Subscribe...By refusing to recognize or admit that the Vietnam War was from its inception primarily a civil war, and not part of a larger, centrally-directed international conspiracy, policymakers assumed that North Vietnam was, like the United States, waging a limited war, and therefore that it would be prepared to settle for something less than total victory (especially if confronted by military stalemate on the ground in the South and the threat of aerial bombardment of the North). In so making this assumption, policymakers not only ignored two millennia of Vietnamese history, but also excused themselves from confronting the harsh truth that civil wars are, for their indigenous participants, total wars, and that no foreign participant in someone else's civil war can possibly have as great a stake in the conflict's outcome--and attendant willingness to sacrifice--as do the indigenous parties involved.The Wrong War - Why We Lost in Vietnam
In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record's answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people.
However, loud voices in Washington want American forces in Iraq to start a two-front war, attacking the Shiite militias as well as the Sunni insurgents, on the grounds that both are threats to our puppet Iraqi government. Should those voices prevail, the Shiites would at some point have to respond, with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia probably in the lead. They would be foolish to fight us where we are strong, in and around Baghdad where the "surge" is focused. A far better target would be our vulnerable supply lines, which again run south through the Shiites' home turf. At the least, such an attack would draw many of our forces away from Baghdad, relieving the pressure on Sadr City. Potentially, it could leave our troops in Baghdad cut off and quickly running out of beans, bullets and POL, not to speak of bottled water. Anyone who thinks air transport could make up the difference should reference Hermann Goering and Stalingrad...Operation Anabasis
... If the Hanoi decision is to continue the irregular war declared on South Vietnam in 1959 with continued infiltration and covert support of guerrilla bands in the territory of our ally, we will then have to decide whether to accept as legitimate the continued guidance, training, and support of a guerrilla war across an international boundary, while the attacked react only inside their borders. Can we admit the establishment of the common law that the party attacked and his friends are denied the right to strike the source of aggression, after the fact of external aggression is clearly established? It is our view that our government should undertake with the Vietnamese the measures outlined herein, but should then consider and face the broader question beyond.tkchrist: Also if you remember the Chinese DID invade the border of N Vietnam after we pulled out... and lo and behold the Vietnamese did not embrace them as liberators or brothers. They kicked their asses. It was perfect illustration of how idiotic the Domino theory was.
We cannot refrain from expressing, having seen the situation on the ground, our common sense of outrage at the burden which this kind of aggression imposes on a new country, only seven years old, with a difficult historical heritage to overcome, confronting the inevitable problems of political, social, and economic transition to modernization. It is easy and cheap to destroy such a country whereas it is difficult undisturbed to build a nation coming out of a complex past without carrying the burden of a guerrilla war. ...
It is my judgment and that of my colleagues that the United States must decide how it will cope with Khrushchev's "wars of liberation" which are really pare-wars of guerrilla aggression. This is a new and dangerous Communist technique which bypasses our traditional political and military responses. While the final answer lies beyond the scope of this report, it is clear to me that the time may come in our relations to Southeast Asia when we must declare our intention to attack the source of guerrilla aggression in North Vietnam and impose on the Hanoi Government a price for participating in the current war which is commensurate with the damage being inflicted on its neighbors to the south.
I think that we have handled China so badly, because China is the natural balance against Russia in Asia and Vietnam (laughs) is the natural balance against China in East Asia. We fought with both.
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign the treaty ending World War I, and Ho, supposing that the President's doctrine of self-determination applied to Asia, donned a cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam. Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French Communist Party. "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me," he later explained.World War II's Atlantic Charter said "all peoples had a right to self-determination." The United States supported the Viet Minh resistance against Japan. Ho Chi Minh based the September 1945 Vietnamese Declaration of Independence on the American one and France's Declaration of the Rights of Man, but the US backed the reinstatement of French colonial rule in the First Indochina War. The Geneva Accords that ended the war called for nationwide elections, but the US and South Vietnam suppressed the elections because the Communists would have won.
the North Vietnamese, in spite of their Communism, had issues with the Chinese and the Soviets, further up the chain
What's our record now? 11-1-1 at best?
大军云集，千钧一发，威逼河内的态势已经形成，反击作战的战略目的已经达到。3 月5 日军委下达撤军命令，各部队交替掩护撤退，途中一路实行焦土政策，能拿走的机器设备全部拿走，能破坏的公产全部破坏，是为惩罚。东线部份伤亡惨重的部队撤退时，拼命盲目扫射放炮，发泄愤懑。3 月16日撤回国境，对越自卫反击作战告一段落"Our forces were gathered in strength ready to strike at any moment, and were in a position to threaten Hanoi; the objective of the war of counter-attack had been achieved. On March 5 the Military Commission gave the order to withdraw, and the brigades made a staged withdrawal, each taking its turn to cover the other [forget the proper term for this tactic]. They applied a scorched eart policy along the way as they went, and took all the materiel and machinery they could. They also sabotaged whatever state facilities they could, with the intention of punishing [the Vietnamese]. On the eastern front, as some of the brigades that had taken heaviest casualties were withdrawing, they strafed and shelled indiscriminately to release their pent-up anger. By March 16 [our forces] were back inside our own borders, ending this chapter in the defensive wars with Vietnam."
No, I think we have to put that one in the Tie column.
... real power is always something far greater than military power alone. A balance of power is not a balance of military power alone: it is, rather, a balance in which military power is one element. Even in its crudest aspect, power represents a subtle and intimate combination of force and consent. No stable government has ever existed, and no empire has ever become established, except with an immensely preponderant measure of consent on the part of those who were its subjects. That consent may be a half-grudging consent; it may be a consent based in part on awe of superior force; it may represent love, or respect, or fear, or a combination of the three. Consent, in any case, is the essential ingredient in stable power--more so than physical force, of which the most efficient and economical use is to increase consent. By using physical force in such a way as alienates consent one constantly increases the requirements of physical force to replace the consent that has been alienated. A vicious spiral develops that, continued, ends in the collapse of power.It's difficult to express how differently the US was seen before Vietnam. Hans J. Morgenthau, Vietnam: Shadow and Substance (September 1965):
The expedition into Vietnam is a creeping debacle, more insidious for not being spectacular, conjuring up immense risks and narrowing with every step the avenues of escape. And the greatest risk we are facing is neither political nor military. It is the risk to ourselves, to our mission in the world, to our very existence as a distinct nation.The Vietnam War was a disaster: it ripped apart American society, and it destroyed the respect that Americans had for their leaders. Abroad, it demonstrated the limits of American military power, and it destroyed any claims the US might have had to moral superiority.
I have spoken of the prestige of the nation and of the prestige of those who govern it, that is, of the mental image which others have of us. Yet there is another kind of prestige: the image we have of ourselves. That image will suffer grievous blemishes as we get ever more deeply involved in the war in Vietnam. This war is a guerrilla war, and such a war, supported or at least not opposed by the indigenous population, can only be won by the indiscriminate killing of everybody in sight, that is, by genocide. The Germans proved that during the Second World War in occupied Europe, and they were prevented from accomplishing their task only because they were defeated in the field. The logic of the issue we are facing in Vietnam has already driven us onto the same path. We have tortured and killed prisoners; we have embarked upon a scorched-earth policy by destroying villages and forests; we have killed combatants and non-combatants without discrimination because discrimination is impossible. And this is only the beginning. For the logic of guerrilla war leaves us no choice. We must go on torturing, killing, and burning, and the more deeply we get involved in this war, the more there will be of it.
This brutalization of the Armed Forces would be a serious matter for any nation, as the example of France has shown. It is intolerable for the United States. For this nation, alone among the nations of the world, was created for a particular purpose: to achieve equality in freedom at home, and thereby set an example for the world to emulate. This was the intention of the Founding Fathers, and to this very day the world has taken them at their word. It is exactly for this reason that our prestige has suffered so disastrously among friend and foe alike; for the world did not expect of us what it had come to expect of others.
It confirmed the essential logic of the Cold War
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posted by Artw at 11:35 AM on April 18, 2007