While reading this article on the War of 1812, SDSTAFF member Gfactor writes:
Which seems to me that there are those who question whether or not the US lost the Viet Nam War.
So I wondered if His Greatness, Purveyor of All Which Can Be Known, The One and Only Cecil Adams, had ever addressed these issues:
Was the Viet Nam War actually a defeat for the US? Is there a view in which others outside of our country see the end of that conflict as something other than a complete fiasco?
Alas, my skils pale. My attempt to search the archives found that most of the words needed to actually perform the search won’t work. So … Does any one know if Uncle Cecil ever addressed the issue of who actually won the Viet Nam War?
Try searching on “Vietnam” (one word, which is correct) rather than “Viet Nam”. That will get around the fact that the board won’t do searches on words of four letter or fewer.
(Not being snarky - I made the same mistake myself for years.)
Well, unless its a war like WWII, or the American Civil War, where one side totally dominates, conquers and occupies and/or divides the vanquished enemy how they like, any other war can be categorized as a “victory” by either side.
Saddam Hussein claimed a victory in Gulf War I because he remained in power. It takes a bit of spin, but he went up against the whole world and still had his job.
The U.S. in Vietnam has a stronger case. We were never beaten militarily, but the political situation would not allow us to have a full-scale war, and the continual half-assed war caused enough internal discontent that we simply stopped it.
Does that mean we “lost” the war? In a way, yes, and in another way, no…
It’d be better to say that one word is the usual English spelling, rather than “correct”. In Vietnamese it’s written with two words, so it’s not entirely wrong to use it that way. (But you do get better search results, yes.)
No. Well, I’m sure you could find someone. But what do you think of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan? It’s a conflict on the scale of our occupation of Vietnam. Do you think the USSR didn’t utterly lose? It destroyed them. What about the French in Algeria? Or heck, the French in Vietnam?
But the U.S. and its coalition didn’t want to remove Saddam Hussein from power. They explicitly said so to gain the trust of Arab allies. The goal was to expel him from Kuwait.
What’s your definition of a full scale war? We dropped more bombs than we did in WWII, we occupied South Vietnam with 500,000 troops at its peak, and we turned vast stretches of jungle into dead zones using chemical defoliants. We even bombed and (for a time) invaded Laos and Cambodia. We bombed North Vietnam industry to dust. Our goal of turning South Vietnam away from communism and unification was a complete failure. Our cause was simply not popular enough. We failed completely to understand who we were fighting and their motives.
I think the logic of your argument would apply better to the Korean War. At first, we simply wanted to defend South Korea and restore its antebellum borders. But then we invaded the North, got our asses handed to us by the Chinese, then we barely held the push back of their attempt to conquer the South, and then we had a cease fire. If we never invaded NK, we could call it a victory. But the way it ended was more of a draw.
Well, you can call a donkey a racehorse, and it’s still a donkey.
The United States lost the Vietnam War, pure and simple. There is absolutely no reasonable argument to the contrary. Their objective was to prop up the South Vietnamese regime and prevent the Communist regime from taking over the country. They failed, utterly and completely, and so lost.
Wars aren’t always won by the side that inflicted the most casualities.
As to the War of 1812, I always like Will Ferguson’s summary; the United States won, Canada won, England earned a draw, and the Indians REALLY lost.
My (I thought very innocuous ) post was an inquiry as to whether or not The Master had ever addressed either of these questions.
I was looking for a link (if one existed) not looking for a debate. As I mentioned upthread, I’m way too familiar with the whole thing. Not going there at all. And you can’t make me. So there.
(This is the wrong forum for that s, ahhh, stuff anyway.)
Thanks again to Gfactor for some links to some interesting reading material. I’m plowing through some of it in another browser window as I post this.
Thanks anyway Guys & Gals. And Others as may be present.
For the Vietnam war: What was the American objective? I don’t think I am too far off the mark if I say it was establish a viable government in the south that could prevent takeover by the communist north. What was the objective of the Viet Cong government? To unify Vietnam under the communist northern government. Now you tell me who won.
For the war of 1812: First I will ask whether Ottawa (not to mention London) was burned? Got that. Now in that case, one major American objective was freedom of the high seas and it did obtain that objective. So if the US didn’t win, it didn’t entirely lose that one. Still, I think “emancipation” of Upper and Lower Canada was a major and unrealized goal.
For winners and losers, this one takes the cake. Three hundred years ago or more, there was a war between England and Holland over an island in the Pacific that was a major source of nutmeg. The English lost their island but in the settlement they were given in recompense a small island in an unimportant part of the world then called New Amsterdam. Who won that war? Of course, the Brits no longer own it.
Lucy got his/her answer. Cecil has probably not addressed this. If anyone needs to explore the debate over whether the US won/lost/tied in the Vietnam bowl, please feel free to explore this in our Great Debates forum.
) post was an inquiry as to whether or not The Master had ever addressed either of these questions.