Seemed pretty direct to me, what with the draft and all. It’s not like the US didn’t try…
It’s an excellent analogy. You can’t brush it off as “oh, that one doesn’t count”.
The British pulled out short of achieving their goal in the US. Thus it “lost”.
The US pulled out short of achieving its goal in Vietnam. Thus it “lost”.
The only difference is spin. In fact, one could go further - the British pulled out of the US because it also had the French to worry about. It’s not like the US was attacked by Russia while in Vietnam.
Dude, we didn’t have a direct stake in it…how much clearer could it be? The Colonies were, well BRITISH COLONIES…you know, they owned it. They had a direct stake in the out come. It mattered to them. They had colonial governors, land owners, etc etc. South Vietnam was a perhiperal issue to the US. It was a FRENCH colony…one that they lost. The US didn’t own South Vietnam, it wasn’t a colony, we weren’t directly or even indirectly affected by the lost of South Vietnam to the North.
We pulled out and let it fall for gods sake! That’s how little we cared about the place.
So did the British. “Pulling out” isn’t a measure of how much you care, it’s a measure of how well you do.
I’m not sure what the issue of ownership has to do with it. Are you implying that the British “tried harder” in the US than the US did in Vietnam? That the US wasn’t really trying? Could have won if it really wanted to?
As for “how little we cared” - the US instituted a draft, for goodness sake! It lost 40,000-odd casualties! The US cared one hell of a lot about that war.
Sorry, man, both wars were losses. The British lost the American revolutionary war, and the US lost the Vietnam war.
I’m not implying anything, I’m saying straight out that the British had a direct stake in the US colonies, where as the US did not have a direct stake in the Vietnam conflict. Trying hard or not trying hard had nothing to do with it, though in actuality the US didn’t ‘try hard’, since we waged what was essentially a status quo defensive struggle. We didn’t WANT to conquer North Vietnam (not having any stake in the conflict) and merely wanted to keep things the way they were, with a North and South Vietnam. The British, on the other hand wanted to qwell the rebellion and retake the colonies, since they DID have a direct stake in keeping them.
Dude…we always used a draft for any military purpose up to that time. It was SOP. It had more to do with the fact that we didn’t have much of a standing army than some sort of indication that we really cared about the conflict in any sort of existential way.
When I say ‘we didn’t care’, what I mean is that it wasn’t vitally important to the US, to our strategic or even tactical aims, and was more something we felt we had to do, taking the torch from the French and defending the world from the communist hordes. We didn’t have any sort of plan or goal other than simply maintaining the status quo in the region. When it came down to it, we pulled out with promisses that if the South Vietnamese really needed us, we’d come back. Then when the South Vietnamese started to go tits up we ignored their calls for further aid and left them to face the music on their own.
We didn’t lose…the North Vietnamese won and the South Vietnamese lost. We just got egg on our face and a bunch of our young men killed for nothing.
Couple of quotes from some people whose opinions you might trust more than mine:
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that “in terms of military tactics, we cannot help draw the conclusion that our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail.”[247] Even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded that “the achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion.”[248]
General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective. As he remarked, “I still doubt that the North Vietnamese would have relented.”[249]
By war’s end,** 58,193 soldiers were killed**, more than 150,000 were wounded, and at least 21,000 were permanently disabled.[252]
“the responsibility for the **ultimate failure **of this policy lies not with the men who fought, but with those in Congress…”[245] Alternatively, the official history of the United States Army noted that "tactics have often seemed to exist apart from larger issues, strategies, and objectives. Yet in Vietnam the Army experienced tactical success and strategic failure"
I don’t know how it can be clearer than that. It’s just pure denial to imply that the US did not lose the war.
Of course it did. It was part of the war against communism; the US’ primary agenda at the time.
That just sounds like a kid telling his friends he “let the bully win” to save face.
Either the objectives were achieved (in which case it’s a win) or they weren’t (in which case it’s a loss). Just like in the Revolutionary War.
It’s not like the US managed to invade England during the revolutionary war. It simply managed to prevent England achieving it’s objectives (or, rather, re-evaluate it’s primary problem, which was the French).
There are about 58,915 families who would disagree with you. The US goal was to prevent the loss of South Vietnam to communism. Though every major battle on the field was won, in the end it failed to prevent this from happening.
As a thought experiment, did the USSR lose or fail in Afghanistan? Did the French lose or fail in Vietnam?
In any event, the scar Vietnam left on the American psyche was a real one. There were serious worries that driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait would cost 10,000 or more casualties and concerns about the will of America to pay such a price. Looking back, they can seem somewhat absurd.
That’s gonna be easy. As I’ve seen the trick played many times before I guess I can mimic.
-Did the French lose or fail in Vietnam. They failed and they lost. Vietnam belonged to them, Ho-Chi-Min succeeded in forcing them to flee. So they lost.
See the criteria is that if it was a colony, and you lost it, well you lost. If it’s just a territory that you dont own, but on which you wage war, invest tons of money and weapons in, but that, in the end, you still have to exit. It’s not a loss.
Arguments, just like a costume, can be tailored to hide unfacable defaults.
The problem is that we can easily win straight-up wars but guerilla warfare is another matter. It’s not a new problem: Pancho Villa made the American expedition into Mexico look like clowns. Heck, for that matter Napoleon- freakin’ Napoleon- couldn’t effectively occupy Spain. The only way to pacify a country full of people who don’t like you is to kill lots and lots of them. And their wives, children, and white-haired elders if need be. And for social and political reasons that’s simply not an option anymore.