Did we cut an run in Vietnam?

As I'm sure you know, Doc, "those in the know" will happily give you 100 different "factual" interpretations of the answers to your questions.

Lucky you, I'm one of them.

During the Presidential campaign of '72 Nixon vilified George McGovern as a cowardly Democrat who would "cut and run" by withdrawing from Vietnam. He said he had a "secret plan" himself, but wouldn't give details.

Surprise! Nixon's secret plan was...to cut and run! But first we went through a transitional phase called "Vietnamization." It may sound strangely familiar to you. It called for U.S. forces to do intensive training with the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), then make them responsible for winning the war while we withdrew. (I believe Bush is today avoiding the term "Iraqization" because too many of us Vietnam-era folks are still around.)

Well, despite the glaring fact that Vietnamization didn't work too well, sure enough, we withdrew, while Henry Kissinger negotiated a settlement with the North Vietnamese. Nixon started calling it "peace with honor". It was cut n' run dressed up. But most Americans didn't mind the subterfuge.

Was it a mistake to intervene in Vietnam? Depends on how you saw the struggle there at the time (1961-63) to begin with. Old School Cold Warriors, of which JFK was one, saw it most importantly as another instance of Communist imperialism. In the context of the times, it was reasonable to see it that way. Others among us saw it as first and foremost a Civil War, with an artificially divided nation having a North-vs.-South war, with the two "side issues" of a) the fact that Communists were leading one side and B) some of the Communists were already in the South, determined to topple their own government, "revolution"-style.

So it was an inherently confusing situation, sort of three wars-in-one. Hindsight tells us it was a mistake, if only because Presidents Johnson and Nixon were unwilling to do what was necessary to win.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ghostofjk @ Jun 22 2006, 07:58 PM) [snapback]275608[/snapback]</div>

While you can blame Nixon all you want, he was out of office by the time Saigon fell. What precipitated the fall of Saigon?

What happened in SE Asia after the fall of Saigon that caused George McGovern to say we should go back in?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ghostofjk @ Jun 22 2006, 07:58 PM) [snapback]275608[/snapback]</div>

Hmmmm, astute did you also know that when we came in on the heels of the French Colonizers the North just figured we were essentially the same type of Colonial power? Thus we deepened ties with the NV and the Russians/Chinese? The North wanted to be free of all outside influence and would have probably distanced themselves from the commies after reunification if we had left them alone, pure conjecture but a possibility. In our zeal to help others and spread democracy we tightened the hold of the commies on Vietnam. Take a look at their history and the wars they have fought not to many years of peace for these people and I don't believe that they have ever lost a war. Take a look at what they did to the Chinese over a border dispute in the late 70's early 80's. Still the way we fought that war was shameful but I don't think we "cut n ran" we just didn't pursue the right tactics. The idea of Proportional Response played a big role in our loss even though we won nearly every battle and engagment.

Also did you know that the average combat soldier in WWII got in about 40 days of combat for a 4 year rotation while in Vietnam the average combat soldier got 240 days of combat for a 1 year rotation due to the helicopter's mobility?

Wildkow

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jun 22 2006, 05:41 PM) [snapback]275456[/snapback]</div>

I'm not 'in the know' - just opinionated. We shouldn't have been there in the first place, and anything we 'accomplished' was negative.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jeannie @ Jun 23 2006, 02:32 AM) [snapback]275706[/snapback]</div>

I was there. Not only a waste of time but just like Iraq, a lot of kids are getting wasted for issues above their pay grade wrapped up in the red, white and blue. Do we seriously see ourselves vacationing there in 10 years like we are doing in Hanoi? Doubt it. The muslim world has no use for westerm culture.

 

No. We did not "cut and run." We lost. Plain and simple. And we didn't lose because of peaceniks at home, or because Johnson and Nixon were "unwilling to do what was necessary." We lost because the Vietnamese are a proud people, unwilling to be subjugated by anyone, and willing to give up everything for their independence.

Vietnam was our ally against the Japanese in WW II. But after WW II we "rewarded" them for their help by supporting the French, who insisted on re-colonizing them. They kicked the French out, but But Eisenhower and Dulles were unwilling to permit a democratic election which would have elected Ho Chi Minh, so the U.S. began giving military aid to the corrupt government in the south, which refused to allow elections. Our military aid progressed from a small number of "advisors" to a full-blown invasion, but the Vietnamese people were unwilling to allow their country to again fall into the hands of foreigners. They fought with superhuman will and ferocity.

We should never have supported the French, and when the French lost we never should have taken their place.

Nixon's plan to win the war was to expand it into Cambodia, to cut off the Vietnamese supply lines. But what he accomplished instead was to topple the moderate Cambodian government and replace it with one as extreme and corrupt as the South Vietnamese government. The new, corrupt pro-American Cambodian government could not stand, and so was replaced by Pol Pot, one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty tyrants in the history of the world. And we still lost the war.

The whole war was a series of criminal "mistakes," beginning with the decision to go in in the first place. And GWB, who used his daddy's influence to get into the National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam, and then even went awol from the Guard, and apparently spent the entire era drunk and drugged, never learned the lesson.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jeannie @ Jun 23 2006, 05:32 AM) [snapback]275706[/snapback]</div>

Yeppers and all wars the USA have fought, have given you the right to have your opinion & the freedom to speak it.

If I was old enough I would have proudly gone, and come back to the USA proud and dis gruntled at the Amerika that didnt reconize my service....

Freedom is never free.

*He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
Thomas Paine

*Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

*Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake,... of searching and experimenting,... of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political.
Ignazio Silone, 1950

*The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree.
Thomas Campbell


*Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
Gerard K. O'Neill,

*Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

*It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
Dick Cheney

*We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.
Robert J. McCracken


*Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine

*In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

*No one is free when others are oppressed.
Author Unknown

*Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

*We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
Eric Hoffer

*Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.
Author Unknown


*Freedom is not enough.
Lyndon B. Johnson

*Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Woodrow Wilson

*They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

*We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
Felix Frankfurter

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass, speech, Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1883

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788

*Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
Theodore Roosevelt


*Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922

*I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
Author Unknown

*The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke

*We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
Errico Malatesta, l'Agitazione, 18 June 1897

*We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our guns to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
Ricardo Flores Magon, speech, 31 May 1914

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
Thomas Macaulay

 

We lost a war we never should have been a part of.

And we haven't learned from history.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Jun 25 2006, 02:02 PM) [snapback]276537[/snapback]</div>

You can say that again.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Jun 23 2006, 01:08 AM) [snapback]275667[/snapback]</div>

No Vietnam time but spent eleven months in Iraq at the 'request' of GWBush.

This time, we're following the British Colonizers instead of the French, and the end result will be exactly the same.

BTW, they just upped the maximum age for new Army recruits from 40 to 42.

From Iraq: - Missing the Point:

• "The original decision to invade Iraq was the fatal mistake; the
  rest is just consequences. Iraq's government was crueller and less loved
  than most regimes in the Arab world, but the United States and Britain
  would be facing the same kind of resistance movement today if they had
  invaded Morocco, Egypt or Yemen in 2003. There is no country of over two
  million people in the Arab world where an invading American army would not
  soon be confronted by the kind of resistance it is facing in Iraq.
  
  History matters, and for Arabs all the history is bad. Britain
  lured the Arabs into revolt against their Turkish overlords in the First
  World War with a promise of independence, then carved them up into the
  familiar Middle Eastern states of the present and bound them all in
  colonial servitude. It also promised Jews a national homeland in Palestine,
  the state of Israel -- which America has unstintingly supported, regardless
  of Israel's policies towards its Arab neighbours, for over forty years. Why
  would any Arab country welcome an invasion by the United States and
  Britain?
  
  This is a concept -- that we are unloved in the Arab world because
  of our past behaviour -- that is very hard to get across to the public in
  Yorkshire and Texas. But then, it's a notion that is also very hard to get
  across to the governments in Washington and London. They seem to feel that
  good intentions (as defined by themselves) should be enough to bridge the
  gap.
  
  If some other country had invaded Iraq with the best of intentions
  -- Russia, say, or Japan -- it might have got away with it. But the
  Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was doomed from the first, and Bush and
  Blair had dozens of experts on call who could have told them why. Either
  they didn't listen, or they chose not to ask."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusguy04 @ Jun 25 2006, 10:38 AM) [snapback]276464[/snapback]</div>

And I'm glad to be have those rights.

Fortunately, not all of my rights have required wars to achieve them. As an intelligent female graduating high school in 1966, I had very few options for a 'challenging school' for college with my preference for math and science - I had been totally bored in high school. If I remember correctly, there were only 3 schools listed in the Barrons guide as 'most competitive' that were even co-ed. I went to one that actually 'allowed' up to half a percent of the freshmen to be female. (Six years later when they decided (or were coerced by Federal law) to evaluate boy and girl applicants equally, the new freshman class had over 40% females, and most if not all the 'all male' schools had become co-ed). It took another few years for business to catch up - my 1976 MBA class faced many New York banks who believed in 'pressure interviews' that included questions to the women "What form of birth control do you use?", and it was a while before they caught on that such questions were inappropriate.)

When I had my mandatory admissions interview for the college of my choice, the interviewer asked me why I wanted to take a slot away from a boy who would have to support a family (he actually said 'take the bread off the table), I told him "Well, there's no guarantee I'll ever marry, and even if I do, there's no guarantee my husband will live to see our childrem graduate college". I was told that he was so startled by this concept that his first call when he went home was to a life insurance agent and the second to the admissions office to say 'Accept her!'

I realize this post was off-topic, but I genuinely appreciate my rights as an American, no matter how they were won. (And, btw, I never married, but 'adopted' the two sons of a friend who had a stroke, becoming 'instant Mom' to a 4 year old and 11 year old, and was able to provide for them financially because I had a professional career.)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusguy04 @ Jun 25 2006, 07:38 AM) [snapback]276464[/snapback]</div>

Every person has a right to be free. Nobody has the right to deny freedom to others.

We didn't go into Vietnam to keep America free. We went in to deny the Vietnamese people the freedom to choose their own government. We went in to prevent the reunification elections. And we paid a very high price for our opposition to freedom.

And we are again paying a very high price to try to colonize a country that will not accept our rule.

 

Freedom must be taken from within, not bestowed from without.

If the Iraqi people had risen in rebellion and we were asked to aid them in their revolution...that would be one thing. England did not give us our freedom, we took it. France did not fight England and then give America to us. They helped us after we rebelled.

Can anyone recall a functioning democratic government where this did not happen? What country has liberated peoples from the tyranny of another government, then handed it over and the people took over and formed and maintained a democratic government. In otherwords....what country has 'given' freedom to another? Anyone?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jun 25 2006, 04:10 PM) [snapback]276637[/snapback]</div>

Daniels's response was spot on..they would have won in 100 years of fighting..we lost plain and simple...and I was there as an US Army Ranger...I know...look me up....www.LLRP.com photo batch#22...code name 'hippie'

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Jun 25 2006, 03:52 PM) [snapback]276630[/snapback]</div>

Japan.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jun 25 2006, 04:10 PM) [snapback]276637[/snapback]</div>

Germany could arguably be called a democratic monarchy before Hitler rose to power, but in Japan, you do have the model of a country being "given" democracy and respect for human rights by the conquering power.

It is possible, but very, very hard. Often the most you can hope for is a change from one tyrant to something better, but sometimes what you get in the end is worst than what you started with. That's why I've been critical of "nation building" in the past, including at the start of the current Iraq war (and why I agreed with the first President Bush in not continuing the war to liberate Kuwait and invading Iraq back then).