Vietnam War---alternative strategy

Evidently the arms routes into North Vietnam should have been cut more effectively. That includes overland rail routes, Haiphong harbor, and any other harbor in use. I never heard yet of Vietnamese planting a crop and having T-34 tanks sprouting up, home grown.

Failing that, the South Vietnamese, who were divided on the war but who in many cases fought to the death against the North, should have been given sufficient air power in the period 1973-1975 to smash a Northern armored offensive in the same way the offensive of 1972 was smashed. It is a well known fact that the U.S. cut off military support of the South from 1973 onward.

However, as even Robert McNamara concludes in his memoirs, the war had to be won by South Vietnamese effort, not American effort.

In Lodui's comment above, he may not be aware that at the time of the North's 1975 offensive, the North had 153 battalions in the field. That's not what I call public relations.

 

Did I miss something here? Was it really Tom Hayden and David Dellinger and Joan Baez and George McGovern, not to mention ordinary protesters such as myself, that drove the Khmer Rouge to their atrocities?

You've been eating some of them funny sugar cubes, my friend.

 

Flawed USA policy drove the misery engendered by the SE Asian debacle. Those in the USA who opposed the war for being unnecessary and immoral were patriots exercising their rights. USA policy fueled nationalism in nations with long histories of opposing foreign occupiers, including China, Japan and France. USA blindness kept this going like a meatgrinder for years for no purpose.

State USA goals were proven to be false when after N Vietnam had won and consolidated the country, the did NOT serve as the impetus for a "domino effect". Instead, when the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge, when the job was done they promptly left.

The Vietnam War was a chain reaction of error from start to finish. This was the result of some serious moral lapse in the planning and execution from Washington. Start with the Phoenix Program. Selective assassinations of locally powerful leaders? This is how the world's beacon of democracy should behave? This sort of thinking and action doomed the effort from the start.

The USA ignored morality, Vietnamese culture and history, and common sense. Two Administrations principally lied and manipulated and consistently produced bad policy which only dug the hole deeper. The blame lies with LBJ, McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Nixon, Laird, Haig, Kissinger, etc. That is how history will see it.

The Antiwar Movement was right. The nation would probably be better off today if it could admit that. And then address the mess we're in in Iraq. Vietnam was easy to leave. There were no real negative consequences of it, in the geopolitical sense. Iraq is not that simple, however. How many lessons has the USA learned from the Vietnam experience? We shall see...

 

Only thing is, there were a lot of Viets who died opposing Communism as imposed by Pham Van Dong, Van Tien Dung, Vo Nguyen Giap and friends. Look at any Viet website today and you'll find one thing. The winners write the history.

What are we (the Free World) opposing in Iraq? Sunnis? Shiites? Who the fuck knows? Just ask George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld (sorry, Mr Rumsfeld took an early retirement, may I ask who's calling?) and they'll give you this week's version of what Americans are dying for. You might say it's a crude question.

Open letter to George W:
Dear George,
I got up in the morning and looked in the mirror. I didn't have a problem with that. Neither did you. Or did you?
David B.
Canada

 

what we couldhave shouldhave whouldhave done, if you want a REAL alternative stratagy, would have been to embrase 'unkle ho' as the allie he approched the u.s. to be, instead of spiting on him and showing him the back door and thus forcing him to turn to allies we did not favor.

nor did we really have any bussiness poking our noses in there in the first place. i think that's really the main thing. when we replaced the french, we really came in, as they had been, on the moraly wrong side.

that is why so many objected here to our being there.

=^^=
.../\...

 

I hate war.!

I hate USA and israel!

 

The U.S. and Isreal are also filled with hate. Aren't you glad you're on their level?

 

In his memoirs, "Mandate for Change," President Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged that 80% of the Vietnamese, north and south, supported Ho Chi Minh. That is why the United States lost, and why the United States deserved to lose.

 

the war was over before it even started. i studie ancient civs and their battles. NOBODY went in without a plan, backup plan, peoples support, knowledge of enemy and terain, ect. but the biggest problem was doing it without the peoples support. i found a quote of ancient chinese philociphy. "the will of the people is like water,halt it and it will eb, guide it and it will flow, let it settle and it will turn clear, and without it nothing will last".

 

blitzkrieg wouldn't have worked. There was no single large enemy force or clear lines drawn. The terrain of vietnam probably wouldn't lend itself very well to blitzkrieg either.