[xm177e2]

And if the military had been honest with the media from the start, maybe Cronkite would not have just assumed they were lying when they told him Tet was a failure.

[glockmeister40]

I think we would have won if we let the military do its job. That would have included invading north vietnam and wiping out the root of the problem.

[elbucko]

"Is It Possible, Could America Have Won the Vietnam War In '1968?"

YES.

[TomGuy]

It became a political instrument, used by politicians for political purposes. Had the military been allowed to conduct it as a "war," it would have been won. But they were subjected to the political persuasions of the politicians who were micro-managing and conducting it from their offices in Washington, DC.

[SauronOfMordor]

The US concentrated too much on "body counts". The Communists weren't that much concerned about bodies -- they had lots of cannon-fodder. What they DIDN'T have that much of was cash.

If the US had concentrated on economic targets (destroying the dikes in North Vietnam and ruining the rice harvest; taking out the warehouses in Haiphong; etc) and gotten the North too busy keeping its own people from starving to look for trouble down South, things might have been different

[freedomtrail]

We NEVER lost the war. We left.

[Tuco-bad]

Walter Cronkite sold out America February 28, 1968, when he stated that we could not win in Vietnam.

4 years later we implemented Linbacker II, after North Vietnam walked out of the peace talks.

After intensive bombing of North Vietname (known as the Christmas offensice), the North Vietnamese ran back to the peace talks and signed the peace agreement.

We did NOT lose in Vietnam.

[verity]

they were on their knees and had prepared to negotiate a "surrender.

This is not a credible statement!

[RLK]

We had that war won and snatched defeat from victory at least three times. The first defeat for us was Kennedy's assassination of Diem. The second was McNamara's defeatest military strategy. Nixon's bombing of the north was bring about capitulation until it was shut off here.

go here

http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/rlkocher_index.htm

for a 190 page analysis of the Viet Nam War complete with recently released Kennedy tapes documenting the assassination.

[OldEagle]

The truth is that as of October 1967 the war was over, in that North Vietnam could not win it and they knew it. Tet 68 was their last gasp and if we had not been sold down the river we would have won AND we would not be wondering today about MIA's and a lot of other things. The veterans of "the conflict" would have been treated like heroes and Hanoi Jane would have been... (I guess I was just dreaming)

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Gene Kuentzler is either lazy or relies on Doris Kearns Goodwin to do his research. According to records, by the end of 1967 there were 19,560 KIAs alone and by the end of 1968 there were 36,152 KIAs.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

"Is It Possible, Could America Have Won the Vietnam War In '1968?"

From a Must Visit Site
Vipers Vietnam Veterans Page, A Vietnam Veteran & Proud Web Site
About Vietnam

The Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history. Two American advisors were killed on July 8, 1959, and the last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled. Officially there are still 1,991 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia.

Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said: "ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran.  For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win. They were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, most neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they'd tasked their soldiers.  And the war was reported by a self serving Media who penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations because they were more interested in a story than the truth! It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

Tribute To Vietnam Era Veterans....Welcome Home by Snow Bunny

[pfflier]

Is It Possible, Could America Have Won the Vietnam War In '1968?

It is not only possible but likely if the war were prosecuted in the same fashion as the Persian Gulf war.

1) With overwhelming force instead of gradual escalation

2) With decisive use of airpower assets and effective strategic bombing.

3) By letting the military set the priorities instead of politically based micromanagement.

4) With insistent and unrelenting pressure instead of bombing pauses and truces intended to send messages and "open dialogue opportunities"

5) By establishing a stong alliance with allied forces in the region particularly Australia, Thailand and Japan.

[PJ-Comix]

No. The war couldn't have been won. As a matter of fact Vietnam was the absolute WORST place on the planet to fight the communists. Whatever one thinks of the VC and NVA philosophy, they were incredibly tenacious. Think the Polish army or the Hungarian army or even the Soviet army at that time would have fought so tenaciously? Of course not. Few of the soldiers in those countries gave a damn about the communist system.

The problem with Vietnam is that the communists successfully intertwined themselves with nationalsim. The average VC (actually Viet Minh but that's another story) or even NVA soldier was fighting for their country, NOT for communism. If you notice, communism has pretty much taken a back seat in Viet Nam today.

The USA missed out on a golden opportunity when it didn't send in air support at the Bay of Pigs. Even with the landing mishaps there, Castro could have been easily overthrown if we sent in air support to destroy his air force and ground forces.

Of course, you must remember that the Secretary of Defense during both the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Vietnam was Robert STRANGE McNamara. Think there was any chance of victories with him there?

Bottom line on Vietnam was that the communists were willing to sacrifice large numbers of people in a war of attrition. We weren't willing to make the sacrifice in a war of attrition.

As somebody once said of Vietnam: It was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Looking back at the Cold War era, the USA should have picked it's battlefields more carefully.

[Cindy]

"Is It Possible, Could America Have Won the Vietnam War In '1968?"

YES!

[Whilom]

Nonsense. Do people just make this stuff up off the top of the head? The war in Vietnam was lost when the cost in blood and treasure became too high for the majority of Americans to accept. There was no defeat of the Americans on the battlefield, and repeated victories there did not end the war on our terms. Nor could it have been so. It was not a war that an outside power could win in any sensible description of "win". Even if we had been willing to use the utmost of our military power (nuclear weapons) to make the cities of North Vietnam uninhabitable, this would not have ended the conflict -- which included Cambodia and Laos. Nuke them? Nuke China? Nuke everybody? Stay in Vietnam forever (as we are doing in South Korea) to forcibly prevent the North from overrunning the South? For what? A corrupt, authoritarian government? If American politicians had given a second thought to the enormousness of sending young Americans to their deaths in combat, they would have demanded better reasons than protecting the bad guys from the communists. Vietnam was a failure of American politics, testosterone over reason. If you recall, at the time U.S. society was coming down with a fever that lasted an entire, crazy generation. We could have pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and done a lot better in court than Andrea Yates did. Millions believed that the ills of America, indeed of the world, could be cured in an afternoon by goodwill among the populace, free booze and dope, and liberal fiat from Washington. When fever seizes the mighty, peasants better run for their bunkers. But peasants have a way, like the Joads, of enduring.

[Non-Sequitur]

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. By 1967 the Viet Minh had been fighting for over 25 years and would have fought for another 25 years. The long and the short of it is that they wanted it worse than we did, worse then the South Vietnamese did. The North Vietnamese were willing to fight to the last man, woman, and child and we weren't.

[Chad Bagwell]

I think that we could have brought the reds to their knees with the simultaneous amphibious and helicopter invasions of several large Vietnamese cities. Such an assault would sever NVA communication and supply lines, kill thousands of enemy soldiers, and badly damage Vietnamese morale. The Russians are cowards and the Chinese... well maybe they learned their lesson in Korea.

[Biblebelter]

I will never forget what I heard a General Gavin say on of all places the Mike Douglas Show. Gavin said that Haiphong harbor was not a natural harbor, but a man made harbor. That in order for the harbor to be maintained to dock large sea going vessels, it needed to be regularly dredged. He insisted that we never bombed the dredges, and if we had bombed the dredges and continued to do so that a major source of supply to North Vietnam would have been cut off.

Whether this is true or not I do not know except to say that I felt the General appeared very credible to me. My contempt for Johnson and vile the bureaucrats who prosecuted the Vietnam War led me to accept this account as true. I conjectured the reason that they did not bomb the dredges was because they did not want to deprive our so called allies the opportunity to profiteer from our dead American heroes. My contempt also led me to wander if Americans were not somehow profiteering in some covert way through Haiphong Harbor.

In just how many ways American soldiers were betrayed by the politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, and captains of the military industrial complex we may never know? I will tend to believe Oliver Stone before I would ever believe any of the ever growing league of plagiarizing historians.