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Originally posted by mensaguy: This is a valid conjecture. Obviously, we don't KNOW what would have happened in re: Vietnam had JFK not been killed. However, we DO know that he authorized a National Security Memorandum a few days prior to his assassination that called for the first 1000 troops to be brought home by the end of 1963. LBJ reversed that decision before the end of November
Yes he did sign an order to bring home 1,000 troops, but they were not combat troops, most were cooks, mechanics and other rear echelon. Unfortunately most do not look at the details of this and equate the 1,000 troops with JFK's willingness not to widen the war.
Hmmm. That's not what NSAM 263 says. It says "military personnel." You can read it here:
Rear echelon people are still "military personnel".
Seriously, the Kennedy Mystique, haciography that makes objective criticism of his policies difficult, has got to go. Even a disgusting leftist like Noam "The Chump" Chomsky acknowledges that LBJ was just following the tracks JFK laid down....
Rear echelon people are still "military personnel".
Seriously, the Kennedy Mystique, haciography that makes objective criticism of his policies difficult, has got to go. Even a disgusting leftist like Noam "The Chump" Chomsky acknowledges that LBJ was just following the tracks JFK laid down....
And that's exactly why the Kennedy Mystique exists. And it sure helps deflect attention away from the Left when talk of assassination conspiracies and "who done it" is in the air. "Why... we just know it was the right wing establishment that killed JFK - he wanted to pull us out of Vietnam!"
While most will say our involvement in Vietnam was pointless, was there anything positive about it that had the U.S never gotten involved in Vietnam in any way, shape or form would've been bad?
The involvement in Vietnam was not pointless, it was extremely poorly executed by those in charge. Just look at S. Korea and ask them how "pointless" the US involvement was there.
The way it happened, sure, a terrible loss of life and resources on both sides.
The biggest positive thing that came out of it, IMHO, was the switch from a draft based to contract based army. And by "positive" I mean from our beloved Government's perspective. A draft based army would not be deployed all over the world so easily to play the world's policeman.
One of the takeaways from Vietnam is that we probably should fight more through refugees and proxies. It's expensive to put $100,000 worth of education onto a battlefield. There are people in Third World countries for whom fighting for the U.S. would be an advance. I do feel strongly that enemy challenges should not go unmet.
How has that worked out for us? They quickly learn that fighting for the US is a loser, but fighting for themselves is a better idea. We gave ISIS its start with weapons. Moderates warned that when you dump arms into an area you lose all control over how they are used. If you really want a recipe for bringing down the USA, just arm the rest of the world.
This is a valid conjecture. Obviously, we don't KNOW what would have happened in re: Vietnam had JFK not been killed. However, we DO know that he authorized a National Security Memorandum a few days prior to his assassination that called for the first 1000 troops to be brought home by the end of 1963. LBJ reversed that decision before the end of November.
mensaguy replied: Hmmm. That's not what NSAM 263 says. It says "military personnel." You can read it here:
The cooks, mechanics and rear echelon personnel were in the military, they just do not have a role in combat none the less they are still considered troops. My point is that on the surface that memorandum leads people to believe that JFK was not seeking a wider war. As someone mentioned earlier in the thread all of LBJ's advisers during the escalation period of 65 - 67 were JFK's staff Mcnamara, Rusk, Bundy etc.
While most will say our involvement in Vietnam was pointless, was there anything positive about it that had the U.S never gotten involved in Vietnam in any way, shape or form would've been bad?
Wasn't it mcarthur that wanted 47 nukes to obliterate China shortly after WWII? The thought being, if we didn't, that was one communist party we were going to confront sooner or later....and, sure enough, THE number one reason Johnson didn't bomb Hanoi early on was the fear that the Chinese would enter the Viet Nam war???
And had they entered the war, what would the outcome have been???
They didn't and despite that, we were able to kill what? 2 million north Vietnamese? Soooo, I guess we at least slowed that communist growth down for a minute. Regardless, you are looking at it in hindsight. In 1962 it was serious threat and the cold war was very, very well underway. Don't forget, the bay of pigs wa during this time and Kennedy had nearly gone to blows with Kruschev....talk about your what if's!!!.....
Within a year, Kennedy was spending 5 million a week in foreign aid and "1,500 advisors" in south Vietnam....wasn't all Johnson and Nixon.....
You can "what if" this to death. I would ask a better question. Suppose Johnson and McNamara hadn't been such pu$$ies about it and bombed Hanoi to pieces in 64/65 the war may very well been over in a year or two and we may still have been very much there?
Maybe you should be asking this question about the Korean war. We lost nearly the same amount of Americans in three years as we did in ten years in Viet Nam?
Does anyone really, really know why we entered that one? What would have happened had we skipped that exercise? One merely need look at the leader of North Korea to understand why and what may have been had we passed. Now, think ISIS....
It is generally believed that the 'Domino Theory' that was talked about at the time has generally been discredited.
BUT - The truth is we can never know for sure. It is impossible to know for sure what would have happened if the U.S. had not tried to prop up the South Vietnamese government.
We ended up running away in the end, shoving our million-dollar helicopters into the drink
It was as pointless a war as the US has ever engaged in, although, that said, getting sucked into fighting there wasn't nearly as stupid as invading Iraq in 2003.
Your politics are showing. Vietnam was a total failure, much of the blame for that lies upon the divided loyalties of Americans during the 60s and 70s. The other major cause for the failure was poor decision making from the top. Our leaders were not there to win the war, they were fighting a war to preserve the status quo. We did not really have a cause, many people really did not know what we were fighting for and there seemed to be little real national interest involved. It is easy to see how these things could have worked against us there.
Iraq was a totally different circumstance. We got involved in Iraq because we were trying to remove threats from the muslim middle east in response to the 9-11 attacks. Iraq was holding dangerous chemical weapons and they were training terrorists. There was real justification for the war. The Iraq war did drag on like Vietnam, but once more troops were sent (the surge) the opposition fell apart. Today there is democratically elected government in Iraq and the threat has been removed. ISIS is threatening what we did there, but in the end I think that nation will hold. As long as ISIS does not destroy the Iraqi government (ISIS is being pushed back in Iraq recently), I think the Iraq war will go down as a successful endeavor. You can debate whether or not the Iraq war was worth it, but what is not in question is the fact that the US won that war and that the current Iraqi government is way better than the bathist regime we removed. Vietnam was a total disaster, Iraq is nothing of the sort.
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Vietnam was a total failure, much of the blame for that lies upon the divided loyalties of Americans during the 60s and 70s. The other major cause for the failure was poor decision making from the top. Our leaders were not there to win the war, they were fighting a war to preserve the status quo. We did not really have a cause, many people really did not know what we were fighting for and there seemed to be little real national interest involved. It is easy to see how these things could have worked against us there.
