Could America Have Won the Vietnam War?

[leftover_crack]

thrawn are you mocking captain Space with your avatar!???

[cgannon64]

*sigh*

I thought I had a good idea...oh well

[Darkworld Ark]

Acually, Ho Chi Min originally came to the US & asked if Vietnam could become a US territory, & than the US would help build up the infrastucture. Unfortanitly, the US refused, so Ho Chi when to the commies.

[SlowwHand]

It is a good idea. Sorry I even said anything. I was out-of-line.

[cgannon64]

Don't worry about it. I now know how to fix this dying thread---forget about the military aspect of Vietnam. What do you think would've happend if we decided to not pull out when we did, but to give it another year? If we decided to put a few more troops in rather than start pulling them out? What if the government thought total victory was the only answer, despite rising political outrage?

Would we be in anarchy right now, or would there have been martial law established all over the land to prefent it?

This is why I really wanted to do this thread, I didn't want people to think about the combat---I wanted people to think about the situation at home.

[SlowwHand]

If we pulled out later, fighting under the same method of leadership, we would have more dead boys.
That's about it.

With the military running it, my opinion is that the deal would have been done way earlier, with a lot less loss of life.

BTW, South Vietnam was a soverign nation being threatened.
It wasn't like the Confederacy in the United States.

[cgannon64]

Yes we would have more dead boys. We would also still have Ohio under marshall law, we would still have the National Guard shooting college students, we would still have constuction workers beating up students while the police looked on, we would still have Columbia being captured by students and the police clubbing every last one of them.

[Dinner]

The short anwser is yes they could have, but, they would have had to launch a real invasion of the North by the mid-1960's to do so with their ideals intact. That probably would have resulted in a widening of the war to both mainland China and Korea but it could have been done successfully.

Since China was in the midst of the collosal failure that was the Great Leap Forward the Chinese would have been in a much worse position to begin hostilities against the U.S. then during Korea. Not to mention the North Vietnamese hated the Communist Chinese with a passion so it is a fairly safe bet to say the U.S. could have succeeded with a divid and conquor strategy against the three communist powers in Asia.

The only real question remaining is what the USSR's response would have been. They could have either limited themselves to material support like they did in Korea or they might have taken the opportunity to launch WW3 in Europe. I guess we will never know...

[Bosh]

BTW, South Vietnam was a soverign nation being threatened.

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.

[cgannon64]

I always thought wars fought over ideals were idiotic. I guess Vietnam could be considered a war fought over ideals---the country had little or nothing we actually wanted, but we just had to stand up to communism, because of our one-minded cold war status. If World War 3 and a nuclear holucaust was fought over Vietnam, a tiny jungle nation technologically unadvanced, it would be saying alot about the human race. We are all very lucky the government listened to its people and cooler heads prevailed.

[Q Classic]

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.

sorta like korea. they just picked a line which looked to divide it about in half.

[Mihai]

The americans thought that the problem could be solved by military means only, ignoring the succes of British in Malaya. 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.

[Sava]

According to recorded tapes, Nixon wanted to drop the bomb on Vietnam...

There's nothing America could have done short of a full mobilization to win Vietnam. Had they poured millions of troops in there, it probably would have sparked a war between the US and China + USSR.

[johncmcleod]

I think if we had fully committed to that war early on, we could've won it (by either keeping peace between the two nations or conquering vietnam) before the public started screaming. Though south nam did have a corrupt government, they still were attacked with provoking anyone, and I think it was our and the rest of the free world's duty to stop it. I don't know much about vietnam, and I was born after it ended, but I don't understand why the US soldiers were so bad to some of the Vietnamese. Was there a reason? And also, it's not like the public was perfect either. They hated the US soldiers that came back. It's not like they wanted to go just to kill innocent people, they went and fought because they were ordered to and they watched many of their brothers get killed beside them. They deserved more respect.

[Sava]

the whole situation is and was FUBAR