Vietcong saw us? As an occupying force.
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).
He was heavily reliant on American money to survive. I'd call that pretty good grounds to call him a "puppet". His independence was very frustrating because it became rather hard for America to support an authoritarian ruler who cracked down on his own people. His independence, coupled with his ineffective rule and inability to cleave together any type of support outside his base of Catholics and cronies led to the eventual coup that America tacitly supported.
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 two go hand in hand. The reason the Americans wanted to bring Diem under control was the bad press over Buddhist crackdowns and self-immolations. It's very inconvenient when Buddhists burn themselves in protest and the picture goes "viral". Makes people in the heartland ask questions. Why did that guy set himself on fire? What was he so upset about? Diem wanted American money no strings attached while continuing to suppress religions he didn't agree with. America eventually thought they needed a puppet with all strings attached, not just most strings.
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.
He was anti-Buddhist! He was a very pious Catholic. His cabinet was a joke lol. He and his brother Nhu ran everything with the aid of family and his military and political cronies. Some would say Nhu ran things [I would agree] more than Diem.
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).
Wow. Alright. Well South and North Vietnam were a united country until 1955. They had shared geographic history and were the same ethnically. They are a united country again. I wouldn't call it a "civil war" rather than a war of reunification.
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).
Congressional delegations to Vietnam were largely a joke. I wouldn't call the cabal that took over after Diem's assassination competent. Competency isn't required, only the ability to pull off the coup. After that all the military leaders of the coup had to do was what America told them. Besides my 70-30 number was not for a Diem rival in South Vietnam, it was for Ho Chi Minh...the guy who had defeated the French colonial power.
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."
John Paul Vann was a critic of Diem and the ARVN army!
Accompanying ARVN units to the field, Vann quickly realized to his dismay that the South Vietnamese army lacked the will to fight. In the face of enemy fire, far too many ARVN officers and soldiers opted not to engage the enemy and took flight. The disastrous battle at Ap Bac on January 2, 1963, was a turning point for Vann. Attempting to direct the battle from a light and unarmed observation aircraft, Vann was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Yet despite Vann's best efforts and a solid tactical plan that should have succeeded, the ARVN allowed the VC to escape.
The more Vann came to understand the political situation in Saigon, the more he became disenchanted with the way President Diem was running the country. It was an open secret in Saigon and Washington that the Diem government was rife with corruption. Vann witnessed firsthand how Diem refused to implement needed political and military reforms and how his corrupt brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, rewarded friends in the military. Seeing how badly the Diem regime was responding to the ever-growing Communist threat, and the lack of military progress against the VC, Vann decided he had to tell his superior officers, and anyone else who would listen, just how badly things were going in Vietnam.
It had become obvious to some of the Americans at MACV by late 1962 that the war on the ground was not going right. Instead of learning from mistakes or correcting the situation, many of the senior officers around MACV's General Harkins had begun to rein in any officers who were deviating from the playbook. Vann, however, publicly called the January 1963 battle of Ap Bac a defeat for American and ARVN forces and "a miserable damn performance." Harkins almost fired him, giving him a severe tongue-lashing. From that day forward, Vann was persona non grata at MACV headquarters in Saigon.
In his reports, Vann used statistical analysis methods to show that the South Vietnamese government was grossly inflating VC body counts, further infurating his superiors. Vann also incurred the wrath of his superiors by stating openly that the ARVN troops would not risk conducting search-and-destroy missions but instead assumed defensive positions whenever possible. He further angered senior military leaders by his association and friendship with two young American reporters in Saigon, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Vann shared his misgivings with them, and they in turn filed news reports of alleged ARVN ineptitude. Vann was also strident in his criticisms of the Strategic Hamlet Program, which he thought was a waste of time and energy, and he was critical of the way MACV ran counterintelligence operations.
Harkins had finally had enough. In April 1963 Vann returned to America. When he arrived in Washington, he carried with him his final report as a senior adviser — a scathing critique of the way the war was being handled by the South Vietnamese armed forces. Few of the Pentagon's senior officials wanted to read his report, however.
http://www.historynet.com/john-paul-van ... legend.htmhttp://www.amazon.com/Bright-Shining-Li ... 0679724141Contrary 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).
Most of the refugees from the north were Catholics. Of course they'd prefer to serve under Diem.
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.
If the insurgency was dead, why did fighting continue? Why did the South collapse like a house of cards without American troops to hold the line? Something doesn't make since here.
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.
So the hundreds of books written in the past forty years that have the same story were overturned by a revisionist book that was itself refuted by more than 15 Vietnam scholars?
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.
[/quote]Your well known desire to fit communist plans into everything blinds you to the fact that when a country is controlled by someone they don't want to control them, they revolt. Communism and nationalism can both influence motives.
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."
The American's wanted no part in elections since Ho was far more popular. You know...since he defeated the colonial overlords.
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?"
Soft power. Proxy states. Containment. Domino Theory. All of these things belong.
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.
If the Vietnamese were just an oppressed people why didn't they revolt against North Vietnam? Oh that's right. They loved Ho for his nationalist uprising against the French.
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.
Once again. Wrong. But what can I say. I've been working on this response for an hour and at this point I don't care about refuting every single point. If you can't read books besides the handful of [refuted] books that support your position then it's your problem.
The South was a conquering imperial power funded and backed by the world's leading totalitarian superpower.
Freudian slip?
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.
I'm sure American farm boys were fully educated about the American revolution and had a nuanced understanding of taxation and lack of representation. They probably carried pocket copies of
The Rights of Man and
The Declaration of Independence. Yes? It's really simple. These foreign guys are in our country. We don't like that. Let's fight'em. by the way those 14 year old boys outlasted the most seasoned American troops because they had greater will to outlast. Winning isn't required. To win you only have to not lose. But the beginning of the war, against the French, was a colonial uprising. If you can't see that the war against France naturally flowed into the struggle against Diem and then the US I can't help you.
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.
Reluctantly? They kinda considered using nuclear weapons during Dien Bien Phu. That's not what I'd call reluctant. Not to mention the billions of aid to France beginning in 1950. by the way nationalism and communism can both influence motives.
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.
1. It was Bao Die who had the whiff of French colonialism about him, not the nationalist Diem.
I'm sorry you're right. Bao Dai had the French taint. Diem had more than a wiff of American taint. Diem was even present in America during McCarthy's red hunts as an example of anti-communist Vietnamese. Either way Diem was appointed Prime Minister by the absentee Bao Dai and seized power not long after. After that he didn't sign the Geneva Accord which legitimized North Vietnam as a sovereign state for many countries.
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.
OMG! Diem = Catholic. Catholics make up major part of a nepotistic government and yet were a minority (as Morley would later point out). And the Catholics were a minority. In this case Buddhists might have also been a minority, but taken point should be that non-Catholics made up a majority of the population and were ruled by a very strict Catholic leader.
Pure nonsense, of course, but anything to keep the home fires of "the cause" burning.
There's a reason they called the war after 1964 "Americanization".
I just wasted nearly two hours on this post and I know it's not going to do any good. You're so blinded by your personal attachment to America's public image that you're going to repeat minority positions that give America a better image concerning Vietnam. But you're just wrong. I'm done after this. I probably didn't provide as total a post as I would have liked but it's 4:15 Am and at this point I just don't care. If you're right Droopy I recommend you go to college, get a Ph.D and take up a teaching post and teach 20th century American foreign policy with a focus on Vietnam and/or the Cold War. Prove us all wrong. Get through a Thesis and Dissertation committee writing the same minority ideas you've advocated on this board about American history. Wow us all by debunking the fifty years of scholarship from which I've been writing. Either way I just don't care. Nothing gets through your thick head so I'm done trying after five years.
Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded.-charity 3/7/07
MASH quotes
I peeked in the back [of the Bible] Frank, the Devil did it.
I avoid church religiously.
This isn't one of my sermons, I expect you to listen.