Vietnam War -- wrong to fight or wrong to quit?

Great Debates
21

Now that the Cold war is over and we’re all nice and safe its so easy to moralise on the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was not an isolated action but part of the greater conflict between the West and the two communist regimes.

It was not merely a conflict of ideolgies but the very real real conflict of peoples used to freedom of movement,freedom of speech, secret ballot,trial by jury and all the other things that we take for granted in the West and imprisonment or execution for your beliefs and all the other trappings of the two Communist Blocs regimes at that time.
Once a nation became a member of either of the two CBs that was it,there was no changing of minds later even if you had the unlikely chance of having a democratic vote to say that your population no longer wished to remain Communist ,you were stuck with it.

And as soon as a nation joined the Communist "Family of nations "then its resources and peoples were put to work on getting some other country,willing or not ,into their club by any means possible.

When the Soviet Union for example,said that they intended to destroy World Capitalism sooner or later it wasn’t just rhetoric,they meant it literally.

And judging by the numbers of their own people that they tortured and then executed or imprisoned for even being SUSPECTED of holding contrary beliefs they weren’t too fussy about how many of us in the west would have suffered or died .
Tactically the U.S. physical involvement in Vietnam was a disaster .
The U.S. should have held off using its own military thereby turning the Communists into "plucky little underdogs"and mobilising otherwise uncommitted S.Vietnamese into becoming Anti americans, they should have made much more EFFECTIVE use of indigenous forces and kept a very low profile all round .

As a revolutionary its nowhere near so glamorous being seen to fight your own people then it is being seen to fight against the armed forces of the most powerful nation on earth.

This applies to Iraq now and I hope to god we’re not stupid enough to invade Iran.
At the moment theres more then enough Iranians against the present regime,something that will change if we go in.

As to the exchange student,she has been subjected to a non stop diet of one sided propoganda during her entire life in Vietnam and yes that applies even in this day and age.

When the Hanoi regime was victorius in the south it wasn’t all fluffy and cuddly ,many S.Vietnamese paid the price,something left out of the current regimes version of history.

As I said before, its so easy to be noble and self righteous now that any sign of weakness on our parts will not increase the liklihood of a viscious ,totalitarian regime starting a Nuclear war.

How rapidly people forget.

22

I’m pretty sure the actual Viet Cong was pretty much wiped out in Tet. After Tet, the primary Communist force in the South was the North Vietnamese Army. Besides, the only way that the Viet Cong survived was by supplies and help from the North. Cut off North Vietnam’s ability to bring troops and supplies south, and the Viet Cong dies.

23

You realize that essentially none of the criticisms of America’s war in Vietnam originated post-1989, right? People quite rightly criticized the war while the Cold War was still very much in progress, thankyewverymuch.

And one of the most potent critiques, then and now, is that we got “freedom of movement,freedom of speech, secret ballot,trial by jury and all the other things that we take for granted in the West,” while the people ruled by the tinhorn dictatorships we propped up as “anticommunist” regimes got imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and all the same bad stuff that we accused the Communists of.

What indigenous forces?? What “freedom fighters” were going to put their lives on the line to preserve Ngo Diem’s corrupt regime, or those of Ky and Thieu that followed?

The indigenous forces were fighting Diem from the get-go. So when we, replacing the French, stepped in on Diem’s side, we were placing ourselves in opposition to the indigenous rebels from the beginning.

This was not a tactical blunder - this was a full-blown strategic fuckup, the decision to side with colonial governments and their strongman successors in the postwar world. It put us on the wrong side of history for more than a generation, and handed the USSR the propaganda victory of seeming to be on the side of the people over against the tyrants throughout the Third World.

It didn’t have to be that way.

True. But you still can’t beat something with nothing, and since few were willing to fight for Diem/Ky/Thieu, we just killed a million Vietnamese while delaying that outcome a few years.

All those proxy wars had nothing to do with the prospect of nuclear war. We had ICBMs and the Strategic Air Command and submarines carrying nuclear missiles. It was that, and not any appearance of manliness, that kept the USSR from initiating a nuclear war.

It seems that you have forgotten none of the propaganda points from eons past. But they are still a pile of crap.

Damned if I understand the importance of viscosity in a totalitarian regime. :wink:

24

Communist nations never held a patent on political oppression, many a tinhorn dictator may be anti-communist but have just as bad a record on human rights. If only we had a president who championed human rights…

I’m sure the Poles, East Germans, and Czechs among others would disagree.

If we showed signs of weakness then, why didn’t a nuclear war start then?

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the war was a mistake then and remains a mistake now. All our presence did was make the retribution against the South a bit worse when the North finally prevailed, not to mention kill a ton of people over the years the US was there. Plus without the war, LBJ’s Great Society may have come to fruition, but the war made it unaffordable.

25

If, by indigenous forces, you mean the ARVN then there was a definite problem persuading them to fight.

Ngô Đình Diệm believed the attempted coup against him in November 1960 was primarily motivated by ARVN casualties incurred on offensive operations against the Viet Cong. Furthermore, Diệm was reluctant to allow his army to fight a war because he saw the ARVN as crucial to his family maintaining power. For these reasons he discouraged such attacks on the Viet Cong as were deemed by his officers as risky.

These officers were fully aware that if they did take casualties they would incur the wrath of Diệm, thus missing out on promotion and facing the prospect of dismissal. Therefore they took no chances.

The battle of Ap Bac is a good example of this policy. A vastly superior force of ARVN personnel, accompanied by US military advisors, were defeated by a battalion of Viet Cong guerrillas. This reverse was allowed to take place simply because the ARVN commanders failed to press home their advantage and wipe out the enemy.

Diệm was assassinated in November 1963 but the US must have learned the lesson that South Vietnamese forces weren’t exactly reliable. I guess this was one of the main reasons they commenced disposition of ground troops in Vietnam just 14 months later.

26

Which was not a heroic historic moral struggle between Freedom and Tyranny, nor between Reaction and Progress, but an ordinary great-powers struggle for hegemony.

So? In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious they never could have done it (short of a nuclear exchange that would have destroyed both blocs). No more than the Manchu Emperors of China could have taken London. Red Dawn and Amerika portrayed scenarios that could never have happened, which was fairly obvious to rational people even at the time. (The TV miniseries World War III and The Day After portrayed scenarios which could have happened, also fairly obvious.)

27

I think everyone here is missing the point. The North Vietnamese were not freedom fighters. If the South Vietnamese government was not perfect, it was far better. True, we could not “win” without escalating to a total occupation of the North; but this is to say that we cannot win without taking the steps neccessary to win. Tautologies are true, and the Communists didn’t want to lose. So what? In the early years, taking out the mass firepower of the heavily subsidized Communist north was critical; the first mistake was not doing anything active or leaving thereafter.

But the second mistake was the most abominable peice of cowardly evil ever taken by the US of A, and I include traitorous dealings with Native Americans when speaking of this. The second mistake was the deliberately withdraw support from the South Vietnamese. We had no soldiers there and nothing to lose. Whatever else happened, this was a despicable crime. It was a selfish soothe for the leftists of the day, something to let them forget and relax. But it was a crime nonetheless. The South had already proven its moral superiority. We had already seen that the North could never destroy it on their own. But hey, why not even the playing field? Why should those South Koreans have the benefit of western guns and ammo? Hey, the Communists are better than we are, even with their gulags and mass murder and repression, so helping those Suth Vietnamese with guns and ammo is a moral crime. :rolleyes:

28

Many, perhaps a majority, of South Vietnamese seemed to view the matter quite differently. No matter how many fighters the Viet Cong lost in battle, it never seemed to have any trouble getting new recruits. That was the astonishing thing to Americans at the time: The Americans kept winning and winning and winning, but the VC kept fighting and fighting and fighting, with no end in sight.

It is also to say that sometimes “winning” is not worth the cost. Had the U.S. occcupied NV, we would have been faced with an even worse insurgency problem than the current situation in Iraq. (Worse, because not internally divided, and involving a much larger population.) There’s no way we could have “won” that, short of genocide.

We had nothing to win, either. Do you really believe the SV government could have held on, with or without U.S. support? It could not have. Unlike the South Korean government, it had an interminable (even post-Tet) domestic rebellion to deal with on top of foreign hostility. The only reasonable thing to do at the time was cut our losses and let the Vietnamese bring their own civil war to a conclusion and sort out their own differences their own bloody way.

:dubious: Except by not being Communists, how, exactly, did they do that?

Against the post-victory repression and “re-education camps” and “boat people” in united Vietnam (tens of thousands of deaths, up to a million refugees), we must set such examples of “White Terror” as Indonesia in 1965 (at least half a million, perhaps up to three million, Communists or suspected Communists massacred). It’s hard to imagine a total defeat of Communism in Vietnam would have led to any result less bloody than that. Thieu was no better than Suharto.

29

This is a new one on me. I mean, you can hardly say that what happened after we left Vietnam was a happy affair, but the tragedy of U.S. withdrawal was a result of having gone in to begin with. That notwithstanding, this notion that we felt ‘guilty’ for losing is a new one on me. Is this Iraq-era spin? Because it has always looked to me like we felt emasculated by this defeat, and that’s why we had so many movies in the 80’s that asserted American manhood by playing out fantasies of revenge and symbolic victory in Vietnam.

30

Well, he left out The Domino Theory.

And I can’t believe that I’m the first Bush Bashing Leftist to point out that Bush didn’t learn any lessons from Vietnam. Except to stay in Houston. (But it was a real sacrifice–the Ellington AFB Officer’s Club wasn’t very fancy.)

31

Well, before I buy that bridge, I’d like to look at the brochure.

Some cites for some of your assertions would be handy. I certainly have some thoughts on them, but I’d like to debate something other than what you suppose Nixon’s motivations were.

32

Quite seriously, what’s your point? Most of what you say has already been said and been responded to:

Check.

Check. But what’s your point? Sure it was better. But how does that play into our decisions in a rational way, other than “by golly, we’ve got to go rescue them” if one calls that rational? There’s still the practical problem of our inability to do so. Their corruption (hence the unwillingness of the South Vietnamese to fight for them) meant that we would have to do essentially 100% of the rescuing - a task beyond our abilities.

It’s only the tautology you say it is if you ignore the implication that occupying the North would have been far more difficult than the war we were already fighting. Imagine Iraq with jungles instead of desert.

It would also have destroyed any illusion that the North Vietnamese were the equivalent of prisoners awaiting liberation by the Forces of Good.

Are you saying “the deliberately withdraw support from the South Vietnamese” was “the most abominable peice of cowardly evil ever taken by the US of A” because it caused the fall of the South Vietnamese government to the North Vietnamese regular army in 1975, or are you saying that it was the most abominable thing America has ever done, despite having had zero effect on the outcome of the war?

33

No, it wasn’t. By no objective, moral, or ethical measure was the South Vietnamese government “better” to the Vietnamese people. It was every bit as nasty, murderous and oppressive as is North Vietnamese counterpart, and was in many respects less legitimate. How do you think that government was run, anyway?

Which, again, simply means losing. You don’t seem to quite grasp the reality oif the situation here; there was no course of action that would result in the United States getting a positive result. None, nada, zero, zilch. Nothing would have resulted in a better outcome. Invasion and occupation of the North would have made things far, far, far worse in the long run.

Letting the Vietnamese resolve their own war and run their own country by getting the hell out was in fact the best possible course of action, and the sooner it was done the better. The USA would have been better off simply packing up and leaving in 1970, and would have been worse off if they had left in, say, 1977. The only two options were to stay and exhaust U.S. resources by fighting a war that never would have ended, or to leave. It made no difference in the long run whether the North was invaded or not.

The rest of your rantings are really quite beside the point.

The issue here has nothing to do with Communism, nothing at all. Look, I hate Communism. It’s an evil, horrible ideology that caused untold suffering and hardship for millions of people. I’m glad it’s almost been wiped out and I’ll cheer the day Fidel Castro and Kim Il-Jong finally die and go straight to the inner circle of hell where they belong. The issue at play with Vietnam was not Communism and never was; it was imperialism. The main Vietnamese objective was self governance, not Communism; as it happens, Ho Chi Minh sided with the Communists, but he could have as easily sided with the USA if post-WWII events and unfolded slightly differently. One of the first things Vietnam did after unifying the country was to tell the Chinese and Soviets to get the fuck out, and they ended up getting into a pretty serious war with China just to reinforce the point. Vietnam was never interested in being a Soviet client state; they were interested in Vietnam being run by the Vietnamese. The United States, whether you like to admit it or not, was not allowing them to do that, and so they fought them. If the Soviets had sent in 500,000 troops and bombed the shit out of Saigon, I assure you the resistance would have fought the Soviets with equal vigour. If the Japanese had won World War II and remained the occupying power they’d have still been fighting in 1975. The issue was getting the foreigners out; the alliance with the Communist bloc was one of convenience.

Even if we assume the North Vietnamese government was nastier than the South Vietnamese government, and you’re underestimating how horrible the South Vietnamese government was but I’ll play along, that’s not the issue. The war could not have been won. end o’ story. U.S. involvement simply prolonged a war that really should have wrapped up in about 1957, and resulted in an additional two million people or so getting killed. Had the U.S. stayed another five years, the only added result would be more death. Had they invaded the North, more death. Stayed ten years? Fifteen? More death. YOU CANNOT LIBERATE A PEOPLE FROM THEMSELVES. “Liberation” does not mean “doing what the United States tells us.” It means governing yourself, and the USA wasn’t allowing that, so they were in the crosshairs and would have remained so.

As long as the USA occupied Vietnam or propped up a puppet government, the war was going to continue. No military strategy would have prevented that, short of nuking the entire country, which starts World War 3 and then you have bigger problems.

34

Vietnam never told the Soviet Union to get the fuck out. The Soviet Union and Russia maintained a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay until 2002 (the largest Soviet naval base outside of their own country), the Soviets provided billions of dollars in economic and military aid, and Vietnam joined Comecon and signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in November 1978.

35

You do know that Ho Chi Minh was one of the founding members of the French Communist Party, and visited the Soviet Union as early as 1924.

Ho was certainly an anti-imperialist, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that Communism was incidental to his worldview. It was central to it.

36

I think you’re creating a false equivalence, frankly.

Do you have something to back this up? And do you have an answer to the factual inconsistencies in the rest of your post?

37

I don’t recall anyone here saying they were.

38

The US thought it had won the Korean War.
Whadja expect? :dubious:

39

Lind’s primary thesis, BTW, is not that the U.S. could have won the war (though he does consider the possibility), but that it was necessary for the U.S. to fight it even if we should lose in the end. This was a period of the Cold War when many non-aligned nations were ready to jump on the U.S. or Soviet bandwagon, whichever appeared stronger and more reliable. Making a military commitment to stop Communism in Vietnam and sticking with it until it was clear there was no light at the end of the tunnel at least had the effect of shoring up American credibility in that regard. Had that not been done, Lind argues, the “bandwagon effect” might have tilted in the Soviets’ favor and the Cold War might never have ended. (Note that he’s not even arguing in terms of a regional “Domino Theory” in Southeast Asia, he’s looking at the global Big Picture.)

This “realist” formulation rather puts the “wrong to fight?” question in a different light. Of course, it does reflect a certain callousness to the fate of the Vietnamese people as compared to U.S. strategic interests. If the U.S. had never gotten involved in the first place, Vietnam would have gone Communist earlier – but far fewer Vietnamese would have been killed in the process. One need not be a leftist to think that might have been a much better outcome, locally.

40

What factual inconsistencies? You’ve pointed out that Ho was a long time Communist, which is unquestionably true and not something I said he wasn’t. My point was merely that, had events after WWII gone a different way, he could have been convinced to be a client of the United States (this requires radically different history from 1946 on, so I’m not saying it was a possibility in, say, 1968.) And the question has to be asked as to why so much of the country rallied around Ho Chi Minh. It was, of course, because he was the biggest name around in opposing foreign occupation of Vietnam.

As for creating an equivalent between South and North Vietnam, I admit that’s not something that’s easily quantified. What is fact, however, is that elections meant to unify the Vietnams were cancelled by the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam) with the support of the United States in large part because they didn’t want the people’s votes coiunted - since Ho Chi Minh’s victory was near-certain, something that’s now pretty much universally admitted. The government was never legitimately elected, acted in a beastly fashion to many of its citizens, and essentially acted as a puppet state. People weren’t setting themselves on fire in protest because it was nice to its citizens.