Could America Have Won the Vietnam War?

[Ned]

I agree that Kennedy would have won the election, not only because of his stance on the war, but because of the tremedous good will the people still had for his brother.

[Dis]

I'm pretty sure we won the Vietnam war. The american education system would never fail me in that regard. I also judge this from Rambo and Missing in Action movies.

But I still say we didn't lose the Vietnam war. I had a thread on this in the past. But we obviously didn't win the war. It was a stalemate. N. Vietnam didn't take over S. Vietnam until the U.S. troops left. We didn't retreat. We just left. We felt it wasn't in our interests to stay anymore.

[Dom Pedro II]

Yeah, and the French army didn't feel like it was in their best interests to stop the Germans. They just left, they didn't retreat....

[Dis]

well you just can't leave your own country now!

Vietnam wasn't our country. Our citizens didn't want our troop there so we left. It's called a democracy after all.

Now if the generals made the call to retreat that would be a different story. That would be a retreat.

[Ned]

If you measure victory by body count, of course we won that war. But the objective was to save SV from being conquered by the communists. We failed.

[Dis]

but it wasn't conquered by the communists when we were there. Militarily we succeeded. Politically we lost.

[Ned]

We had an obligation to supply SV with arms. Congress reduced aid then cut them off. We also told SV that we would commit air power in case of a NV attack. We did not.

If we had fulfilled our obligations, SV would probably still would be there.

[Tingkai]

Not likely, given the way the ARVN pulled out of strategic positions the minute the North Vietnamese attacked.

[uh Clem]

The US lost the war long before many of the people who would die in it were even born. What did or didn't happen in the spring of 1975 is meaningless.

The war was fundamentally decided when the US government chose to view Ho Chi Minh & the Viet Minh solely within the framework of the Cold War, as instruments of "Communist aggression." This view, in which Ho was merely the pawn of (variously) Moscow or Beijing, was at odds with the actual situation here on Planet Earth.

I remember watching live television coverage of Secretary of State Rusk telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the primary aim of the war was "containment" of China! A bit more than a decade after Rusk spoke, Vietnam & China would celebrate their socialist solidarity by going to war with each other.

Hence, my view that the "leadership" had less understanding than those who were responsible for actually prosecuting the war (the military, for the most part). And don't even get me started on the subject of body counts...

[Ned]

uh Clem, I agree. The "Domino" theory, first propounded by Eisenhower, lead to our supporting the French in the first place.