Was the US Military on the Verge of Winning the Vietnam War Before they Were Forced to Pull out by Politicians?

IF YOU'D JUST LET ME STAY AT THE CRAPS TABLE WE WOULD BE MILLIONAIRES RIGHT NOW

uh, um, no.

it's not too late, let's bomb vietnam again

http://www.vietnamwar.com/coverb_med1.jpg

"...In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... the A-Team."

i think if they were to disregard all political imperatives during the war they could have used nukes and the like, right? i mean, i dont think there was any truly military reason beyond the desire to not kill every person in vietnam that they couldnt win. or am i naive?

Having just finished Walter Isaacson's Kissinger, the answer is an unqualifed "no." It's admittedly hard to sort out: Kissinger and Nixon lied so often in public and to each other, and no doubt convinced themselves, that I can't accept at face value their mutual, explicitly mentioned agreement in 1969 that the war was "unwinnable."

The real problem came in 1973, when five years of lying to the South Vietnamese government in Saigon finally caught up to Nixon and Kissinger. After keeping Saigon uninvolved in the Paris peace talks, Saigon, quite rightly, reneged on accepting Kissinger and Hanoi's points. Whereupon Nixon ordered the bombing of North Vietnam to punish them for their "stubbornness." It's a disgusting story in which no one emerges with any honor.

no, not even close. the war was unwinnable, short of just dropping nuclear weapons.

i think if they were to disregard all political imperatives during the war they could have used nukes and the like, right? i mean, i dont think there was any truly military reason beyond the desire to not kill every person in vietnam that they couldnt win. or am i naive?

-- ryan, Monday, August 27, 2007 2:40 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

uh, um, no.

It all depends on how you define the terms 'winning' and 'on the verge'. You can accomplish anything with five decades worth of agent orange and a zombie-like commitment to devouring human flesh.

...which Kissinger would have happily devoured.

NOM NOM NOM

WITH AN AGENT ORANGE GLAZE

hell no. Problem is, Nixon & Henry didn't tell Gerald Ford that, so good ol' Gerry(& two notable douchebags in his cabinet) kept thinking that it was okay)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB178/ford_rumsfeld_cheney.jpg

Oh, for the days when american presidents had a fine pair of sideburns.

Also, the initial push to pull the fuck out came in, what, 1970? The vote failed, so it took a coupla more years for the public to come around.

right-wingers' obsession with vietnam being a noble lost cause is truly baffling from one POV, since responsibility for it lay with a decidedly liberal administration (whether you prefer to blame JFK or LBJ, the latter prob the most liberal president of the 20th century, it was clearly an expression of the making-the-world-safe-for-democracy expressed by kennedy's inaugural address and arguably the good intentions of johnson's great society). you'd think they'd find it easy enough to distance themselves from vietnam, or damn it as a typically flighty unrealistic liberal enterprise, but of course since the right failed to produce a significant anti-war movement in the late 60s the way the left did, they can't do that without looking stupid. so even pat buchanan, who thinks FDR was a reckless warmonger, gets all worked up about vietnam.

All this talk about nuclear weapons makes me want to reject the question, actually. Winning a war means covering every aspect of it, and it doesn't necessarily make sense to separate support at home from any other factor, from political situations abroad to just running out of soldiers. Exhausting the patience and good sense of the public is just as much a failure as having bad weapons or making bad tactical decisions: maybe you can still say "we'd have won if we'd had better weapons," but you're blaming yourself, not the rifles.

I say this in part because "we could just nuke the place to eternity" is a ridiculous claim for a method of "winning" a war -- the equivalent of saying you could have won that chess game if you'd just knocked the board on the floor and stood over it gloating.

if we count those, then i am more or less undefeated at chess

dominos guys is was dominos

AT LEAST IN THEORY

I say this in part because "we could just nuke the place to eternity" is a ridiculous claim for a method of "winning" a war -- the equivalent of saying you could have won that chess game if you'd just knocked the board on the floor and stood over it gloating.

i didn't even bother with being that generous to anyone who says this, as saying such completely ignores that american policy post-ww2 and throughout the rest of the 20th century (and until recent big talk by the bush administration) is that nukes are for strategic use only. hell i think we even talked about that in a thread like two or three years ago.

Wow, in that photo upthread Rumsfeld and Cheney look like some perfectly genial comedy team... maybe, say, hosting their own a few-years-after comedy show attempt to cash in on Laugh-In's success...with Rumsfeld/Cheney as Rowan/Martin knockoffs, and hosting President Ford on this one particular episode, who is just about to spit out a catchphrase along the lines of "sock it to me" to reprise Nixon's comedy take.

Or maybe I am just so removed from that era that any number of random photos evoke silly pop culture, those Dean Martin Comedy Roasts, etc.

But seriously, Dick Cheney looks like a young Bob Newhart there!

and ford is all oh yoo guys !!!

'xactly!

and obviously there'd have to be a Squeaky Fromme-related assasination attempt skit...

w/Dick Cheney as Squeaky! Heck yes!

(note: i was not srsly suggesting that dropping nuclear weapons was an option; just saying that conventional WWII/korea-style warfare proved useless in vietnam.)

so how to slap around those that claim this?

don't argue with them in the first place, it's clearly a lost cause

A++++ excellent troll would kick this dead horse again, and again, and again

perhaps Heave Ho should start a thread about who was behind the 9/11 missile strikes

if there's anything I know about ILE posters it's that most of them have graduate degrees in history, economics and religious studies

9/11 missile strikes???

perhaps Heave Ho should start a thread about who was behind the 9/11 missile strikes

I don't mean to come off like nud3 sp0ck, or to derail the thread, but I thought this piece by Robert Fisk was a well-balanced account of troubling 9/11 discrepancies/unanswered questions. Spare Me The ‘Ravers’, But Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11

no

seriously, we've found a bunch of Ford-era cabinet photos before, they're floating aroudn on ILX

I like; the one above is beautiful.

http://www.rakemag.com/today/readmenace/archive/Rumsfeld-cheney1975%20(Custom).jpg

http://www.dailypepper.com/mt/archives/Rumsfeld_Cheney.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Ford_Rumsfeld_Cheney.jpg

That last one is great, with the cherry blossoms ('least I'm assuming that's what they are) peeking through the windows.

Tombot, why do you call this a troll?

<eliza>Tombot, why do you call this a troll?</eliza>

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently.

We must remember the words of the enemy. We must listen to what they say. Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror -- but it's the central front -- it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating. (Applause.)

Gotta love the great orator Bush (or his speechwriters for putting those words into his mouth, rather) talking about words being added to one's vocabulary.

The first two sentences of the last paragraph there come off like a kindergarten teacher scolding their students...or a Sunday School teacher talking to a bunch of first-graders. (Except in those cases the delivery wouldn't be so monosyllabic, and the content would likely be more nuanced).

And they're still invoking bin Laden at every opportunity. Good grief. First of all, you assholes in all of your glory failed to find him; second of all, I'm personally convinced that the guy is dead.

Yeah, that whole speech shows that they are going beyond grasping, grasping at straws, a few times over at least. My schadenfreude at witnessing this administration go down in utter ignominy is only tempered by the sickening feeling resulting from reflecting on all the human misery that they have been reponsible for and that their legacy has created for years untold.

In what was his second address on Memorial Day, President Obama marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War by paying tribute to the troops who fought there and were “sometimes denigrated” when they returned home. He pointed to Vietnam veterans as an under-appreciated group that were often criticized when they should have been celebrated for serving their country, reports the Associated Press.

"You were sometimes blamed for the misdeeds of a few," Obama said at the Vietnam War Memorial. “It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened,” reports ABC News. Obama vowed that “it will never happen again.”

Lonely fear lights up the sky
Can't help but wonder why
You're so far away

There, you had to take a stand
In someone else's land
Life can be so strange

I wish we never had to choose
To either win or lose
That we could find a way (We could find a way)

But I won't turn my back again
Your honour I'll defend
So hurry home, and 'til then (til then)

Chorus:
Stand tall, stand proud!
Voices that care are crying out loud
And when you close your eyes tonight
Feel in your heart how our love burns bright (hurry home… ooh)

Today is the 50th anniversary of the start of the Tet Offensive.

"What the (Ken Burns) documentary fails to capture fully, however, are the devastating consequences of the US *counteroffensive* — the massive and indiscriminate bombing and shelling of populated areas of South Vietnam to drive back the Tet attackers. The counteroffensive killed many thousands of South Vietnamese and provided the hardest possible evidence that the US was not a reliable ally and, in moments of crisis, would treat the South Vietnamese just like the enemy. In other words, the Tet Offensive disillusioned not only the American public but millions of South Vietnamese as well. One of the best accounts of the counteroffensive comes from the writer Tobias Wolff, a former Special Forces officer, in his memoir, In Pharoah’s Army. He was in My Tho during the Tet Offensive and the US counteroffensive:

We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street.… The corpses were everywhere.… One day I passed a line of them that went on for almost a block, all children.… The Viet Cong … knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our lives."

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/tet-offensive-vietnam-war-american-empire

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon when the US officially withdrew troops from Vietnam and the North reunified with the South, ending the 20 year war.

Congratulations to the Hồ Chí Minh regime. They fought like indefatigable tigers for independence. The USA left 55,000 of our own dead and more than a million casualties among the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for goddamn nothing. If you think today's US politics are infuriating, at least it hasn't delivered those kinds of statistics, yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrfz9pULvm8