Posted on 01/28/2007 10:59:35 AM PST by quidnunc
Perhaps the most immoral decision ever made by any agent of our federal government was Congress’ decision to pull the rug out from under the government of South Vietnam.
The decision to abandon Saigon was actually taken in three steps. The first came in June 1973 when Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment prohibiting further U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. As Henry Kissinger has bitterly noted, that act decisively undercut the ability of the Nixon administration to enforce the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords that had been signed just a few months earlier.
The second step was Congress’ decision to cut its aid appropriations for South Vietnam by nearly half for fiscal 1974-75. That cut thoroughly demoralized the South Vietnamese government and military and, as archival records from North Vietnam later revealed, led Hanoi to begin preparing its final offensive.
The ugly story finally came to a close just a few months later, when the newly installed “Watergate” Congress refused desperate requests from the Ford administration for emergency American aid with which to resist Hanoi’s Soviet-supplied invasion.
-snip-
The security situation in the countryside of South Vietnam had improved dramatically by the early 1970s, with the Viet Cong having been effectively swept from the villages and rice paddies due to the losses suffered during the Tet offensive and the subsequent effectiveness of Creighton Abrams’ “clear and hold” tactics.
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 gave the United States and South Vietnam virtually everything we had sought in five years of frustrating negotiations. Promised a generous level of American aid and swift American retaliation in response to communist violations of the peace accords, South Vietnam appeared to have been saved.
-snip-
"The South Vietnamese, as much as it hurts me to say it, abandoned themselves."
There is truth in what you say. Even Westmorland points out that when the South fell, that only one division of their army actually stood and fought. The vast majority were more focused on there families in the rear and didn't stand and fight. They fled.
However, if the North had known that we still would have backed the South, they probably would not have attacked. It is a hard call to make.
Bookmark
But guys...the South Vietnamese wouldn't stand up to fight if we were reneging on our promise to give aid and assistance.
When we refused to give them aid (ammunitions, medical supplies, etc.), and declared that we wouldn't give them the promised air support - they realized that the situation was going to be hopeless when the North Vietnamese were being given plenty of assistance by the Soviet Union and China.
And it is worth noting - more South Vietnamese (SVN) died fighting for their country than French died defending France from the Germans. (The old joke --- how many French does it take to protect Paris from the Germans? Answer - no one knows, it has never been tried.) The Americans were far more "forgiving" of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and held the South Vietnamese to much higher standards. The Democrat standard was to require the SVN to stand on their own, unaided, no assistance, etc., and then blame the SVN for the failure to standup to 2 major world powers!
Mike
The tragedy is not that they don't want Iraqi's to be free, the tragedy is that they don't want American's to be free.
I disagree this article gives them a blueprint for it.
It give us marching orders to stop them this time.
ping
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 am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it's historical course and outcome. That is painting 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 is 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. The South Vietnamese government's struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist's worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
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.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. 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. 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. 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. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi's party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for "throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate" and for being "mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise." The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
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.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. 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. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. 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. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet's MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation's refusal to live up to it's treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. 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.
I've been telling a group of Dems the basics of this story, for a couple years.
The Left is in complete denial of the history here. And they *really* don't want to hear about the Cambodian genocide, and the many Vietnamese killed, brutalized, and lost at sea, as a direct result of the Dem's actions.
They stood up just fine. They were faced with a conventional armor blitzkrieg from the North, that was funded by the Soviets.
The Dems cut and ran. No funding for our allies.
Do you think that's what we, as Americans, should have allowed to happen?
Peace Now! = Surrender Now!
Great post. Thanks.
Fifteen years from the day when our Nation's FREEDOM was born until our nation was mature enough to enshrine forever our RIGHTS from GOD!!
13 Months have passed since the Iraq Constitution has been ratified and WE not THEY are TIRED of the FIGHT!!
Thank GOD our FOUNDING FATHERS were POSTERITY MINDED and not instant gratification freaks like those who inhabit the halls of freedom today!!
Besides the manslaughterer from chappaquiddick, who else currently serves in the Senate who also was in the chamber back then (and voted for death like that slug did...)?
Is there a place where I can pull up congressional house/senate votes by member from that time frame? would love to post that up here for all to see...
CGVet
Eggsackley .. the democrats are working off of a blueprint they drew up way back when. The question is 'why do they want the US to be less than a superpower and subject to the oil whims of the Islamic nations'? The outing of Jimmy Carter's sycophancy to Islamics may give us a hint or two as to the democrat ties to the M.E. Islamics.
btt red, white and blue "T"!!!!
Thanks for a great history lesson. Nice post!
Some people (or factions, more correctly; the so-called "village idiots") within the US and the US Congress might wish that this conflict will just go away. After all, the American involvement in Vietnam was able to end because it was half a world away and there was zero chance that the Vietnamese would follow us back to the US. The conflict was "in theater."
Anyone with that attitude should simply follow blogs such as Bill Roggio, the Belmont Club or In From the Cold (as just several examples). For starters:
http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/01/pakistans_insurgency.php
It will become eminently clear that the forces we are fighting are struggling for supremacy in Somalia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Chechyna and other areas around the world. This is not about Iraq. It is about two incompatible world views.
Thank you for your service. I too have friends with names on the Wall.
F
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