Could US win in Vietnam?

[Mike Collins]

Oh, come on Mike. Vietnam rose up in rebellion against the French under Ho Chi Minh, who was viewed as a national hero, akin to (or possibly greater than) George Washington. They won the war, and suddenly the US came in and divided the country and set up their own government in the South.

The fact that Ho Chi Minh was fighting the Americans ensured that the majority of the common people in the South wanted the North to win. Unlike in Korea, the Vietnamese had gained a united nationalist idealogy before they were divided (Korea was a colony of Japan before being split into a communist North and a capitalist South; and if people keep saying "Communist North and Democratic South" I'm going to scream! The opposite of communism is CAPITALISM, not DEMOCRACY! Rhee Sing-Man was as much of a dictator as Kim Il-Sung). When their national hero, their national icon, led the North, most of the people followed him.

1. Do you know how Ho became the leader of the resistance movement? He sent his flunkies out to murder every prominent non-Communist leader! He basically became the leader by default. This is hardly the actions of a Mandarin George Washington. More like a Mandarin Adolph Hitler!

After the French were defeated the few non-Communist Viet Minh left the movement. Did you know Nguyen Van Thieu (the last elected president of the Republic of Vietnam) was Viet Minh? Diem also was a part of the reisitance movement (although he campaigned for independence through peaceful means).

2. The notion that the commoners in the South wanted the Communists to win is not supported by reality. If they did, it seems they would have risen up and supported the NVA when it took over large population centers in 1968 and 1972. This never happened. The general populace of the South really didnt come to their aid in 1975 either. They just curled up and accepted what they saw as inevitable.

3. If they gained a "united nationalist ideology" why did large ARVN units often fiercely resist the NVA? If this were true, the common Joes (or common Nguyens) of ARVN should have just about always dropped their weapons and went home (or defected). If this were true the battles of An Loc, Phan Rang, Xuan Loc, or the counter-offensives during the 1972 Easter Invasion should not have occurred.

4. Most people in the Republic of Korea did NOT follow Kim Il Sung. Didnt happen. And Rhee was nothing like Kim. Not even close.

 

[Mike Collins]

And to think that communism = the dictatorship of the proletariot is a confusing of communism and Marxist-Leninism. There is a difference. Land reform ideas and the like are all added onto the original idea of communism (as are dictatorships); that is why there are always the suffixes, such as "Maoism" or "Leninism," to show whose idea it was.

This is all wordplay. Every nation that set Communism as its goal was totalitarian. Kind of makes you wonder.......

 

[Mike Collins]

And, honestly, how many people are killed in the United States due to capitalist policies? Dirty air, due to pollution, causes an estimated 35,000-38,000 heart attack-related deaths a year. Just heart attack-related deaths. What is the difference between taking someone's food and letting them starve, or dirtying someone's air and letting them die of a heart attack? I'm not negating the evils done by communist dictatorships, but this is really a case of pointing out splints in the eyes of others while ignoring the logs in your own.

Oh you must be joking!! Are you seriously comparing the state of US environmental regulation to policies in communist nations that amount to premeditated murder?? By the way, Ive heard the Communists left some real environmental lash ups in their industrialized nations. And lets not go into food (or lack therof). I think you better rethink going down this hole.

 

[Mike Collins]

And Ho Chi Minh hated passionately the cult of the personality that was developed by Stalin and used in both the USSR and China (and, after his death, in Vietnam). That is why most Minhists believe that, based on his writings, Minh would have fought against any attempt to deify him.

Then why didnt he stop the cult of personality that developed around him? Seems to me if he could get up enough steam to murder middle class people for being middle class he could easily have punished his zampolits and secret police for making people hang his picture up everywhere and worship him like a god...........

 

[Mike Collins]

And when, historically, have a people risen up completely as one? The American Revolution had people who supported the British; the Algerian revolution had many Francophiles. Hell, how many French embraced the conquering Germans with open arms? To thus call the American Revolution a revolution, but dismiss Vietnam's revolution as something else entirely, is rather hypocritical.

But KoA, youve been telling us that Ho and his Viet Minh had the support of everyone! If you want to accept the quote above, then you must accept that there could be more nationalists in Vietnam besides Ho and his crew.

 

[Mike Collins]

Notice, though, that names of the slain were posted in newspapers across America during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. I don't remember Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt putting pressure on a newspaper to not say the names of the dead, like the current Administration tried to prevent Nightline from airing the names of the dead in Iraq.

Dont you love how it all comes back to George Bush?

There was a big difference in the reporting of the dead in the wars you mention. There were no national newpapers running a daily tally or listing the names of war dead. They were reported in the obituaries which are for local consumption. Actually Wilson and Roosevelt did pressure the press at times to not report bad stuff. Not sure about Lincoln but he probably did to. He did suspend Habeas Corpus in the border states. I have a feeling a Maryland newspaper running anti war articles would have found itself out of business.......

 

[Mike Collins]

Have you ever read the Pentagon Papers? Not heard of them on Limbaugh, but actually read them? For all the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations' talk about halting communism, the Pentagon Papers make little mention of communism in their strategic outlook, but rather talk about rubber and lumber and other resources of a united (and US friendly) Vietnam. Hmm, I wonder why? Could it be that the war was for less-than-noble purposes?

Makes me wonder if youve read them yourself. They do mention halting Communism. As for the other reasons, so what? All nations act in their own self interest. This includes the USA. If anything, I would be more upset if it didnt include the "less than noble" reasons to be in Vietnam!

 

[MerryPrankster]

"Don't count me in with that, Matt; I abhor the firebombing of Dresden and other terror-bombings, call the massacre and expulsion of Germans from E. Europe a genocide, and am horrified at the idea of the Morgenthau Plan."

Fine. Sorry Rafi.

However, a lot of other Leftists will downplay or even ignore those things (and since many of the people who focus on the expulsions tend to be neo-Nazis, people will dismiss the expulsions as a fantasy altogether) while going beserk about My Lai, which was a much SMALLER atrocity that even the smallest terror-bombing. That seems a little hypocritical to me.

Do you recall Macsporan? IIRC he rabidly defended WWII and the US Civil War.

Rafi, the point of Sherman's "March to the Sea" was to break the Southern people's will to fight. It wasn't convincing them that secession was a bad idea (a 1864 "hearts and minds" campaign); it was "submit or we will burn your crops, rape your women, etc." The rape bit was the exception rather than the rule (though it probably occurred fairly often), but crops were burned, livestock carried off, etc and there were many, MANY cases of starvation as a result.

Sort of like William the Conqueror's infamous Harrying of the North, which lead to 100,000 deaths in northern England, largely through starvation (deliberate destruction of crops and farm implements).

 

[MerryPrankster]

"Not sure about Lincoln but he probably did to. He did suspend Habeas Corpus in the border states. I have a feeling a Maryland newspaper running anti war articles would have found itself out of business......."

Lincoln shut down quite literally thousands of newspapers. He also had VERY open-ended sedition laws, which were used against lots of his critics. Reminds one of Woodrow Wilson. One would think a son of the South such as Wilson would have known better...

Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln," though some parts of it have been reasonably argued against, tells quite a bit about US citizens being detained without trial, newspapers being shut down, lots of Maryland legislators being arrested to prevent them from voting to secede, etc.

 

[Paul Spring]

War and legal rights

In regards to the US Civil War, it should be noted that the Confederacy was in general no more respectful of the rights of pro-Union people than the Union was to pro-Confederates.

I remember reading a history of the various political struggles and civil wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BCE. One quote that really stuck in my mind is this

Gaius Marius, a powerful Roman politician and general who briefly made himself a virtual dictator, was once criticized by his opponents for taking several measures to reward his followers and punish opponents that were clearly illegal. Marius replied by saying:

The law speaks too softly to make itself heard in the noise of war.

In other words, legal niceties and by implication respect for people's legal rights go right out the window during times of war. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it does seem to be the way that most societies handle things.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

B.S. It very much was a hostile takeover! The Vietnamese in the south did not want to come under the control of the Hanoi regime. They may not have liked the folks in Saigon, but there was never any true support for the goons in Hanoi.

The notion that the Communists would have come to power had there been true elections is silly. Again, the support was not there.

That is absolutely untrue. The US prevented elections because we knew the communists would win. Our completely myopic view of Viet Nam as a Soviet Cold War battlefield prevented us from seeing that it was really a nationalist struggle against colonialism.

There are only two ways we could have won in Vietnam.

1. Nuclear attack, which is not really an option, and would be pointless in any case.

2. Excepting Ho Chi Minh as a client when he asked to be. That was the real failure - supporting a hopeless French effort to reestablish their colonial rule.

 

[Mike Collins]

That is absolutely untrue. The US prevented elections because we knew the communists would win. Our completely myopic view of Viet Nam as a Soviet Cold War battlefield prevented us from seeing that it was really a nationalist struggle against colonialism.

There are only two ways we could have won in Vietnam.

1. Nuclear attack, which is not really an option, and would be pointless in any case.

2. Excepting Ho Chi Minh as a client when he asked to be. That was the real failure - supporting a hopeless French effort to reestablish their colonial rule.

Oh, the Republic of Vietnam had quite a few elections. The Communists werent allowed to participate because it was a given they would cheat and bully people. Besides, they didnt really want to participate as it would tend to recognize the legitimacy of the Republic. The notion that Vietnam wasnt a Cold War Battlefield ignores reality. The Communists were armed to the hilt with Communist equipment. If it wasnt for this gear, they never could have functioned.

As to your means of winning the war:

1. Nukes- Nonsense. You give the Communists waaaay to much credit. Do you really think if the VC were cut off from the North they could continue to thrive? Do you really think the NVA could break through to their Southern puppets if resisted by a combined US/RVN defense? No need for nukes here.

2. Befriending Ho- No way. Ho spent his entire adult life as a Communist thug. He precisely modeled the North off what he saw as an understudy in the USSR and PRC. Why do you believe he would suddenly become a Western ally?

 

[Coriolanus]

Didn't Ho Chi Minh also support the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and seek Truman's support after WWII?

Anyway, as for winning the war, the possibilities of keeping it a Special Forces conflict or bombing from the beginning make the most sense.

 

[Mr.Bluenote]

And to think that communism = the dictatorship of the proletariot is a confusing of communism and Marxist-Leninism. There is a difference. Land reform ideas and the like are all added onto the original idea of communism (as are dictatorships); that is why there are always the suffixes, such as "Maoism" or "Leninism," to show whose idea it was.

No, it is not a confusing, KoA, and NO there's no difference - look it up! Engells and Marx operates with this term in the period between the revolutionary take-over and the implementation of true Communism.

Oh, and you're right Coriolanus, Uncle Ho did seek Truman's aid after WW2. As far as I know Ho always was more of a Nationalist than a Communist.

Mike, I totally agree with you! Good points!

Sigh, Pasha, you do know that the US forces in Vietnam actually won each and every engagement in which they fought the Viet Cong and NVA, right? After the French retreat in, eh, 54(?) the conflict between the North and the more democratically inclined South was indeed a struggle between Communism and Freedom!

I really do wonder where people have all these strange ideas about Vietnam from? Olliver Stone? It's as easy as scrathing your back, finding out wether or not there was a popular uprising in Vietnam/Indochina etc etc. It really annoy me to no end when people have these reflex reactions (what's the english term? Knee-jerk reactions?)!

Best regards!

- B.

 

[Knight Of Armenia]

The point is that I have found out, Bluenote; hell, my recent professor for Modern Far-East History was a CIA employee whose job it was to understand what was happening in Vietnam (interesting side note: the CIA was well aware of all this, but believed that US military might would inevitably prevail).

Washington forced Vietnam to be divided into two instead of holding a united national election.

And I can't believe that Mike is trying to use the fact that people are never 100% anything as a point against me. The majority of people in anything are always passive. But, in this case, the majority of the active minority were pro-Communist (more correctly, pro-Minh). The majority of the people did not rise up against the British, either, but simply went along with what the active minority in their area did. It even exists now (why most people in the US don't vote, but have an active opinion on what the government does? Rather than try to alter who their leader will be, they just accept it and talk about it).

The entire history of Vietnam has been similar to the Vietnamese war; their one power to defend themselves has been a willingness to use their population and their terrain to stymie enemy troops. That is the nature of the Vietnam conflict; it was just another struggle against foreigners for many, including the South, whose population, by and large, did not approve of foreign troops in their nation.

And Bluenote, reread what you said. The dictatorship of the proletariot theoretically comes BEFORE communism. Thus, to equate the two is incorrect. Communism has never been achieved in this world, aside from small communes; simply because dictatorships refer to themselves as communist, doesn't mean that they are communist.

As for the health reasons? It never fails to astound me how conservatives can simply write off the environment, and treat discussions about it as quasi-sci-fi. The Bush administration itself admitted that 35,000-38,000 people die a year by heart attack-related causes due to air pollution. That, as you say, is cold hard fact. Most of this pollution is caused by coal power plants, and most of them refuse to put in scrubbers (and are now allowed to thanks to the Clean Skies initiative) because it would cost them too much money. Does the fact that the USSR also polluted bring consolation to the families of the tens of thousands dead as a direct result of a FINANCIAL decision? I somehow doubt it. Does the fact that "hey, at least we didn't starve them" make the families any happier? I doubt that too.

Corporations make decisions that they know will cause death (the Ford Pinto, for example). Some administrations oppose this, some support it. But because it's a corporation, we're supposed to act like it's not as cruel as Stalin's Purges? That, I don't buy into.

 

[Knight Of Armenia]

Honestly, trying to argue that the Vietnamese communists didn't enjoy popular support is like saying that the Chinese communists didn't enjoy popular support; it's just not supported by the facts. All the old-time Nationalist generals say that Chiang's policies destroyed any support they had, and troops that had been given directions and aid by villagers now found that those same villagers would lead them into traps and take potshots at them. Whatever the governments did AFTERWARDS (in both Vietnam and China, establish a cult of the personality), during the conflicts in question, they had the support of the majority.

 

[NapoleonXIV]

"I really do wonder where people have all these strange ideas about Vietnam from? Olliver Stone?"

It might also have something to do with the fact that we are now scheduling vacation packages of a nation still being run by the people who killed 50,000 of our countrymen. I know one former LRRP who actually went on one and he swore to God the native tour director was the man he was going to have had to kill if he had stayed for another tour. If these people were indeed evil incarnate then what has changed in 30 years except that they've gotten older and can now make cheap shirts? If they weren't, then the whole reason for the war was a lie, start to finish

One thing none of your scenarios seems to take into account is the reaction of the Russians to any of these proposals. We could indeed have won the war easily whenever we wanted, with 4-5 strategically placed big nukes; if we could have somehow made the Soviets not start WWIII in response.

 

[Mike Collins]

And I can't believe that Mike is trying to use the fact that people are never 100% anything as a point against me. The majority of people in anything are always passive. But, in this case, the majority of the active minority were pro-Communist (more correctly, pro-Minh). The majority of the people did not rise up against the British, either, but simply went along with what the active minority in their area did. It even exists now (why most people in the US don't vote, but have an active opinion on what the government does? Rather than try to alter who their leader will be, they just accept it and talk about it).

Ah, but it is you foisted on your petard, not I! I freely admit most Viets were essentially bumps on logs. You on the other hand stated the communists enjoyed wide ranging support. Whats it going to be? Dont worry, I know. You want both.......

 

[Mike Collins]

The entire history of Vietnam has been similar to the Vietnamese war; their one power to defend themselves has been a willingness to use their population and their terrain to stymie enemy troops. That is the nature of the Vietnam conflict; it was just another struggle against foreigners for many, including the South, whose population, by and large, did not approve of foreign troops in their nation.

Too bad we can never get empirical proof to verify this deep seated Vietnamese loathing of foreigners on their land. The rest of this statement could have some validity. Its about as valid as saying the Germany people have historically tried to gain hegemony over mainland Europe to gain resources and defensive buffers. Both could be true, but think og the God awful baggage that come along with them!

 

[Mike Collins]

Honestly, trying to argue that the Vietnamese communists didn't enjoy popular support is like saying that the Chinese communists didn't enjoy popular support; it's just not supported by the facts. All the old-time Nationalist generals say that Chiang's policies destroyed any support they had, and troops that had been given directions and aid by villagers now found that those same villagers would lead them into traps and take potshots at them. Whatever the governments did AFTERWARDS (in both Vietnam and China, establish a cult of the personality), during the conflicts in question, they had the support of the majority.

There you go again. Did they have popular support or did they have the support of an active minority? Cant have both.