Could America Have Won the Vietnam War?

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by Boshko

No, the country was never formally partitioned, it was just, in theory, under two temporary administrations pending national elections which the south refused to participate in.

I thought it was the north that refused to participate unless the south agreed to a communist regime or somethn like that, i dunno. I forget. This gives me an excuse to brush up on my pre-vietnam history.

Kman

[cgannon64]

Originally posted by Mihai
When they tried to gain the local population on their side (the only way to win a guerilla war) it was to late and the effort was subminate be corruption.

Yes, later in the war they had the "hearts and minds" campaign, some half*** effort to get South Vietnam to like them. Many people there thought that was stupid. In the words of one soldier, "We're here to kill goo*s" (sorry I didn't know if I could say the slur for Vietnamese, so I just inserted a star. We all know what letter that is...right?) Many soldiers there didn't give a crap who the enemy was.

[Mihai]

Originally posted by johncmcleod I don't understand why the US soldiers were so bad to some of the Vietnamese. Was there a reason?

The reason is called guerilla war. You go there to fight the evil communism, you are nice to the local people and in one sunny day a civilian blow up the coffeshop where you and your buddies go. After a few events like that (with scared two-sided peasants) you don't trust any local people and see around only enemies and start to treat them bad. It becames a vicious circle.
Unless you have smart commanders who know how to get out from this vicious circle, the situation can go only worst.
As I said, at first the americans didn't took in consideration other means than military ones.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
1: Allow the military to pick targets... not the pres.

The military did pick the targets. Every single target the military asked to bomb was bombed, except those within ten miles of the Sino-Vietnamese border.

2: STOP at the parallel line. That was a big mistake, and our egos got in the way of our better judgement.

It wasn't about egos, it was fear (justified, as it turns out) of Chinese intervention in the war. Whil many have berated the American government for believing that the Vietnamese would have called in the Chinese after having spent over a thousnad years kicking them out, China recently revealed that it would have intervened had the Americans invaded the North.

Pekka, the Americans did have the full support of the government. Majority popular sentiment against the war did occur until 1970, when the US invaded Cambodia. Most business leaders turned against the war in 1969, as it became a drain on the economy.

The only way the US could have won that war was to stay out of it from the begining. 60K American kids and 2 million Vietnamese died for what? To defend an illegal, murderous, and corrupt regime in the South, that was opposed by the vast majority of it's own people? The country should have been reunified in 1956, when the people of Vietnam voted overwhelmingly for reunification.

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


The military did pick the targets. Every single target the military asked to bomb was bombed, except those within ten miles of the Sino-Vietnamese border.

2: STOP at the parallel line. That was a big mistake, and our egos got in the way of our better judgement.

It wasn't about egos, it was fear (justified, as it turns out) of Chinese intervention in the war. Whil many have berated the American government for believing that the Vietnamese would have called in the Chinese after having spent over a thousnad years kicking them out, China recently revealed that it would have intervened had the Americans invaded the North.

Pekka, the Americans did have the full support of the government. Majority popular sentiment against the war did occur until 1970, when the US invaded Cambodia. Most business leaders turned against the war in 1969, as it became a drain on the economy.

The only way the US could have won that war was to stay out of it from the begining. 60K American kids and 2 million Vietnamese died for what? To defend an illegal, murderous, and corrupt regime in the South, that was opposed by the vast majority of it's own people? The country should have been reunified in 1956, when the people of Vietnam voted overwhelmingly for reunification.

I must disagree. The point of the war in Vietnam was to resist Communism. In that vein, while the war was mishandled and South Vietnam lost, the overall battle against Communism has been successful. We must not be lulled into believing the communist danger is past, it lurks still and we may yet have to risk all for our freedom.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by cgannon64
THe classic example is where an American bomb destroyed a bridge, only to find the next day that Vietnamese peasents had built one out of sandbags.

No, the worst example was of a particular bridge (I forget the name) that was constructed by the Chinese. In typical Commie fashion, the bridge was built far stronger than the bridge needed to be for it's projected usage.

Along comes the war, and the US decided the bridge needs to be destroyed. So the US starts bombing the bridge. And it survives. The Vietnamese start using a ford about a mile up river, so that traffic doesn't get bombed, and they put AA emplacements all around this bridge. And the US keeps trying to bomb it, and planes keep getting shot down. It took the US two years to finally destroy that bridge that wasn't being used, at the cost of dozens of planes.

BTW, this was during the Nixon era, so don't blame the President picking the target. This was a total Pentagon snafu.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
We must not be lulled into believing the communist danger is past, it lurks still

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by johncmcleod
I don't know much about vietnam,

That's where you should have stopped.

[cgannon64]

Originally posted by johncmcleod
but I don't understand why the US soldiers were so bad to some of the Vietnamese.

It is actually qutie simple. To the soldiers there, they weren't fighting a bunch of guys in uniform marching across the country. They weren't even fighting a bunch of guys in uniform hiding in the jungle. They were fighting guys in uniform, kids who threw grenades into cafes from a bicycle, women who told them a road was safe when it was mined, young Vietnamese children who offered to shine their shoes, then died their uniforms white and stole their ammunition. To the soldiers there, they weren't fighting an army, they were fighting EVERYONE. Like I quoted before, "We're here to kill goo*s." Most people had no idea who the enemy was, so they went around bombing villages and killing civilians. It was as if they were fighting an invisible enemy.

[Dom Pedro II]

Here in lies the problem of why we lost the Vietnam War: We were never trying to win.

While we were trying to slaughter Vietnamese, we didn't make any effort to attack them economically or hit them in their nerve centers. We allowed Soviet and Chinese ships to enter North Vietnamese harbors (who did we think was giving them the guns?), and we were very careful not to anger the Communist countries. Well, thats no way to pursue a war.

Bombing the North Vietnamese infrastructure, and more importantly, invading North Vietnam itself in an amphibious assault would have been more effective than what we did. If we got rid of Ho Chi Minh and his followers, then the boys with machine guns, and women and children ready to blow themselves up, wouldn't have had anything to blow themselves up FOR. To deal with them, we could have "bombed them with butter" as they say. It is amazing how fast illiterate, ignorant peasants abandon the Communist ideal when their stomachs are full. And most importantly, we had to remember that Vietnam was for the Vietnamese. If we were going to prevent the Communists from taking over, we also had to let the people materialize their own government.

Unfortunately, we didn't do that. We fought Vietnam to make it look like we were doing something. In fact, we supported an oppressive regime, rigged their elections, and everything else under the sun to incite the people to violence. It is little wonder that they fought so hard against us. We weren't there as a police force, we were there as conquerors as far as they were concerned.

[chequita guevara]

You think the entire North Vietnamese economic infrastucture wasn't bombed? They are still recovering from the war. An area the size of the state of Massachusetts was turned into a desert.

Don't kid yourself, the US was trying to win. It was just in an unwinnable situation. An invasion of the North would have brought in the Chinese and possibly the Soviets.

The War in the South, on both the VC and ARVN sides was largely supplied by the US, as the South Vietnamese government was so corrupt that it sold much of its military hardware to the VC.

It's funny, you say let the Vietnamese materialize their own government, but that was what we were precisely trying to prevent. In the nationwide elections, the country voted for reunification. The South refused to abide by the elections. By 1963, the VC controlled so much of Vietnam that they were about to declare a provisional government. If the US had ever for a moment allowed the South Vietnamese government to stand on its own, it would have collapsed like the house of cards it was. That is why it collapsed when the North invaded in 1975. It never had more than 5% support.

[Dom Pedro II]

Yes, I said that we botched their elections, and there is no doubt that we were trying to hold up a regime that was horrible from the beginning. If I had personally been running the United States, I wouldn't have gone into Vietnam at all.

But the question was whether we could have won... I think we could have. My point is that we did not pursue the war with the same kind of initiative that we did with say the Second World War. We did not invade the North because it was very likely that Russia or China would become involved as I said, but at the same time, I think that was the only thing that would have brought results. By ousting Ho Chi Minh though, it might have been possible to bring in a more centralized leader who could have reconciled North and South without having a Communist dictatorship OR an American-propped regime either.

Of course, as America proved in 1964 when they helped over throw Goulart in Brazil, MY home country, they would rather have a pro-American dictator than a neutral Democracy.

[Kramerman]

No, the worst example was of a particular bridge (I forget the name) that was constructed by the Chinese. In typical Commie fashion, the bridge was built far stronger than the bridge needed to be for it's projected usage.

Oh yeah, we all know how well know the communists are for quality products... heh

[chequita guevara]

Oh, you misunderstand. It wasn't that it was a qualtiy bridge, it was that it was way overbuilt. They used far more steel and concrete than the project required.

[Kramerman]

In hind site, i must say, the war definately seems rediculous. But at the time, when there was a genuine fear of the "domino theory" of communist expansion, especially in south east asia, and the hysterical fear of communism at the time, then the war becomes understandable from an American perspective.
That doesnt negate the horrific toll the war had, especially on the vietnamese.