Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The U.S got involved in Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism in South East Asia. How could the U.S had done this without sending U.S troops there to fight North Vietnam? What were some non war alternatives to stopping the spread of Communism over there?
"Fire in the Lake" is a must read. A key point is that the Vietnamese feared the Chinese above all else, and naturally viewed the U.S. as a potential counter influence.
It seems likely that the U.S. could have cut a deal with the Vietnamese and avoided intervention. The potential is evidenced by the current amicable relations between Vietnam and the U.S.
<<
The founding father of modern Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh. He led Vietnam's communist revolution against French colonial rule and then took on the US. But it seems he long had an admiration for the US and repeatedly sought the country's help in the decades before the Vietnam War.
What people might find most surprising is that he once lived in the United States: in Boston and in New York City....
It’s not clear what he thought about the bitter party politics in America in that era, but he was a huge admirer of American ideology. Some Americans nowadays have this view of the US as a colossal and morally questionable imperial state. They forget that for most of its history, it was the revolutionary underdog. The country's whole narrative was one of resistance to a foreign tyrant — Great Britain. If any nation was a champion of other colonial underdogs, it was the United States, at least in the popular imagination.
So, the young Ho Chi Minh and other young nationalists around the world admired this and would try to court US public opinion by appealing to that strain of revolutionary anti-colonialism in America.
>>
Instead, for political reasons, Lyndon Johnson plunged the U.S. into the disastrous Vietnam War, relying on a staged incident to gain Congressional authorization for a conventional warfare intervention.
The Vietnam War badly damaged Americans faith in the Presidency and Congress. And yet, many Americans obviously remain heavily influenced by flawed and deceitful political leaders, again with disastrous consequences.
The basic reason seems to be that the US didn’t want to antagonize China and bring them actively into the conflict. It isn’t clear with the Cultural Revolution raging internally that China had the resources or will to actually put military forces into North Korea. And of course China and Vietnam were traditional enemies.
Years back, someone asked Cecil Adams what would have happened if we'd taken the insane amount spent on the war and just given it to the Vietnamese as a bribe or inducement to reject Communism.
He started by saying "Best damn question I've had in months" and went on to figure that we could have paid each and every Vietnamese citizen the considerable amount of $5,000 each... and it probably would have worked.
Without military backing, even if the South Vietnamese had a great leader who could unite the people, the communists would have taken the country by force. Generally speaking, communist governments do not honor treaty negotiations and terms of the agreements, as was the case with the Kissinger 1973 agreement.
It certainly would have helped to have someone better than Diem and Madame Nhu at the helm when they needed to unite against the communists. Acting as first lady, Madame Nhu was not good at public relations. The Buddhists were treated with contempt and I'm sure many of them became sympathetic to the Viet Cong and collaborated with the communists. That was the nightmare, you couldn't tell who was who and infiltration and spying was rampant. You can't defend when you are surrounded by the enemy, and have the enemy within to contend with.
Economic incentives were not working, The ARVN guys got a lot of money and supplies but it was not being distributed to the people who needed it most. The war was very expensive to the US as it was, wholesale welfare to millions of Vietnamese citizens and importing consumer goods may have won over many more people to capitalism, but it would have been too much of a strain on the US economy.
From a military point of view, if a much greater bombing effort was carried out on Hanoi and supply routes in Laos & Cambodia, much earlier in the war, with possible use of a nuclear bomb in that earlier period, may have been the only thing that could have halted the advance of the North Vietnamese.
France could have done a much better job in the administration of Vietnam after WW2, their attitude towards the people of Vietnam was shabby, especially when you consider what France had just been thru with the German occupation. Their actions as westerners had already tainted the population before the US became involved in Vietnam, and had eroded the trust we needed from the population to reject communism and become western.
US supported the French in Indochina because they feared not doing so would fracture the alliance in Western Europe against the Soviet Union. The Vietnamese independence movement fought against the Japanese during the war and turned to the US for aid.
Without military backing, even if the South Vietnamese had a great leader who could unite the people, the communists would have taken the country by force. Generally speaking, communist governments do not honor treaty negotiations and terms of the agreements, as was the case with the Kissinger 1973 agreement.
It was the South Vietnamese government, backed by the US, which refused to honor its agreement to hold nationwide elections in 1955 under the terms of the Geneva Accord.
It was the South Vietnamese government, backed by the US, which refused to honor its agreement to hold nationwide elections in 1955 under the terms of the Geneva Accord.
That would have given the communists control of the whole country from that point on. In the year leading up to the vote referendum orchestrated by Diem in 1955, it was decided to leave the communists off the ballot and have a partitioned government. In 1954/1955 there was an ongoing push to relocate anti communist people to the south, and those loyal to the communists to move north. The north was more heavily populated than the south, and any election in northern precincts would be rigged in favor of the communists because they would control those precincts. Obviously Diem's vote referendum was also rigged, and that was a dumb move because Diem's popularity was solid enough that he could have won honestly and carried at least 60% of the vote without the fraud and slander of Bảo Đại, the weak elderly emperor running against Diem. The French were still around in that year, and they hated Diem and worked to promote the old emperor just to get revenge on Diem.
I don't fault the US for supporting Diem at that time for the above reasons, after all, we were trying to fight communism, not promote it with an election stacked in the favor of the communists. The situation was somewhat similar to Mossadegh in Iran needing to be removed to keep the communists from taking over Iran. Castro should have been removed from Cuba as well, but Kennedy was too soft to carry out the Eisenhower invasion plans.
All the lives, money, material, and destruction we poured into Vietnam were for nothing. The same goes for all the conflict and anger in the anti-war movement. We saw everything through the lens of anticommunism, some still do. We are still eager to send troops into minor conflicts. The communist north gained control of the entire country. The French and Japanese were gone at the end of WW2 and the former colonies wanted independence. The French wanted to retain possession but got booted out. There were processes in place to try to settle it. So we leapt onto the breech with an anti-communism fever dream about dominos, phantom torpedo boat attacks, and support for privileged puppet governments. There were a lot of participants in that mess and some clear evidence that we were manipulated into that war by the CIA, NSA, and South Vietnamese provocation and mistaken moves by Hanoi. The idea of defusing and backing out of the conflict was never pursued. Johnson, McNamara, and witnesses all knew the Gulf of Tonkin episode was not as portrayed even as they pushed for full US involvement.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Vietnam's historical enemy is the Chinese
