Posted on 05/02/2005 5:52:58 PM PDT by CHARLITE
THE Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. However, 30 years after the war's end, the reasons for its outcome remain a matter of dispute.
The most popular explanation among historians and journalists is that the defeat was a result of American policy makers' cold-war-driven misunderstanding of North Vietnam's leaders as dangerous Communists. In truth, they argue, we were fighting a nationalist movement with great popular support. In this view, "our side," South Vietnam, was a creation of foreigners and led by a corrupt urban elite with no popular roots. Hence it could never prevail, not even with a half-million American troops, making the war "unwinnable."
This simple explanation is repudiated by powerful historical evidence, both old and new...we need to recognize what a profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime we faced three, four and five decades ago. And out of respect for the evidence of history, we need to recognize what happened in the 1970's and why.
In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hundreds of thousands of our Vietnamese allies were incarcerated, and more than a million driven into exile. The awesome image of the United States was diminished, and its enemies were thereby emboldened, drawing the United States into new conflicts by proxy in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. And the bitterness of so many American war veterans, who saw their sacrifices so casually demeaned and unnecessarily squandered, haunts American society and political life to this day.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Democrats.
Char:)
The Socialist/Communist Left is trying to aid the terrorists in the war on terror in the same way that they aided the Communists in Vietnam. We have pinhead civilians who hate this country and our military who are out there telling the military how to conduct interrogations of monsters who are trying to kill us. Until we develop the testicular fortitude to stand up to the pot smoking, maggot infested Commies, we'll always fall victim to the so-called "Vietnam syndrome." It is none of these terrorist-loving maggots business what we do to interrogate people who are trying to kill us and destroy our country. We need to stand up to them and, like Bubba, tell them to "kiss it." If these so-called anti-war protestors are so concerned about the health and welfare of terrorist buddies, I recommend they suit up and join them in their war to kill Americans.
This is totally true, and history will show it to be so.
The MSM, and to some extent the military itself at the time, misunderstood this as a popular insurgency, even as the NVA had 300K hard core regulars in the field. This was, in fact, a fairly conventional war, fought on extremely difficult jungle terrain with tactics that had not yet had a chance to evolve to the threat.
Ultimately, it was NVA tanks crashed the gates of Saigon in '75. Timid LBJ leadership and tremendous social and political change lost this war on the home front.
We are still too close to this war. Once the pain has past, it will be easier for historians and the country to embrass this emerging reality and take responsibility for it.
Char :)
The author overlooked the part Catholic vs. Buddhist played in this war. The first wave of refugees to arrive in the US were Catholics, never the majority in Viet Nam.
I will not register to read the rest of this story but my first thought is 'what have the done with the real New york Times?'
Here is a fabulous tribute to our veterans. It is a new website with photos of the WWII Memorial in D.C. and great patriotic music.
ping
"Victory Denied:Why your son faces death in No-Win Wars"
by Major Arch E.Roberts ,Committee to Restore the Constitution,Howes at Oak Ft.Collins Colorado 80521,1966
The man who helped program the Citizen Soldier Code Blue
training that we still recieved fragments of in 1969
makes a compelling case,as to WHY we did not win them
S.E.Asian War Games.InSept.of 1961 the other JFK (the one
who was President) Had a State Dept. Document 7277 Living at
Peace in a world without War Plan to surrender American
sovereignty to the Extra Constitutional United Nations That
global entity that reflects the USSR in structure and goals. Too many Americans prefer to believe the LIE that we
are yet Free and that nation established 1776-1791.They are the blind leading the blind .
bump
There were a lot of real culprits. The South's government was corrupt; our government was never really serious about winning - only about not losing; our tactics were frequently faddish; an emphasis on military management rather than military leadership alienated the troops; bright pronouncements of impending victory which went on for years led to disillusion at home... and it has to be said, the NVA was stubborn enough and good enough to take advantage of our shortcomings.
If we could have won the war we would have. But wars are between cultures and at the time our culture just wasn't good enough.
And every time we were close to winning, we stopped the B52s.
If they had the same majorities as they had then, they would do the exact same thing to this country and our troops, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I have no illusions about that matter. They would allow those countries to sink into chaos, murder, beheadings in soccer stadiums..........and they'd blame the mess they created on Bush and Republicans.
bump
I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.
I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that German Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.
There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.
Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.
He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Great response, which I read with much interest. I hope you continue to publish your well researched and well documented perspective. Your history as outlined here is in fact the reality of Vietnam; a military defeat caused directly by weak kneed civilian leadership.
It is amazing how liberal bias has distorted history so completely.
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