Ho Chi Minh was a rabid nationalist. He had no desire to be a proxy of the Soviet Union or China. Sure, he took their aid but as soon as the war was over, he cut any puppet strings they tried to place on him.
Piffle. Ho Chi Minh was very much a freedom fighter who wanted a united Vietnam out from French rule. When he could not enlist the support of the U.S. to get the French to leave, he turned to the Soviet Union, (never China as you have claimed). That had the unfortunate effect of making his effort a “communist” one from the perspective of the U.S. which then decided to invent a “domino theory” to rationalize opposing him. Inviting Soviet support, of course, had the bad result that his country was flooded with people spewing Marxist dogma, leading to a lot of bad decisions in later years.
He never had designs on any country outside his own borders. Since you have claimed that his “stated aim” was regional conquest, I am sure that you can provide a serious quotation where he actually said that.
Oh, puh-leeze. You’d have more credibility quoting the Onion or the Weekly World News as a primary source. :rolleyes:
Oh come now, Mrs Lincoln, surely you have some opinion about the play…?
You have not spent any serious effort to “differentiate.” The post for which you were Warned included a reference to Occam’s razor that was clearly intended to indicate that the poster was stupid.
In addition, posting “You have a faint glimmer of intelligence” can only be construed as a personal attack on a poster, not a critique of his or her statement.
Take any further complaints about Moderation to ATMB and do not post it in this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Y’know, except the ones we were illegally bombing, of course!
I have to admit this is one of the odder things I’ve ever read here. You’re posting an article which you’re not even confident is credible? :dubious:
What’s the point of my reading an article that you don’t even think is credible?
I’ve already read Joseph Buttinger’s Vietnam: The Embattled Dragon and Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History.
Explain to me why I should trust this article who’s credibility you won’t even vouch for over books by recognized scholars on Vietnam and the Vietnam War.
We got some pretty good music out of the anti-war crowed…
Ho was a fairly committed Communist since the 1920s. He was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of France. studied in the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, and then did Party work in China. After a period of exile in Europe, he went back to China in 1938, to advise the Communist militia. Then in 1945, after the Japanese defeat and his declaration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, almost all of the non-communists in the Viet Minh were purged. I think it’s safe to say that he was a Communist pretty early on; maybe not when he tried and failed to get Indochinese independence at Versailles, but not long after.
And China’s Communists did aid North Vietnam in both the fight against the French and the invasion of the South. They provided troop training and combat advisors, and provided weapons, supplies, planes anti-aircraft guns and an anti-aircraft unit to man them. They eventually cut down on their aid, as they started to split from Moscow and sought closer relations with the US, but to say that Ho never turned to China or that China didn’t help North Vietnam was incorrect.
For more on this, check out Qiang Zhai’s “China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975”.
As for not having designs on any countries outside his own borders, the North Vietnamese toyed with the idea of an Indochinese Federation that would combine Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but with the rise of Pol Pot and the defeat of the Cambodian Viet Minh, it fell apart.
True enough; however all estimates place NVA/VC deaths far, far ahead of ARVN deaths with the vast majority of them occurring between 1965-72, i.e. the years of US ground force commitment. Outside of a few high quality units such as the ARVN Marine and Airborne Divisions, the ARVN performed very poorly against the NLF usually suffering more casualties than they inflicted while US forces inflicted casualties orders of magnitude greater than they took. There’s a casualty estimate broken down by year here.
You said I had ‘a faint glimmer of intelligence,’ was delusional but it wasn’t my fault as I have no choice in my thinking. In what world does that not mean stupid?
Let’s not start a discussion of what greenslime1951 meant. The post was insulting and he’s been warned for it; further discussion belongs in ATMB or private messages.
What do you mean by “the Cambodian Viet Minh”?
In Vietnam: The Necessary War, Michael Lind makes the case that the war was worth fighting even if it could not be won. From the American POV, it was but one theater in the Cold War; and success in the geopolitical aspects of that depended on the “bandwagon effect,” i.e., the West could not afford to be seen as weak or in retreat at any point, for fear the nonaligned nations would hop on the Communist bandwagon.
Of course, that whole thesis depends on the assumption the Cold War was worth fighting in the first place, about which I have my doubts.
Of course, all those lives might have been saved if Eisenhower had allowed the all-Vietnam elections promised in the Geneva Accords to go forward, which he should have done, even when facing the certainty that Ho Chi Minh would win.
For instance, a 1973 Soviet report regarding North Vietnamese policy goals stated:
(Quoted from “Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War”)
The Viet Minh provided aid to Khmer Communist and left wing Khmer nationalist groups in Cambodia called the “‘Khmer Issarak Front’”. the dominant party of which, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, was founded by Son Ngoc Minh, who was half Vietnamese and half Khmer, and Tou Samouth, who was a Khmer Krom. The Party was originally controlled and sponsored by the Viet Minh and tended to follow the Viet Minh line, so it, and the pro-Vietnamese faction of the party (the ‘Urban Faction’) was nicknamed the Khmer Viet Minh. Eventually, in the 60s, North Vietnam’s Cambodian policy would change, and Pol Pot, who took over as head of the party after Tou Samouth’s death (rumored to be at the orders of Pol Pot), would break the party’s ties with North Vietnam, after the North Vietnamese, who at that time, had just negotiated a policy with Prince Sihanouk to let them use Cambodian territory for bases and shipment of supplies against the South (the ‘Ho Chih Minh Trail’), wouldn’t endorse Pol Pot’s uprising against the government.
So basically his argument is “we killed over a million people for propaganda purposes”; no, that doesn’t sound like a good justification at all.
He didn’t stop it. It was stopped by Ngô Đình Diệm, who announced that South Vietnam wouldn’t participate in the election. It’s true that the US supported that, but it wasn’t the one with the deciding vote. Diem was.
Diem may have made the decision to declare South Vietnam as an independent country. But he never could have done it without knowing America would back him up on it. So it really was Eisenhower who had the deciding vote.
That said, Ike was no fool. He basically told Diem to go ahead and declare independence if he could make it work. Eisenhower didn’t promise to prop up the new country with American troops. It took Kennedy and Johnson to get us really caught up in Vietnam.
The fact that the war we fought to prolong those two million lives ended up killing two million people itself makes your math here a little weak. Especially if, as you argue, the two million people ended up getting killed anyway. (I think it’s arguable that the slaughter would have been as bad in 1956 as it was in 1975. Twenty years of war made people vindictive.)
If the justification is saving lives, then we’d have been better off standing back and letting two million people die rather than fighting a war and ending up with four million dead instead.
Of course, those weren’t the only two choices. We could have saved the first two million by letting them evacuate the country in 1956. And then we could have saved the second two million by not fighting the war. The downside of that is that we would have needed up with a communist Vietnam. But that’s what we ended up with anyway after four million people died.
That was the Korean War. Or have I been whooshed? 
As I’ve stated elsewhere on the Board before, it is generally accepted by the Thais that the Vietnam War saved them from communism. After Vietnam fell, then Cambodia and Laos, the Thais were getting more than a little nervous, especially considering the inroads made in northeastern Thailand by the local Communist Party. Even into the 1980s, there were parts of the Northeast the government dared not go, because they were communist strongholds. I myself remember this.
(Ho Chi Minh stayed in the Northeast from mid-1928 to late 1929. The house he lived in has been designated a historic site, and there are fully grown trees he planted himself. Geographically, much of northeastern Thailand is actually closer to Hanoi than to Bangkok.)
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all fell after the US pulled out, but Thais credit the US with keeping the tide at bay long enough to improve much of the infrastructure of the Northeast – building roads and hospitals, introducing electricity – and maybe take some of the attraction away from the communists. This has always been the poorest part of Thailand.
Now, you may agree that this was the case or not agree, but the Thais genuinely believe and credit the US with this, although these days it tends to be the older generation. Younger folks may not be quite so aware of it anymore. But it helps explain why Thailand has always been such a pro-American place.