Disclaimer: 037771 has made me seek out 'Hanoi's War' by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen. Brother, seeing as it's been so many weeks since I last responded to you, don't be surprised if I don't come back to this thread for an even longer period of time, as I read and digest that work.
It seems logical then to conclude that if Nixon or, I daresay, Kennedy, somehow decides to invade Laos from US bases in Thailand, an occupation would likely reduce North Vietnamese aid to the NLF.
This sounds a lot like nineteen sixties US Cold War warrior thinking and analysis RE military tactics; doesn't your reading of North Vietnamese history address their own generals' assessments RE the lay of the land?
Anyway, Kennedy wanted to stay out of Laos because he feared Chinese intervention. That was his rational choice; fight in the RVN, not in Laos or even the North, because the sensible thing was to avoid finding out what Mao's limits were for getting involved against US forces. Natch.
You can see the point I'm trying to make is relating to the flexibility of the VWP Politburo vis-a-vis the conduct of the war, in that a) the body was riven by factionalism throughout the early to mid 1960s, and b) that it was prone to alter its decision-making through the application of external stimuli.
This is a professional sounding argument, to be sure, but once again you seem to be basing it on maybe a single work, maybe two. And this thesis (or two) of yours is pretty heterodox, not something you can credibly convince me about, not when you have no worthwhile passage you can cite about either Hanoi factionalism or the rest of the communist blocs' baleful influences on Hanoi's processes.
And you haven't answered my question about 'how aggressively opposed to the longterm survival of the South were this peace faction you talk of?'.
North Vietnam isn't destined to fight doggedly for reunification in the manner to which we are accustomed.
Seems implausible, as far as I currently know. Might make good fiction, but that's besides the point.
What's 'plain weird' as you put it is your insistence that I am arguing that.
My point was that you're constantly coming back to poorly-supported heterodox notions, ala the NLF could easily have become independent of Hanoi.
If you don't have access to scholarly articles or an academic library, then I would now recommend buying Hanoi's War, as well as Chen Jian's Mao's China in the Cold War, because if you're just relying on secondary material that ultimately just relates to the American viewpoint, then you're not reading anything new.
This is the one valid point you have against me here, and I will cop to it.
But trust me, if, once I've read this material, and I find you're analysis makes extrapolations that are yours and yours alone, not supported by said literature, then I reserve the right to be a little offput.
The comments that you make in the link you supplied do not convince me that you did anything more than skimmed it, at best for this conversation... Which begs the question, have you read anything that would suggest you appreciate that there is another side to telling the story of the Vietnam War beyond the American? I assure you, having consulted nearly all of the books you cite in the bibliography on your thread dedicated to Kennedy and Vietnam, I am just as schooled in American policy during this period as you are... I included the clip from Youtube because a) this is a man who has done the legwork sifting through the primary sources and come to enough conclusions to write an informed biography about John F. Kennedy, and therefore even a succinct opinion of his would have merit (a great deal more than both of ours, I might add,) and b) I don't really believe that you have actually read the book to any great extent.
As a matter of interest, do you rely entirely on general histories/popular biographies for the US side of your knowledge about this war, while only going to the trouble of apparently reading dedicated strategic histories when it comes to Hanoi?
Seriously, Dalek is nowhere near being a geopolitical or national-security-state specialist here; do you want me to get his Kennedy book out of the library so I can count the number of paragraphs he devotes to Vietnam?
It's just embarrassing to rely on a TV historian like him. Seriously, I read at least two military-staff-college-grade histories when researching my essay on JFK, and that's including one book I didn't even bother using in my finished piece.
The point you made in 2011 about Kennedy resisting the 'NSC establishment' is...shaky, to say the least.
Where do I say any such thing in my post from two years ago? This?:
Magniac 2011 said:
I find it very hard to believe that JFK can go against his entire NSC establishment
Kennedy consistently exhibited a habit of not listening to even his closest advisers, even Bundy
I hope you're not complaining about me dismissing the popular historiography RE Kennedy supposedly bucking the system on Vietnam; Lawrence Freedman quietly derides that stuff as 'the anecdotal evidence', that stuff about Jack Kennedy having a secret plan to end the war, a secret plan he doesn't even have to inform McNamara about while alive. Guys like Freedman mostly ignore it all, because that pop narrative is real anti-intellectual stuff, it's a rejection of both primary and specialist secondary history.
If you do have any in-depth knowledge of the actual Camelot-era national security state, then you'd dismiss that thin gruel, too.
Which begs the question, have you read anything that would suggest you appreciate that there is another side to telling the story of the Vietnam War beyond the American?
I'm sorry, but I see no reason to believe your pacifist-hypothetical-scenario take on the Vietnam war actually has much in common with the actual anti-American, Communist North one.
Your notion that you're enlightening us about the 'other side' confounds me, seeing as you're constantly implying they didn't have any determinative motivation to fight this war! How on earth do you try to express anything from the communist PoV in such western, liberal pacifist terms?
and you seem to have hit upon the reason when you stated a lot earlier that you suspected the Dove faction didn't write a lot of autobiographies lamenting the reunification of Vietnam. Well, they didn't, and you can probably think up for yourself why they didn't. What we do have is a newly-accessed primary source base that alludes to their intentions which, while not fully defining their endgames, nonetheless challenges the orthodox narrative that Hanoi was hell-bent on reunification from '54 onwards.
This doesn't really strike me as the study of history, as opposed to it being the citing of history-speak in support of polemic.
I can't but take this as you trying to impose a narrative over either thin material, or material that's essentially social history, not war policy history.
Are you even citing primary sources of the Hanoi regime, or just of its dissidents?
Why on earth would I decide to do that on a site entitled 'Alternatehistory.com'? Counterfactualism is the whole point, and the reason we're having this discussion in the first place.
But you keep on challenging real history with your fictional-scenario-inspired extrapolations, with seemingly too much input from social/popular history. That's the problem.
Anyway, I'm going to delve into that book you cite as your main inspiration for believing them lot didn't have the heart to fight the running dog imperialists. Who knows, I might discover they actually wanted to fight a war of nationalist reunification, that it wasn't all just a perfect storm of weak coincidences that made them march South.
