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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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 Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Whatever spin the apologists try and put on it, the United States lost the Vietnam war. |
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ReeseDog
Joined: 05 Apr 2008
Location: Classified
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 3:42 pm Post subject: |
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| catman wrote: |
| Whatever spin the apologists try and put on it, the United States lost the Vietnam war. |
Quit, not lost, and it had nothing to do with lack of military might. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 4:18 pm Post subject: |
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Not so black-and-white as you so desperately want to believe, Catman. Hanoi has sought aid from us from the beginning, under our terms, and has also sought acceptance in the world system we created and continue to direct, again under our terms. Interesting behavior for a victor.
Long live the revolution... |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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Of course the US could have nuked them and forced an end to the war. There were too many oustanding circumstances that prevented that from happening.
So instead of lost do we prefer the term "strategic withdrawl"? |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 8:13 pm Post subject: |
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| catman wrote: |
| There were too many oustanding circumstances that prevented that from happening. |
Only a few; and it remains very simple to understand: most importantly, LBJ, R. McNamara and others in the American govt, including R. Nixon and H. Kissinger, were never the utter monsters your side made them out to be. They would never have nuked Hanoi, nor even bombed its agricultural and waterway infrastructure. They rejected that kind of warfare from start to finish.
Further, they never aimed to destroy North Vietnam. They aimed to contain Communism in Southeast Asia following the Chinese Revolution. One point of this overall campaign involved drawing a line in South Vietnam. They drew and held that line for twenty-five years. After normalizing relations with Beijing, which included an anti-Soviet alliance, they withdrew; the war, increasingly problematic at home, had become untenable and now irrelevant. North Vietnam subsequently took South Vietnam by conventional military action. In the meantime, as I outline, above, American forces and American allies stabilized their positions from South Korea to Japan to Taiwan to the Phillipines to Indonesia to Thailand. Call it what you want. But your taking it out of this larger context and calling it a straightforward "loss" remains just as wrong and simplistic as my calling it "a victory" -- which I do not do, incidentally. |
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T-J
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
Location: Seoul EunpyungGu Yeonsinnae
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 8:51 pm Post subject: |
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I'm sorry I'm having trouble following some of the "logic" with this thread.
As I see it the U.S. enters the conflict in '65 (deployment of combat troops) let's not get into when U.S. involvement did or didn't start. A peace treaty was signed in '73. Some argue this is a win.
Military support for the south continues for a few months as the north continues hostilities despite the treaty. The U.S. congress cuts off funding for continued support of the south. Some argue this is a loss.
The south manages to hold on without U.S. air support for nearly two year until the fall of Saigon in June of '75. Again seen as a loss, despite the presence of a treaty ending the conflict and U.S. combat involvement ceasing two years prior.
The bigger picture in the 1950's was to prevent the spread of communism. Skip ahead 50 years to 2009, the spread of communism was in fact halted and today Vietnam and the U.S. enjoy a warming relationship. Vietnam continues to embrace capitalism as it opens to the West.
Our military never failed to reach its objectives throughout the conflict. Politically we ceased to support our allies. In the end even our political objectives have for the most part been met or or being met. I fail to see how this is a loss. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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| T-J wrote: |
| ...let's not get into when U.S. involvement did or didn't start. |
This is not disputed in the least. American involvement in the Vietnam War began under the Truman. admin., just following the Chinese Revolution and the outbreak of the Korean War. Truman and D. Acheson drew a containment line in East Asia: ground forces in South Korea; naval forces in Taiwan; and financial and military aid to the French in Indochina.
This line held for the Cold War's duration. |
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sharkey
Joined: 12 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 11:48 pm Post subject: |
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| vietnam is a communist country today. Americas main policy was to stop the spread of communism in Asia by all means necessary. Therefore, America lost a war that it only took because the Euros were starting to have confidence issues about American military capabilities in Europe. I guess the US showed their abilities quite nicely against a third world ragtag army. |
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T-J
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
Location: Seoul EunpyungGu Yeonsinnae
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 12:17 am Post subject: |
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| sharkey wrote: |
| vietnam is a communist country today. Americas main policy was to stop the spread of communism in Asia by all means necessary. Therefore, America lost a war that it only took because the Euros were starting to have confidence issues about American military capabilities in Europe. I guess the US showed their abilities quite nicely against a third world ragtag army. |
This European smugness is amusing considering the root of a lot of the worlds problems that the U.S. was left with still trying to clean up are the result of centuries of European colonialism worldwide and the rapid indiscriminate decolonization post WWII.
This applies to French Indo China, as well as the former British colony now known as Iraq. |
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catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 12:43 am Post subject: |
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| T-J wrote: |
I'm sorry I'm having trouble following some of the "logic" with this thread.
As I see it the U.S. enters the conflict in '65 (deployment of combat troops) let's not get into when U.S. involvement did or didn't start. A peace treaty was signed in '73. Some argue this is a win.
Military support for the south continues for a few months as the north continues hostilities despite the treaty. The U.S. congress cuts off funding for continued support of the south. Some argue this is a loss.
The south manages to hold on without U.S. air support for nearly two year until the fall of Saigon in June of '75. Again seen as a loss, despite the presence of a treaty ending the conflict and U.S. combat involvement ceasing two years prior.
The bigger picture in the 1950's was to prevent the spread of communism. Skip ahead 50 years to 2009, the spread of communism was in fact halted and today Vietnam and the U.S. enjoy a warming relationship. Vietnam continues to embrace capitalism as it opens to the West.
Our military never failed to reach its objectives throughout the conflict. Politically we ceased to support our allies. In the end even our political objectives have for the most part been met or or being met. I fail to see how this is a loss. |
The lives lost were truly in vain. |
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T-J
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
Location: Seoul EunpyungGu Yeonsinnae
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 1:46 am Post subject: |
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| catman wrote: |
The lives lost were truly in vain.
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Your opinion.
Not mine, nor that of any of the vets I know.
Doesn't make your opinion any more valid, nor mine any less.
All lives lost are tragic. The fact that we debate in their memory and perhaps save future lives gives some meaning to the sacrifice they made, no? |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 1:55 am Post subject: |
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| catman wrote: |
Of course the US could have nuked them and forced an end to the war. There were too many oustanding circumstances that prevented that from happening.
So instead of lost do we prefer the term "strategic withdrawl"? |
Well, considering that the US was trying to avoid a nuclear exchange with China, and successfully avoided such an exchange, I'd say loss loses a bit of context.
Vietnam certainly was not a victory by any standard.
But Vietnam could have easily been a repeat of the Phillipines, if not for the Cold War dynamic. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the US simply decided to take over the Phillipines. The US 'won.' It defeated the insurgency, largely b/c the insurgency was unwilling to sacrifice more lives to fight the US. I guess you could call that a victory for the US. I don't know, it just seems like kind of a waste as well.
I guess what I'm saying is there's a very narrow range of outcomes that could have justified the deployment of US troops in Vietnam. Its not like the Vietnamese gov't or people had harboured people who bombed Pearl Harbor or flew planes into the WTC. |
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Leslie Cheswyck
Joined: 31 May 2003
Location: University of Western Chile
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 2:56 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
But Vietnam could have easily been a repeat of the Phillipines, if not for the Cold War dynamic. |
True, that.
| Quote: |
| Many American commanders in the Philippines never lost sight of two things. First, their goal was to obtain Filipino acceptance of American rule in a way that would gain the cooperation of the Filipino people and prevent the need to hold the Philippines through the continued use of military force. Second, to accomplish that goal the army and the colonial government had to provide acceptable political, economic, and social alternatives to those put forth by the revolutionaries. Both the compatibility of American and Filipino liberalism and the progressive orientation of the army's officers helped the Americans accomplish their goal of gaining Filipino acceptance of American sovereignty. |
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American goals for the world in 1900 were not totally incompatible with many of the desires of the liberal revolutionaries in the Philippines, although the United States was clearly a threat to their nationalist aspirations. The intellectual roots of the Philippine revolution were in Europe, and the liberal vision of many Filipinos was shared by a number of the Americans who would eventually fight against them. That made the American task of conquest easier and the Filipino task of resistance much more difficult. The Americans could co-opt the Filipino revolutionaries because in so many areas, such as education and municipal government, American and Filipino goals were compatible.
In the 20th century, when Marxism and, later, Islamic fundamentalism replaced liberalism as the dominant ideologies of revolution throughout the world, the possibilities for cooptation decreased significantly, making successful campaigns of the kind undertaken by the Americans in the Philippines much more difficult, if not impossible. By the time of the war in Vietnam nations such as the United States would have far less in common than they once did with the revolutionaries of the world. |
http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book-ch3.html |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 8:17 am Post subject: |
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Kuros: neither Soviet Russia nor Maoist China was backing the Philippine insurgents at the turn of the century. And Western Europeans, and Germany and Japan, seized approximately one quarter of the planet between 1875 and 1900. If we had not seized the Philippines after winning the Spanish-American War, one of them would have. And then we would have found ourselves without influence and closed out of markets in East Asia, and, on a larger, global scale, too. Apples and oranges, then.
Further, I wish you would take a look at the Cold War context that surrounded America's intervening in support of the French -- a govt who stubbornly refused to follow FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations' advice and grant their colonies independence from 1945 through 1954. In the end, as the evidence shows (presidential papers, NSC files, agency papers, and British and French govt papers) if Washington wanted to maintain a strong pro-American France and maintain leadership in the European Cold War, it faced a limited set of options re: how to deal with the French and their problems in Southeast Asia...
It goes on and on. Consult Mark Atwood Lawrence's Assuming the Burder: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (California, 2005). It frustrates me that too many who have opined on this war seem to never have read anything serious on it. I should start a thread: what is the last book or article you read re: the Vietnam War? and see what kind of responses, if any, I get. |
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it's full of stars
Joined: 26 Dec 2007
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| Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 9:45 am Post subject: |
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So America entered Vietnam to show the French how to fight a war?
Or the USA went to vietnam, so as to maintain good relations with the French? |
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