No, Virginia seceded from the United States. West Virginia seceded back into the United States.
There’s really no point in continuing to discuss this when you aren’t making any sense and the issue has nothing to do with the topic of the Vietnam War.
I’ll have to go with there’s no point in discussing this with you as it has nothing to do with Vietnam and you aren’t making any sense, but before I do:
Which makes their action insurrection and rebellion against the lawful US government. Again, because a majority may want to reject the laws of the US government and secede does not mean they get to trample on the rights of the minority that doesn’t want to. States don’t get to secede; this was settled 150 years ago.
Wait, what? Didn’t you just say they would have already rejected the laws of the US government? Why would there be lawsuits when one party does not recognize the validity of law? What would be the point? Should they insist upon carrying out their criminal actions of rebellion and insurrection, how do you think criminal actions are dealt with other than force of arms?
Ah, no. They haven’t. Even if they had, they’re a US organization, not a Mexican one, and have zero standing with the government of Mexico. The closest thing I can think of for these ‘several organizations’ you think exist is the Mexican Nationalist Front, which while a Mexican neo-fascist organization isn’t a political party, can’t nominate candidates and thus has no standing in the Mexican government either.
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I didn’t introduce the California question to this thread, but since you’ve chosen to continue the discussion of California’s secession (at the same time you said you weren’t going to discuss it :rolleyes: ), I’ve chosen to respond to your post. The assumption was that California had already seceded. What would that have entailed? Public discussions, a binding voter referendum, concurrence by the State Legislature, and the Governor didn’t veto it. California HAS seceded. So what happens next?
What would be the U.S. response to that scenario? Direct negotiations with Mexico, of course. International negotiations with California? International lawsuits? Negotiations thru a mutually agreed upon 3rd party? Canada perhaps? Maybe Switzerland? Lots of screaming, yelling, and der fingerderpointen. But a U.S. military invasion of California? Not likely.
You keep repeating this like it’s a fact.
It’s not a fact. It’s an opinion. A really bad and ignorant opinion.
As several of us have pointed out, the United States government has threatened to use military force against every state that threatened to secede and has used military force against every state that went ahead and seceded. We have a 100% record on this issue.
So why do you think we wouldn’t use military force against California if they seceded?
We didn’t say we weren’t going to discuss it. We said there was apparently no point in discussing it with you. Because you don’t seem to be following what anyone else is saying.
You’re going to have to make up your mind. If you going to repeatedly say you don’t want to discuss this with me, why do you continue to discuss it with me? :smack:
I don’t know of anyone, and I have inquired at backyard BBQ’s, parties, while carpooling, and on fishing, and hunting trips, who would demand that the U.S. military be used to force California (or any State) to return to the U.S.A… No one was in favor of actually shooting or bombing California’s residents. The hatred that existed in 1860s doesn’t exist today.
A bit of thread zombiery (?) but this is a fascinating subject and there have been some very well informed comments made.
I think, however, this sums up how the US could have won the Vietnam War:
.
The reality was that there wasn’t much for the people of South Vietnam to fight for (they didn’t know that a unified Vietnam under the communist would be grim). Vietnam’s ethnic minorities certainly had slightly more cause with the South but it wasn’t like the South made an effort to woo them or otherwise make their lives easier. The government of the South was utterly corrupt and staffed mostly by those who had served the French.
Also, the command of much of the Northern armies were from central Vietnam rather than Hanoi.
The only way the US could have won the war was to never have gotten into it in the first place.
Just to contribute a bit, there’s a great analysis of Vietnam applying Clauswitz’s principles, written in the early 80’s or 90’s by a colonel.
Pretty darn good read for military history buffs. Gist of the book as I recall:
-Failure to formally declare war and get the american people behind the war
-Adopting a ambiguous defensive posture
-Failure to allow movement in force into North Vietnam (and also Cambodia/Laos)
-Poor collaboration with the South Vietnamese Army
http://www.amazon.com/On-Strategy-Critical-Analysis-Vietnam/dp/0891415637
But that’s silly.
It’s not because we didn’t formally declare war that the American people weren’t fully behind the war. Who would we declare war on? North Vietnam? For the first half of the war we barely fought North Vietnamese, the majority of our fighting was against South Vietnamese irregulars, aka Viet Cong. The public was fine with the war as long as it was back burner stuff. We turned against the war when American kids started getting killed, and the Generals kept saying we were on the verge of victory, only somehow victory never happened after years and years of being almost ready to declare victory and come home.
As for the “defensive posture”, what did you want us to do? Bomb Hanoi? I think we tried that. The reason we were “on the defensive” is that we were trying to prop up the South Vietnamese government, whose main reason for existence was siphoning off American money into private hands. And even if we had occupied the North, what then? We’d still be dealing with an insurgency over the whole country, with us allied to a government that didn’t work.
Poor collaboration with the South Vietnamese army is a given in such a situation. You can’t just fix it by saying we should have fixed it. The problem is that the Americans didn’t trust or respect their South Vietnamese counterparts. You can’t just order them to trust and respect the ARVN, because they can see with their own eyes that the ARVN can’t be relied on.
It’s clear that there were some simple and obvious solutions to winning the war in Vietnam. The problem is that just because an answer is simple doesn’t mean it is achievable. Training and equipping the South Vietnamese or Iraqi or Afghan army so they can go toe to toe with the North, or ISIS, or the Taliban is a simple and obvious solution, the trouble is that no matter how much money and effort we put into those goals it never worked. You can’t just say we should have accomplished X or Y without explaining exactly how we were supposed to accomplish X or Y, when we spent the whole war trying to accomplish X or Y and never succeeding despite heroic efforts.
If your answer to winning Vietnam is to just do everything we did do only try harder this time, that’s not much of an answer.
The arguments in the book struck me neither as silly nor “just doing what we did but only harder.”
Furthermore, it is not “my answer” but merely the objective analysis of someone much more well versed in the application of military tactics than I am, albeit from 20-20 hindsight and a U.S. army background with all requisite biases (OTOH, show me someone with the requisite expertise and no biases). I apologize that I am not able to fully do the book’s arguments justice from my limited memory and would encourage interested dopers to read it, but feel that to dismiss such careful and deliberate analysis with a hand-wave could be a bit hasty.
To expand on the author’s points a bit in reply to your points:
Failure to Declare War - the author felt the failure to declare war left the American people very confused and greatly exacerbated the impact of American deaths and that a declaration of war and garnering of requisite buy-in would have forced more clarity into the strategy and support for the war (his arguments were pretty compelling here and I felt fairly relatable given the recent ambiguous “war on terror”)
Ambiguous Strategy and Defensive Posture- yes, the author felt we should have been more aggressive, bombed Hanoi, and invaded the North and focus on destroying the NVA more than the VC and forcing North Vietnam into a negotiated solution sooner (difficult to judge, but the objective would have been more clear than “kill the VC in South Vietnam and try not to lose”; also seemed very relatable given our experience in Iraq)
Poor Collaboration with the South Vietnamese Army - yes, perhaps inevitable to a degree, but some outcomes are much worse than others and the author felt chains of command and areas of responsibility could have been much better communicated (the arguments here also seemed fair)
I do however readily admit that there is not a “clear” answer, otherwise we wouldn’t need a thread on it, much less Great Debates.
It wasn’t, though. As far as Southeast Asian grimness goes, Communist Vietnam was and is really OK. Compare and contrast with Juche ; Khmer Cambodia ; terminally corrupt, civil war-y, repressive Indonesia… Modern Vietnam might not be the best it could possibly be in the best of all worlds, but it’s a decent place to live in AFAIK.
And honestly, considering their recent past, there was no way Vietnam would have ever gone with any foreign power’s idea of what was good for Vietnam. It’s not like the anticolonialist/communist insurrection was a fit of pique or otherwise unreasonable - they’d tried all the other ways. Repeatedly. They tried to offer a dominion. They tried to offer Vietnam in a still-subordinate-but-growing-into-independance-over-time. You can only be told to fuck off, shaddap, know your place and get with the program for so long before it starts getting mildly irritating - which American involvement in the war was ultimately all about, from the Vietnamese POV if nothing else. Going Communist might have meant eking back under China’s boot, which in practice it didn’t, but even if that had been true at least those assholes were their assholes.
This is a few months old and early in the thread, but I wanted to highlight this. States have a lot of tools in the tool chest, and with Vietnam the military option wasn’t a good one to use. You’re quite right that we won the peace in Vietnam, not only is it a very pro-American country, but despite to this day having a one-party State ruled by the communist party it’s also extremely not under China’s thumb.
In a scenario where we never left, at very best we’d have a South Vietnam that today was propped up by massive military aid, a military commitment to troop presence that continued to this day, a North Vietnam that would probably be far more extreme and likely allied with Russia or China.
Basically it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which “not losing” would have turned out better than the peace treaty and abandonment of South Vietnam. The better scenario still would have been to not be involved in the Vietnam war at all, and likely we’d be in the same place we are today but with 50,000 fewer dead American soldiers and essentially a “lost generation” of soldiers that took a decade for the military to recover from.
I know some people who took advantage of programs to leave Vietnam for America, and even at its grimmest it’s right to say Communist Vietnam hasn’t been that bad. Vietnam did and still does have a lot of problems, and people did get sent to “reeducation camps.” One Vietnamese man I know was one of the first batch of Vietnamese to be allowed to immigrate to the United States because he was a translator for the Americans and was in a category of people who were expected to be targeted for retribution as the North took over. He had some family member that got in trouble with the the new regime, but it was honestly “mild” trouble when compared with things that happened under Stalin, Mao, or elsewhere in Southeast Asia even that had similar wars.
Beyond that, the “opportunity cost” of the Vietnam war was political - the US basically letting itself be painted as what the Soviet propaganda wanted it to be : the oppressor, the foreign power using and abusing local power dynamics to their ends (and liberally using the beatstick to enforce its will), the inhumane construct that napalms kids to get its ends, the Aggressor (this reminds me of an old Sov’ joke, but nevermind)… America didn’t just lose a whole bunch of kids, and its own population’s trust, I think it can fairly be argued that it also spent most of its “we’re the Good Guys” capital from WW2 in the jungles.
And while Domino Theory is and was a bunch of fearmongering bullshit, I think it still cost them/y’all in the geopolitcal sphere by bolstering anti-US propaganda in a lot of places otherwise completely removed from the conflict itself - Cuba, sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America (though these cats had plenty of legit reasons to get pissed at the US of course), even the Middle East. I think it can be argued that while in the post-WW2 wrapup the US earned a lot of cred as the “we’re occidentals, but we’re not *those *occidentals”, it could have done a lot more with that cred than just splutter it all away in a pair of “you know, those occidentals might have been onto something…” wars.
ETA : also, are we talking reeducation camps or “reeducation camps” ? Like, the places where they make you recite Marxist theory, or the places where they make your own son bury you alive because that’ll learn him ?
In the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara tells a story about going to Vietnam in 1995 to meet with some of his old North Vietnam era counterparts. There are some eyebrow raising statements re: America’s stance on unification, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
China and Vietnam had a brief border flareup after Vietnam invaded Cambodia.
There were significant reprisals post-SVN collapse and ethnic minorities were, and continue to be, prejudiced in Viet Nam.
That being said, I agree with you that it isn’t as bad as other countries and the pogroms were no where near the scale of severity of the Russians or Chinese.
Any merit to the argument that US involvement in Viet Nam assisted Thailand by allowing it to rebuild and remain independent?
Both McNamara and Thuỷ are seeing that conflict through a lot of biases. Probably difficult not to given their personal involvement. Thuỷ isn’t correct to paint it solely as a struggle for independence, it was also a struggle to force a political system on a significant portion of the Vietnamese population that had rejected said political system.
With McNamara I’m really not sure what he’s talking about, we certainly were not willing to give the Vietnamese Communists everything they wanted in the 1960s. The string of Presidents we had there weren’t willing to let Vietnam be unified, independent and Communist.
I guess maybe in McNamara’s mind he was seeing mostly capitalist 1990s Vietnam and asking why couldn’t they have dropped Communism and then we’d have been okay with them, but a guy like Thuỷ wouldn’t admit or concede that Vietnam has dropped Communism. But instead is following sort of a Chinese model, where it is still a Communist government that follows a form of Communist principles, but in which a free market is allowed to exist as well.
I think what Thuy meant was the ability of the Vietnamese to have the independence to make their own choices, even if it was the wrong one and at the chagrin of the Americans.
Yeah, there’s not enough reason today for anyone else to want to invade a secessionist California. But by that same measure, there’s not enough reason for California to want to secede. If there were an issue in America that was divisive enough to compel Californians to secede, it’s likely also divisive enough that the rest of the country would be willing to try to stop us.
It’s certainly considered gospel here in Thailand, I can tell you that. Even into the 1980s, there were areas of northeastern Thailand where you could not go due to communist guerrilla dominance. The thinking here is the US action diverted attention away and gave time to start building infrastructure – paved roads, electricity etc – in that region that eventually paid off. Most Thais looked in horror at what happened to the Lao royal family and figured Thailand’s would have met a similar fate had the US distraction not slowed things down. In short, the domino theory was considered a reality.