*groan* . . . OK, let's debate the Vietnam War . . . again . . .

[BrainGlutton]

@RaftPeople

I am the first to admit my lack of knowledge on this. I was under the impression that the communists had not made much progress in getting support from the general population. I had assumed the VC were merely an effective force but a minority of the population.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War:

France had gained control of Indochina in a series of colonial wars beginning in the 1840s and lasting until the 1880s. During World War II, Vichy France had collaborated with the occupying Imperial Japanese forces. Vietnam was under effective Imperial Japanese control, as well as de facto Japanese administrative control, although the Vichy French continued to serve as the official administrators. After the Japanese surrender, the French fought to retain control of their former colony against the Viet Minh independence movement, led by Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. After the Viet Minh defeated the French colonial army at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French Withdrew, and the colony was granted independence.

According to the ensuing Geneva Conference, Vietnam was partitioned, ostensibly temporarily, into a Northern and a Southern zone of Viet-Nam. The former was to be ruled by Ho Chi Minh, while the latter would be under the control of Emperor Bao Dai. In 1955, the South Vietnamese monarchy was abolished and Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem became President of a new South Vietnamese republic.

The Geneva Conference of 1954 specified that elections to unify the country would be scheduled to take place in July, 1956, but such elections were never held. In the context of the Cold War, the United States (under Eisenhower) had begun to view Southeast Asia as a potential key battleground in the greater Cold War, and American policymakers feared that democratic elections would simply lead to communist influence into the South Vietnam’s government.

Diem’s RVN government had gained the support of the US to circumvent the scheduled democratic elections, and under Diem’s dictatorship, South Vietnam would be free of both a communist political influence, and a democratic process that threatened to install it. The North Vietnamese had been winning the public relations battle; it had implemented a massive agricultural reform program which distributed land to peasant farmers, and the people of the South took notice. President Eisenhower noted in his memoirs that if a nation-wide election had been held, the communists would have won. Also, it was said to have been unlikely that the Northern Communists would allow a free election in their half of Vietnam. In the end, neither the US nor the two Vietnams had signed the election clause in the accord. Initially, it appeared as if a partitioned Vietnam would become the norm, similar in nature to the partitioned Korea created years earlier.

The NLF led the popular insurgency against the South Vietnamese government. (The RVN and the US referred to the NLF as Viet Cong, short for Viet Nam Cong San (VN:Việt Nam Cộng Sản), or “Vietnamese Communist”. The NLF itself never called itself by this name.)

In June 1961, John F. Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, wherin Khrushchev had sought to bully the young American President into conceding to the Soviets certain key contests, notably Berlin, where large numbers of skilled workers had been escaping to the West. Kennedy left the meeting agitated, and quickly determined that Khrushchev’s attitude towards him would make an armed conflict virtually unavoidable in the near future. Kennedy and his advisers soon decided that any such conflicts had better follow the Korea model, being confined to conventional weaponry, through proxy parties, as a way to mitigate the threat of direct nuclear war between the two superpowers. It was decided that the most likely theatre for such a conflict would be in Southeast Asia. It is unclear as to whether Kennedy had been influenced by other factors at the time (such as racism, oil reserves off of Vietnam’s coast) but by the political calculations of his administration, the U.S. had to work quickly to create a “valve” to release any built-up political pressures.

The North, along with its Soviet backers knew well that the South was prepared to vote for a communist government. The U.S. cared little for Diem, but forged its alliance with his government out of fear that an easy communist victory would only bolster the percieved bravado that Khrushchev had shown to Kennedy at Vienna. The U.S. fatefully decided that an immediate stand against Soviet expansion was both prudent and necessary, regardless of the human cost.

In 1961, the United States began to clandestinely send military advisors, both to give temporary support the South’s Diem RVN regime, and to engage in terrorism against both North and South Vietnam. Some of these bombing attacks were designed to inflame and exacerbate both the civil war in the South and to exacerbate the impression of a greater conflict with the North.

The local strategy was to create the impression that a “legitimate” government was being overrun by “hostile Communist forces,” though this was while the “Communist forces” were limited to a rising insurgency among the South Vietnamese. At the time, this insurgency was mostly inspired, not directed, by the North, and as such the definition of an “enemy” by philosophical and political grounds would prove to be fateful for U.S. soldiers ordered to make life-and-death choices on the ground. To US planners, however, these distinctions were neither forseeable nor did they matter as much as the creation of a greater conflict itself. The “impossibile task” of defining who “the enemy” was would lead directly to the general quagmire and the human rights atrocities for which the Vietnam War is widely known.

The greater overall strategy was simple; to deliberately create a more desirable conventional conflict with the Soviet Union, through the two Vietnamese proxies, rather than to allow nuclear conflict to erupt in elsewhere, as was greatly feared at the time. Cuba, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea were known hotspots that were feared could get out of control, should there be no pressure valve. Because the majority of the South was sympathetic to the North’s communist ideology, the U.S. strategy was designed to artificially exacerbate the divide between North and South, along lines which could be reported to the American people as ideological. The so-called ideological divide has little meaning among the Vietnamese, who well understand the beginnings of its civil conflict as being ethnic in origin; and for their own particular reasons, different outside parties took sides, and desired influence.

Backed by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam began supporting the NLF with arms and supplies, advisors, and regular units of the North Vietnamese Army, which were transported via an extensive network of trails and roads through the neutral nation of Laos, which became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. The stage was set for the escalation to come, wherin a civil war between Vietnamese farmers seeking to overthrow a puppet despot would find themselves pawns in a larger proxy war between the competing expansionist systems of U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism.

Combatants in the War

In major combat there were, depending upon one’s point of view, two to four major combatant organizations; the four being the United States Armed Forces; the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN—the South Vietnamese Army, pronounced Arvin); the NLF, a group of indigenous South Vietnamese guerilla fighters; and the People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN—the North Vietnamese Army, pronounced Pahvin).

Arguments over which of these four were the actual combatants was a major political focus of the war. The U.S. sought to depict the war as one between ARVN defenders with U.S. help against PAVN forces, thus depicting the NLF a puppet or shadow army and the war as a South Vietnamese defense against North Vietnamese aggression.

The North Vietnamese portrayed the conflict as one between the indigenous South Vietnamese NLF and the United States, with the noncombat support of North Vietnam and its allies. This view held ARVN to be a puppet of the U.S.

These conflicting propaganda stances were later played out in early peace talks in which arguments were made over “the shape of the [negotiating] table” in which each side sought to depict itself as two distinct entities opposing a single entity, ignoring its “puppet”.

[sqweels]

My characterization of the Vietnam War is that the cure was worse than the disease and the patient died anyway.

Declan:

On the international level , the conflict in Vietnam allowed countries like Hong Kong , singapore , Malaysia , Thailand and Taiwan to successfully grow into thrivin economies , so they got one , we got the rest.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Communists won the War, why didn’t the domino theory come true? Because in these places there weren’t significant communist “national liberation” movements for the Soviet-led communist forces to ally with.

[laigle]

Of course, it was a brilliant plan to try and save the French Empire at great expense and with no benefits foreseeable to ourselves. Especially the bit about slaughtering civilians and destroying our credibility as a player in international politics. And reminding insurgents that a large mechanized army is not especially effective against hit and run attacks that serve to demoralize the home front was just the icing on the cake.

We ought to give Kissinger another peace prize.

[Declan]

@sqweels

My characterization of the Vietnam War is that the cure was worse than the disease and the patient died anyway.

Declan:
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Communists won the War, why didn’t the domino theory come true? Because in these places there weren’t significant communist “national liberation” movements for the Soviet-led communist forces to ally with.

Think of it this way , the commies won on the tactical level , but where bled dry on the strategic level. Add to that , some very repressive regimes in the aforementioned countries , the cultural revolution in china, and the rise of the non aligned nations, with India in the forefront.

Declan

[BobLibDem]

My first reaction was that the war ended nearly 30 years ago, let’s put it to rest and let Saigons be Saigons.

I do see a similarity between Iraq and Vietnam. Both were justified in part by the domino theory. If communists gain control of one country, others will fall like dominos so let’s fight them over there before they come over here. In Iraq, some feel that establishing a democracy there would make it more likely for other nations in the area to become democratic. I don’t believe either argument has any merit. The communist dominos stopped falling and the prospect of establishing a Jeffersonian democratic beachhead in Iraq is dubious at best, and even that dim prospect is much more likely than neighboring nations embracing democracy.

To answer the OP, the American presence was at the request of what was at the time a sovereign government. So it was not in my opinion immoral. However in my opinion it was not justified since the domino theory, the widely cited reason at the time, has not borne out to be true. I believe it was a mistake for the US to get involved. The money spent, not to mention the lives cut short, would have been far more effectively spent at home. LBJ’s Great Society may actually have come to pass were it not for the war.

I’d like to know if any Vietnamese posters are out there and I would pose these questions to them:
1- Did the lives of the South Vietnamese improve or degrade after the fall of Saigon?
2- Was there any equivalent to the Yankee carpetbagger in post war South Vietnam?
3- Is Vietnam today a repressed society?

[Jonathan_Chance]

Yeah, I’d go with the ‘The Hell with it’ movement, myself.

But if we must…

We’re looking at two questions here…

1. In hindsight, was getting US forces involved in Vietnam ‘right’.

2. If the answer to ‘1’ is ‘Yes’ then was the prosecution of the war gone about in an optimum manner?

1. Given all hindsight it certainly seems ‘wrong’ to have done so. When we pulled out of Vietnam in the mid-70s (thereby admitting defeat) their backers in the Soviet Union were less than 2 decades from complete economic collapse. The simple fact is that victory in the Cold War came about not through use of arms but through appearance of arms. It was an economic victory more than anything else. Perhaps similar patience would have worked in Vietnam. Heck, it seems to at this point.

2. This has always been a resounding ‘NO’ to me. Wars aren’t often won on defense. If the US had wanted to end that thing an invasion of the North should have been planned from the beginning and executed quickly. Take the major towns and roads and hope to starve the insurgents out. But it wouldn’t have been quick.

[dropzone]

@BobLibDem

…let’s put it to rest and let Saigons be Saigons.

That’s cute, Bob, but it’s Ho Chi Minh City or District 1 now.

[misplaced rant]

District 1?!?!? What the hell kind of name is that for a city? “Oooh, Saigon was its Capitalist name and Ho Chi Minh City perpetuates Ho’s cult of personality! Let’s give it the blandest, most Orwellian name possible to show our revolutionary fervor!” That shit is why I hate Communism. Commies wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just keep their mouths shut but they can’t be commies without spouting revolutionary rhetoric all day and half the night. You ever get drunk with one? A miserable experience. :mad:

[/misplaced rant]

[ralph124c]

Lyndon Johnson’s bizarre ideas about war were responsible for this disaster. First, there is NO SUCH THING as a “Limited” war. You either destroy your enemy, or get the hellout!
For example: we lost hundreds of men at the “siege” of Khe Sanh…for no obvious (to me anyway) objective! One day, Khe Sanh was the “linchepin of our defense”…the next day it was an unecessary outpost-what the hell was going on?
Vietnam also marked the ra of the “political” generals-guys who were promoted based on how well they played the game…instead of able field commanders, we got con men like Gen. Alexander Haig (a lt. colonel promoted to major general). The sad thing was, we could actually have won this thing if we had decided that it was worth it! Insread, we lost 60,000 lives (and ruined many thousands more), plus flushed >200 billion dollars down the toilet…for nothing! Had I been CIC in Vietnam, I would have told Johnson:
To win this warwe need to:
-invade Noth Vietnam
-destroy Hanoi by incendiary bombing
-lock up at least 20% of the population in concentration camps (liek the British did in Malaya)
Ok, Mr. President…this is not worth the risk?
Then, start evacuating the US troops today!

[Ryan_Liam]

@ralph124c

Lyndon Johnson’s bizarre ideas about war were responsible for this disaster. First, there is NO SUCH THING as a “Limited” war. You either destroy your enemy, or get the hellout!
For example: we lost hundreds of men at the “siege” of Khe Sanh…for no obvious (to me anyway) objective! One day, Khe Sanh was the “linchepin of our defense”…the next day it was an unecessary outpost-what the hell was going on?
Vietnam also marked the ra of the “political” generals-guys who were promoted based on how well they played the game…instead of able field commanders, we got con men like Gen. Alexander Haig (a lt. colonel promoted to major general). The sad thing was, we could actually have won this thing if we had decided that it was worth it! Insread, we lost 60,000 lives (and ruined many thousands more), plus flushed >200 billion dollars down the toilet…for nothing! Had I been CIC in Vietnam, I would have told Johnson:
To win this warwe need to:
-invade Noth Vietnam
-destroy Hanoi by incendiary bombing
-lock up at least 20% of the population in concentration camps (liek the British did in Malaya)
Ok, Mr. President…this is not worth the risk?
Then, start evacuating the US troops today!

You forgot. The invasion of Cambodia and Laos to secure the borders from NVA attacks.

[Odesio]

@BrainGlutton

1. Was America’s intervention in Vietnam justified? Moral or immoral?

Yes, we were justified in stamping out Communism wherever it reared its ugly head.

2. Was it a mistake for the U.S. to get involved, or not?

It was a mistake for a variety of reasons. McNamara and others understood from the beginning that the United States was unwilling to do what was necessary to win the war.

3. Could the U.S. have achieved victory by fighting with different strategies? (Defining “victory” as a lasting division of the country into two states, one of them non-Communist and both of them more or less at peace internally, as in Korea.)

Yes, it’s certainly possible.

Marc

[BrainGlutton]

@MGibson

Yes, we were justified in stamping out Communism wherever it reared its ugly head.

:dubious: Even in Chile?

[Johanna]

@BobLibDem

let Saigons be Saigons.

ARRGHGH! :smack:
groan is right.

Why didn’t I think of that pun?

One important but little-known historical wrinkle to the situation has been forgotten nowadays. Does anybody remember the Malayan Emergency? This was fought in the 1950s and began when Malaysia was still a British colony. (It was called “Malaya” back then; the name Malaysia wasn’t used until the 1960s.) Malaya got its independence from Britain in 1957 against the backdrop of the prosecution of the fight against the Communists there.

The Communist guerrillas in Malaya were mainly of Chinese ethnicity. (Malaysia has a very large ethnic Chinese minority.) The Pentagon called them “ChiComs” back in those days. They operated in jungle villages sort of like the Viet Cong did later. The British commander was General Templer. He was successful in defeating and disarming the guerrillas and in putting an end to the Emergency. Thus he came to be regarded as the world’s foremost expert in jungle counterinsurgency.

So the Pentagon invited Gen. Templer to come over and advise them on how to do the same thing in Vietnam. Templer told them that the situation in Vietnam was nothing like the situation in Malaysia had been, and what they were planning would not work. What worked in one situation would not work in a totally different situation. They refused to listen to him. They refused to listen to the one man who actually understood counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia. You see the results.

[BrainGlutton]

@Jomo Mojo

Templer told them that the situation in Vietnam was nothing like the situation in Malaysia had been, and what they were planning would not work.

What difference did General Templer see between the two situations?

[Johanna]

@BrainGlutton

What difference did General Templer see between the two situations?

You know, when I read about that it didn’t give any specifics of what he said. But I can use my own noggin to list the important differences:

1. The Malayan ChiComs were not indigenous to the land, and were motivated by a foreign power (Mao Zedong, basically).
   vs.
   The Viet Cong were of the indigenous people of the land, whose main motivation was self-determination for their own people.

2. The Malayan insurgents were limited in the areas they controlled.
   vs.
   The Cong were widespread all over South Vietnam.

3. *Selamat malam, Puan * Opal!
   vs.
   Chào chi, Bà Opal!

4. The Malayan insurgents never won the hearts and minds of the Malay people. Their aims did not coincide with the wishes of the Malay people (which was basically to be left alone in peace).
   vs.
   The Cong were fighting for principles that the Vietnamese people already shared.

5. The British gave independence to Malaya, removing the casus belli of the insurgents who said they were fighting an anticolonial struggle. Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman was a popular, respected leader.
   vs.
   The Diem and Thieu regimes were seen as the despicable, despotic puppets of an imperialist power. And that Madame Nhu… whoa…

6. Templer was a tough, take-charge kind of guy (his favorite word was “bastard,” applied to himself as often as to others). He had no problem uprooting entire villages and relocating them out of harm’s way, the better to hit the insurgents. At the same time he knew how to win the hearts and minds of the Malay villagers, offering incentives and rewards to everyone who cooperated. He understood the people he was working with and had enough experience in-country to know what he was doing. Templer used the ChiCom atrocities against the Malay villagers as propaganda for his side, and was smart enough not to perpetrate similar atrocities for his part. Templer knew how to sort out the non-combatants from the insurgents, and hit only the latter.
   vs.
   The Pentagon was clueless on how to deal with the Vietnamese people, and had too much of an attitude to begin trying to understand anything from the Vietnamese point of view. Multiple Yank atrocities against the people they were supposedly helping: with friends like this, who needs enemies? :rolleyes:

In all fairness, I noticed after posting that ralph124c had already mentioned the British action in Malaya by contrast. Kudos to Ralph. My excuse is that I accessed this thread in the morning before going to work, and didn’t type my reply until this evening after several other posts had gone in ahead of me, but I didn’t look them over when previewing.

[Odesio]

@BrainGlutton

:dubious: Even in Chile?

Anywhere. The unfortunate truth about the cold war was that it meant putting monsters in power so long as they were our monsters.

Marc

[BrainGlutton]

@MGibson

The unfortunate truth about the cold war was that it meant putting monsters in power so long as they were our monsters.

That is a statement of fact, not an argument in justification.

[Alan_Smithee]

The quote from Wikipedia provided by BrainGlutton is very interesting. I’d not heard the idea that Kennedy deliberately manipulated a conflict in Vietnam as a “release valve” for tensions building to a nuclear war between the superpowers. How was this supposed to work? If the Soviets had won, wouldn’t they have been even more desperate, and therefore more likely to rely on nuclear rather than conventional forces? Was giving them a real but costly victory the real “victory”?: did it convinvce them that nuclear conflict wasn’t necessary yet, but that further expansionism wasn’t profitable?

Is the fact that nuclear war was avoided proof that we actually achieved our goal in Vietnam? Or is the fact that we avoided nuclear war (and further Asian expansion by the Soviets) despite loosing proof that the war was unnecessary to begin with?

[ralph124c]

I might also add that gen. Templar had the use of excellent mercenary troops (the Nepalese “Ghurka” soldiers). These men had no compunction about terrorizing the chinese communist guerillas. Their favorite tactic was to capture them (the guerillas) and cut their ears off ! Gen. Templar didn’t have to worry about reaction back home-he kept newsmen at bay!
As for his handling the insurgency: he locked up everybody in guarded camps, and thus separated the guerillas from their support. Hostile villages were burned to the ground, denying support to the guerillas.
As I said, Vietnam couldhave been “won”-but at a huge cost in lives. I think it wasn’t worth it.

[Rashak_Mani]

@MGibson

Anywhere. The unfortunate truth about the cold war was that it meant putting monsters in power so long as they were our monsters.
Marc

Saddam was the fruit of Cold War mentality... as was Osama Bin Laden. Now once more the "putting monsters" is back... with new allies that aren't democratic. To me it just seems a new start and the foundation for another generation of terrorists and Middle East conflicts.

The only conclusion I can get is that the American leaership has no faith whatsoever in democracy and law prevailing even when leftist parties take power. So much for spreading "freedom".

[Princhester]

@BrainGlutton

3. Could the U.S. have achieved victory by fighting with different strategies? (Defining “victory” as a lasting division of the country into two states, one of them non-Communist and both of them more or less at peace internally, as in Korea.)

You’re chopping debate off at the knees, there. A “victory” that consists of creating an artificial and inherently unstable situation hardly seems like victory to me. Or to put it another way, “lasting division of a country” is an oxymoron. The Korean situation is like saying that a pressure cooker is lasting and stable.

@AHunter3

…we should have worked with the Vietnamese people rather than let Ho Chi Minh win the hearts and minds of the people as he did.

Rickjay nails this but it’s worth emphasising. You can’t work with people to oppress them. You can’t work with a nation to defeat that nation’s nationalist forces. It was never going to work (and it’s not going to work in Iraq, but let’s hope it doesn’t take decades before we get a US president smart enough to realise that and with enough spine to back down).

The problem with the whole “we had to do it to defeat the communists” is that it is talking merely about what had to be done to contain the mess that paranoia about communism had created in the first place. Right after WWII the Vietnamese nationalists would have aligned themselves with anyone who had offered to help them kick out the French and get themselves on their feet as an independent nation. Ho Chi Minh approached the US for support and intimated (in my view plausibly) that he didn’t really give a damn for the whole communist shtick (bear in mind that he was at this time head honcho of the Viet Minh, the nationalist, not communist, insurgency) and he was at heart a nationalist and was naturally very popular because he was perceived by your average Vietnamese accordingly.

He indicated that he would gladly be entirely unaligned with the communist bloc in return for US support against the French and the Chinese (who have made a hobby out of invading Vietnam for about the last few centuries)and was rebuffed because (a) no one really gave a damn about the Vietnamese and nationalism and freedom and self determination when US interests were on the line and (b) HCM had a whiff of the dreaded C word about him (“he’s a witch, he’s a witch!”).

When I was a little kid I could never understand why when I overbearingly forced my “help” on my younger brother, he’d react against my help despite my perception that what I was doing was for his own good. No doubt if I’d stood back and waited till he decided he really wanted my help and asked for it, and if I’d given what help he’d asked for and then left him to it, he’d have been appreciative rather than resentful.

It’s a lesson the US will not learn. The US did not learn it with Vietnam, and it’s a lesson it’s doing a good job of not learning in Iraq right now.