with a harder and more expensive vietnam, would the money towards space be cut?
DBWI: LBJ Goes to War in Vietnam
- Thread starter Amadeus
- Start date
Bitter memories of the Korean War helped to dampen the appeal of a similar intervention in Vietnam. Perhaps if the Korean War had never happened, the US would have been more willing to intervene in Vietnam.
I actually think there was a strong sentiment to intervene, actually. Quite a few generals and commanders were screaming "treason" when LBJ left. The whole "Domino Theory" was still going strong at the time, and only when the loss of Vietnam didn't blossom into something far worse did it stop. Of course, even then some say we stopped the Commies elsewhere, thus stopping the dominoes.
Not publicly anyway. They may have been furious in private, but they knew their duty to the Constitution and avoided criticizing the President in public.
Quite a few came close to pulling a MacArthur, if the precedent hadn't been set (i.e. try to overrule the Prez and you get fired).
They're not the same; Vietnam was a divided nation, the USSR went in to stop a rebellion and ended up wrecking the country.
The North Vietnamese wouldn't have had a chance against us unless China committed troops like they did in Korea. Every time we jumped into a conflict - WW1, WW2, Korea - we tipped the balance in favor of the good guys. (We might not have removed the Kim regime but we did drive them out of South Korea).
Most likely there would be a North and South Vietnam today, the former a humanitarian disaster and the latter a major economic player.
Most likely there would be a North and South Vietnam today, the former a humanitarian disaster and the latter a major economic player.
The Korean civil war began when Southern revolutionaries made an impossible promise of an uprising coincident with an invasion by northern revolutionaries.
The second Vietnamese civil war began when southern revolutionaries effectively undermined the RVN and commenced effective military action against the ARVN. The PLAF received minimal assistance from the PAVN, as well noted in propaganda and US internal studies from the time. One could even suggest the lack of PAVN support was criminal incompetence against the revolution.
The US would have been intervening against a kind of Malaya situation, but one where the revolution wasn’t restricted to ethnic minority communists but a multitendential ethnic majority hegemonised by communists with a national myth. As in Afghanistan a foreign power allied to incompetent locals would be at war with a revolutionary people. Which is why I suggested upthread that the course of the war would be dependent on a spectrum from under-committed battlefield loss through to over-committed economic ulcer.
Also, people underestimate the threat of war with China and the Soviet Union if we invaded North Vietnam. Seriously, Mao was nuts and would not have hesitated to get stuck in if we crossed the DMZ.
Why is this red scare still ongoing? Is it all just because of that Red Aksum madman? Or why do you think every capitalist is a "good guy"?
What could it have blossomed into? Laos was taken by the worker and the peasant, as was Cambodia.
Do you mean something like the "Red Ashoka/July 6 Movement" (which was an extremely fringe splinter, mind you!) taking over all of India, or what sort of implausible scenario are you talking about?
Not like the guy had a good diet, or even obeyed his doctor about being on one. He had some pretty crazy antics; remember the time he terrified the Shah of Iran with his amphibious car?