Protests will be even bigger due to how the US is bascially commiting warcrimes in a foreign country.
Protests were about US dead. Only veterans Fuck The Army type movements really cared about war crimes. Civvies cared about blood and treasure. Even the radical liberals (who believed themselves marxists) cared more about US honour than dead foreigners.
An alternative was, to adopt the Malaysian style, approach favored by the New Zealanders and Australians.
That also used Bombings, heavy deforestation by chemicals and Strategic Hamlets.
ANZAC operations were really no more successful in the long run than US COIN tactics. The ANZACs just fought better in the jungle. When the ANZACs pulled out the VC came right back:
Australia, with attached Kiwis, was given a friendly wicket by the PLAF, didn't bat against PAVN bowling except at Long Tan, and basically had no effect on the NFL/PRG's political programme.
The PLAF/PAVN deliberately attempted to disengage from US forces, preferring to concentrate on ARVN formations. The PAVN directly exerted force against the US a couple of times, and US forces basically had no effect on the NFL/PRG's political programme.
Could the US have killed fewer US personell to achieve a corresponding failed result?
Korea was a more brutal war than Vietnam.
Most people forget that North Korea was successfully deindustrialised by an air campaign in what amounted to a horrific war crime, on the scale of "No Gong" Harris or Curtis "The Demon." There is no way to argue, unlike with the Mad Bomber or the person responsible for an indefensible air strike which immolated an city, Tokyo, that the failure of OPFOR to comply with relevant scales of law of war meant that fall back reciprocity laws of war were in effect, nor that it was proportionate or neccessary in a non-strategic war where external sources of strategic supply existed. There is simply no way to defend the deindustrialisation of North Korea by airstrike within law of war, reciprocity, or in fact military necessity. What was practiced on Tokyo was perfected on the industrial regions of the DPRK. The end political results were probably in nobody's interest.
Vietnam was a very nasty war on scales which humans comprehend well. Raped and murdered villagers. A city of officials tossed into pits. We have a long cultural history of these war crimes, practiced over thousands of years. The *perfect* obliteration of a modern industrial society by aerial bombardment is an incomprehensible war crime to most in its scale scope and mechanisation.
What if the U.S. government "embraced" communist insurgencies by burying them in aid and consumer goods? Kill them with kindness, pay off the new party elites, make them answerable to D.C. and not Moscow or Beijing. Beyond ideological problems making this a non-starter, what's the downside to this?
if the U.S. had decided to support the Vietminh during and after the WWII
About the only way to do this would be a percentages agreement with the French bourgeoisie about the independent political composition of a French Union's member states and a solid commitment from the VWP that it would preferentially trade with France over the Soviet Union. And pigs will fly out of my arse. On the other hand a PCI France dependent upon the United States in opposition to the Soviet Union is an interesting concept. But in any of these case you have to wait until Stalin goes around killing Party Members in Fraternal States in 1949.
Not really. It is the capitalism problem. For aid to be sufficient to have political effect, the US has just functionally legitimised why it opposes the Soviet Union, and for that matter UK Labour: the appearance or actuality of increasing the power of the working class to reduce capital's profits. US attitudes to the Soviet Union weren't just anti-Soviet (which they were, for realpolitik reasons of competing blocs of capital). The US bourgeoisie's discourses about the Soviet Union believed it to actually represent some kind of historical transfer of power to the working class and threat to the expanded reproduction of the value form: much like the Soviet bourgeoisie, the US bourgeoisie believed the Soviet Union to be communist.
Now Marxists, Anarchists, or people who actually look at the wage relationship in expanded value reproduction as the sin qua non of capitalism should feel free to laugh, but ideological self-deception is a common place, it is why it is called ideology.
Now the US elite may be dumb as a load of fucking bricks, but before the 1990s they actually promoted rather intelligent functionaries to positions of decision making power. And enough of those functionaries know that legitimising what appears to be communism legitimises communism. Why Tito? Apart from being fucking fabulous, the split between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia emerged, Yugoslavia was cheap to maintain (ie: not a sufficient goods supply to buy them off, they were bought off already by dick waving between party elites). You get Yugoslavia for free. You have to pay for Vietnam by legitimising communism.
just how badly run the Tet Offensive and how it's political success caught the NV government by surprise.
Not everyone in the VWP(north). The heavily purged Giap network knew Tet-1 was a clusterfuck coming, and had been warning the party despite being purged for doing so. Remember that Khe Sahn was expected to work by the Duan faction.
yours,
Sam R.
en.wikipedia.org
www.jstor.org
journals.sagepub.com
