AHC: Keep LBJ from Escalating Vietnam.
- Thread starter dw93
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- 1960s lyndon johnson vietnam
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
good luck.
Once the momentum for war gets rolling, it's oh so very easy to think, we need to try more and try harder, and then we can conside giving up.
Plus, the cold war very much had a religious overlay in that we were the good people who believe in things vs. the godless communists who are willing to do all kinds of sneaky, underhanded, abusive, mean things.
Once the momentum for war gets rolling, it's oh so very easy to think, we need to try more and try harder, and then we can conside giving up.
Plus, the cold war very much had a religious overlay in that we were the good people who believe in things vs. the godless communists who are willing to do all kinds of sneaky, underhanded, abusive, mean things.
Dayton Kitchens
Banned
Almost impossible as in the eyes of LBJ, it was the Kennedy's who got the U.S. heavily engaged in the war in the first place.
Also you would have to have no Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Not the famous, infamous one where the North Vietnamese didn't actually attack at all, but the one two days earlier where the North Vietnamese torpedo boats did indeed attack the U.S.S. Maddox (admitted to by the North Vietnamese General Giap in 1995).
Also you would have to have no Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Not the famous, infamous one where the North Vietnamese didn't actually attack at all, but the one two days earlier where the North Vietnamese torpedo boats did indeed attack the U.S.S. Maddox (admitted to by the North Vietnamese General Giap in 1995).
Kennedy's Vietnam was a non American conflict just as in Laos. It is not hard to avoid an Americanized conflict for the same reasons we avoided war in Laos. The war was in LBJ's nature. It was to spank the enemy into giving in. Geopolitics is more complex. The Tonkin incident is testament to that because it was an uncertain attack that could have been easily ignored. Instead it was used as a casus bellum for intervention in an uncertain situation that would handicap options for resolution other than war, tie the United States to the burden of that action, and would make it a political issue in the United States (whereas it was previously a relatively minor issue that Americans ignored) which would tie the hands of the president in terms of what he could due without review and political fallout. Tonkin was building a mountain out of a molehill and falsely telling the American people we knew with certainty we had been attacked. For all the LBJ revising of image, of which I take part myself, starting a war based on something as shoddy as that required active intent to get the US into a conflict. That is not even a discussion of being forced into war by deteriorating events. That is an issue of creating
an excuse for war.
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On a personal note, what is it with all you guys and the JFK Vietnam phase lately? You're stressing out my vacation.