Posted on 10/18/2002 10:13:43 PM PDT by onedoug
It's that time again...tho re-fight the Vietnam War. This time via the online poll for the program The History Channel cablecast this evening on the subject.
I voted yes, despite the politics that led us there, because I refuse to believe that so many brave Americans lost their lives their needlesly.
I yet feel our involvemnt there was a great enterprise from which, as was the case with the fall of the Soviet Union, we will yet emerge victorious.
I'm curious what Freepers...expecially my fellow Vietnam veterancs, may think.
Then he mired us in Nam, in an attempt to salvage his reputation, his re-election, and his ego.
Vietnam was every bit as unimportant to American strategic interests as Cuba was important to Communist strategic interests. The Russians were laughing at us the whole time, and rightly so, for giving a damn about Vietnam while they fomented revolution right under our noses.
But nobody, including some on this website, will stand up and damn this "martyred" scumbag for what he was - a clear candidate for the most destructive President to ever take office, vying for that title with Roosevelt and now Clinton.
And the Vietnam War gave the anti-American left a HUGE break, essentially allowing them to "take the moral high ground" and re-define society along the lines they wanted it to take.
The results are all around you.
--Boris
IF we fought it to win it, Vietnam was arguably a war to have been "involved" in, but we didn't. Ergo, my vote would have to be "no".
No. Islamism is incompatable with Western civilization, and must be crushed.
Exactly! LBJ was the monster who assured we would lose in Vietnam. We won militarily but weren't allowed to finish the job by scum like LBJ and the Democrat Congress.
The Commies would have taken all of Asia if we had not fought in Vietnam.
Eisenhower didn't think so, and I agree with him. After Korea many Americans thought we should never become involved in another ground war in Asia. This is not to slight U.S. motives or actions, especially those of our service men and women.
On balance, the Vietnam involvement probably cost us more than it could ever have gained. It unloosed social disintegration and lead to unchecked third world immigration. Would the USSR have disintegrated anyway? Hard to say. Viewnam caused Carter who caused Reagan who caused the downfall of the USSR. (Prior to Carter, Democrats had successfully demonized Goldwater.)
From blowing off the original Bay of Pigs invasion plan requirement that air superiority must first be established over the Bay of Pigs beachead before the invasion could proceed to getting the U.S. involved in a land war in Vietnam, John F. Kennedy must rank as one of the most militarily inept Commanders-in-Chief that the United States has ever been saddled with.
From a purely geographical standpoint, Vietnam was not a wise theater of operations to draw the line against Communism.By comparison, Korea was relatively easy.
In Korea, the battlefield was a peninsula. U.S. seapower was dominat and was therefore able to seal off the western, southern and eastern flanks of the peninsula. That left only a relatively narrow northern front to defend without fear of flanking movements by the enemy. Although the unwillingness to wage war directly against Communist China made outright victory in all of Korea impossible, the defense of South Korea was a straight foreward matter of defending a narrow northern front with impregnable flanks.
In Vietnam, the extremely long an narrow geography of South Vietnam and the jungle terrain resulted in an indefensible western flank. No matter where the U.S. fought, one or both U.S. flanks, if any flanks were possible at all, would be "in the air". The enemy could outflank any U.S. position merely by marching more deeply into the neighboring "neutral" country and re-entering South Vietnam either to the north or to the south of the U.S. position.
The unwillingness to wage war directly against Communist China once again made outright victory in all of Vietnam impossible and guranteed a constant supply of war materiel for the enemy across the Sino-Vietnamese border.
The resulting war with no defined front and indefensible flanks meant that the enemy could choose when, where and if to fight and progress could only be measured in the dubious coin of "body counts". America is not psychologically suited for wars of attrition.
Vietnam's geography neutralized America's dominant seapower and forced the U.S. land forces to fight on the enemy's terms. A better theater should have been chosen to make a stand against Communism in the 1960's.
Ho Chi Minh solicted Truman through Patti (then with the OSS) for direct US support in resisting French recolonialization, claiming that he wasn't really a Communist, but had simply utilized it in fomenting for independence. Academically, it's certainly interesting to speculate on how the whole scenario may have panned out had those decisions in Washington taken that tack.
Best to you.
I will. JFK was as almost as stupid as Al Gore. Ask any Cuban trained by him in Miami for the Bay of Pigs then sent to Cuba and then stranded there, ON PURPOSE. I've talked to some of them. Very few escaped then fled to Miami a 2nd time, most spent their lives in Castro jails. Seems that after they landed at the bay of pigs(in Cuba) they were supposed to get ammo and supplies after the initial landing, guns but little ammo. Well, Kennedy, told the supply ships to back home.... leaving the "troops" recruited, trained, and sent by Kennedy there with no ammo, food, or anybody to talk to on their walky-talkies. Then John's buddy Castro came in and mopped them all up. STRANDED, screwed, blued and tatooed and watching the ship's leave with a "curly salute" and a kyuk, kyuk, kyuk..... Ah!.... did'nt know about that eh!.
The 3 stooges in American politics, John, Bobby, and the inimitable Teddy..... Beverly Hillbillies of Tax-e-chuettes, out shooting for some food, except what came up was CRUD, (not crude), they already had the money.
And to this day children, a pork bellyied double ought spy stills lurks the halls of the Senate... the Jethro Bodine of the idle rich, Teddy Kennedy.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a Moron, but Teddy is beneath contemp.
Have a nice day.....
"I refuse to believe" is the refuge
of the cornered.
Perhaps, but for #33, where I meant, "totalitarian".
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