Could this POD work?

I was looking at Cracked.co and I cae across this article.

5 Embarrassing Failures History Class Turned Into Victories

In 1968, the Vietnam War was steadily escalating. The North Vietnamese (the commie bad guys) attempted to make one really big overwhelming push and win the war once and for all. Known as the Tet Offensive, the attack involved more than 80,000 troops attacking more than 100 towns and villages, and was the largest military action at that point in the war.
How History Remembers It:
The Tet Offensive signaled the turning point of the war for the North Vietnamese, and against the U.S.-backed South. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., this had started happening:
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Botanical warfare.
The people were starting to distrust their government in a serious way, and President Lyndon Johnson's administration found that it was almost completely unable to convince the American people that the war was still winnable.
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"We have fire-breathing tanks! How can we not win?"
CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who at the time was the most trusted and recognizable name in news, went on TV and declared that the U.S. should basically just "negotiate, not as victors," because at best "the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." Upon hearing this, Johnson was rumored to say, "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
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Life
"I think I left it in Arkansas somewhere."
After coming into office, President Richard Nixon initiated a policy of "Vietnamization" and withdrew troops from the region. This meant the North Vietnamese were free to take over South Vietnam, and the whole thing had been one huge, stupid waste.
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"Don't feel bad, guys. One day, they'll turn this war into some pretty great movies."
The Reality:
The Tet Offensive resulted in a huge defeat for the communists.
Though initially the attacks caught the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces off guard, they pushed back hard and inflicted massive casualties, all but crippling the North Vietnamese military. The failure of the North Vietnamese was so great that far from being a demonstration of their imminent victory, American generals such as William Westmoreland believed that, after Tet, the North Vietnamese army was so damaged that it was finally on the verge of defeat.
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Again, fire-breathing tanks.
But that wasn't the narrative that would survive in the press. Earlier we referred to these versions of history as "wishful thinking," but it's not that anyone short of the Viet Cong were rooting for the Americans to fail. It's just that those who believed the war was a dead end finally had their proof, whether or not the facts on the ground supported it. This was the story everyone opposed to the war had been waiting to tell.
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If you hum "Ride of the Valkyries" loudly enough, you can ignore anything.
North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh actually called it a few years earlier when he said his side didn't need military victories, but only needed to hang on until the U.S. got sick of the whole thing and bailed out. So, who knows, maybe treating Tet as a disaster, and thus making it politically easier to start getting out, was the best thing that could have happened. But it's giving a whole bunch of credit to a North Vietnamese army that kind of got its ass kicked.



So after reading this I got an idea for a POD. If the US edia had not reacted the way they did and paid attention to US ilitary specialists; could the US have had enough support to continue the war and possibly win it?
 
Was it possible for the North Vietnamese to lose? Of course. With the Viet Cong destroyed in Tet, post-'68 is the easiest South Vietnamese possible victories since JFK supported the Diem coup in '63.

Tet is a solid POD, but even as late as 1972 American airpower + South Vietnamese forces crushed North Vietnamese forces. If the last series of offensives had been stopped (i.e. Congress doesn't cut off funding/airpower) then its unlikely the North could have tried again until '78 to '80, especially if Soviet Union supplies slowed down.

The problem rests in two areas: what does victory buy you? How long can the corrupt South Vietnamese state stay together even without North/Viet Cong pressure?
 
Of course the United States could have won the war, especially if all the military restrictions were lifted. However, at the end you still have a corrupt and unsustainable South Vietnamese government.
 
The trouble with the US involvement in Vietnam is that the mission was never defined. How do you get to victory if no one has a clue as to what that looks like? Its sort of like the punch line from the comic strip Monroe "Even when you win you still loose"
 
The trouble with the US involvement in Vietnam is that the mission was never defined. How do you get to victory if no one has a clue as to what that looks like? Its sort of like the punch line from the comic strip Monroe "Even when you win you still loose"

That is why I say victory is possible if you remove the military restrictions and invade the North with the mission of forcing a surrender.
 
I think this could work, not easily but it could, assuming the US stays in long enough for a quasi stable government to form, like South Korea (yes I am comparing Apples to Oranges but it is the closest thing I can think of)
 
The problem in Vietnam was not military, it was political - in South Vietnam. The US could hold off North Vietnam, but could not crush the insurgency because the S Vietnamese Govt basically could not present itself as an alternative to Ho Chi Minh. In the end the problem was not keeping North Vietnam out of South Vietnam, but how to keep South Vietnam from imploding once the US left. Furthermore, no matter how badly the US dealt with the N. Vietnamese military, once the US left the north would once again support a southern insurgency.

This does not mean insurgents/guerillas always win, but you need to defeat them politically as well as militarily - not happening in S Vietnam.
 

GSchmi781

Banned
I'm afraid this isn't really a POD.

While this could be rather interesting, to make it plausible, you need an actual idea that is more specific than "the media doesn't condemn the war after the Tet Offensive". The question you need to ask here is why doesn't the media condemn the war after the Tet Offensive.
 
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