I Guess America Eventually Won Vietnam

[texdav]

It never was aquetion of winng the war because we did not really want to defeat north vietnam . If we had we would have contiued the bombing non-stop and actaully invade north vietnam.You can really fight when you always have one arm tied behind your back.

[mwruckman]

Tom Paxton penned a song during the height of the Vietnam war called "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" which fits my opinion to a tee.

It has the following chorus:

"Lyndon Johnson told the nation
have no fear of escalation"
" I am trying everyone to please"
"Though it isn't really war"
"We're sending 50,000 more"
"To help save Vietnam from Vietnamese."

The lesson is you don't want to fight the natives in their own land. This is a lesson this short attention span nation has long ago forgotten. So we will have to learn this lesson again in Afganistan. How many dead Americans is this lesson worth?

[oz in SC]

Originally Posted by mwruckman

Tom Paxton penned a song during the height of the Vietnam war called "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" which fits my opinion to a tee.

It has the following chorus:

"Lyndon Johnson told the nation
have no fear of escalation"
" I am trying everyone to please"
"Though it isn't really war"
"We're sending 50,000 more"
"To help save Vietnam from Vietnamese."

The lesson is you don't want to fight the natives in their own land. This is a lesson this short attention span nation has long ago forgotten. So we will have to learn this lesson again in Afganistan. How many dead Americans is this lesson worth?

What about Korea?

[mwruckman]

Originally Posted by oz in SC

What about Korea?

Yeah, what about Korea. You notice that even today 30,000 Americans are still on the DMZ and around Seoul ROK and I don't know how many billions we have spent keeping them there. Today we still have a National Emergency in effect due to the Korean Conflict and we only have a truce with North Korea not a negotiated peace treaty. Another difference, In 1951 we virtually destroyed the North Koreans and had sent Kim Il Sung fleeing to China. Then the Chinese joined the war and inflicted some of the worst setbacks on our forces in American military history we almost lost the 3rd Marine Division at Chosan Reservoir and the evacuation of this division from Wonsan is our version of Dunkirk. The remainder of US forces were thrown out of North Korea by the Chinese and they retook Seoul. With a mighty effort we got Seoul back and the front was stabilized were it is today in the form of the DMZ.

[oz in SC]

Originally Posted by mwruckman

Yeah, what about Korea.....

We fought "the natives in their own land"....

The troops located there are a leftover from the Cold War,just like the troops still in Germany and Japan.

[nightbird47]

Originally Posted by Jaggy001

The populace didn't have a say in those days. Neither was 200 soldiers in an hour a big deal in terms of 18th century warfare.

But the war did not go as expected. The northern states were much more fully controlled and occupied, but in the south, where the more sparce population was actually using guerilla tactics against the British, the war was not going well at all. It ended because Parliment decided they'd had enough. It was going to drag on and on and in the meanwhile they were looking at France as a much more dangerous worry.

We villify the King, but in reality it was already a parlimentary nation, though run basically by the upper crust of wealthy merchants merging themselves into the lower gentry and the traditional nobility. The King mattered more than the current Queen does, but Parliment mattered more in the end. That is where the merchants power lay and where the dissatisfaction was grounded. And it would take years of control to keep and they did not want to have to guard the colonies to keep them while next door they had a traditional rivalry which was far more likely to do harm.

[nightbird47]

In a real sense everyone lost. The roughly 50,000 of MY generation that died might have done extraordinary things, but they died so young they never got to find out. The north took the south in a long drawn our war resulting in a lot of deaths which might not have occured on both sides. We were radicalized and our culture altered. I was a teenager when the bloody footage of raw combat was on the news. I looked at it without a blink of horror. Who knows what might have been if we had not rushed in as the French rushed out, already knowing it was a lost cause and so many would have had lives instead of funerals?

[Mircea]

Originally Posted by oz in SC

Perhaps you missed the fact it took military conquest to take over the south...and that as a result 65,000 were executed, over 1 million people were imprisoned without trial and 165,000 died in 'reeducation camps'...as well as over 1,200,000 people fleeing.

Yeah, so what?

Okay so it took a military conquest. I suppose you would have been thrilled if the North invaded the South driving Puegots instead of tanks.

See, the, um, thing is there weren't any elections in the South, so the people couldn't vote, which apparently you must believe to be a very democratic thing (no elections).

Diem Ngo was installed as puppet in 1955 and then Kennedy ordered is murder in 1963, right before Kennedy himself was [fortunately] murdered.

And then there was a whole series of barracks dictators, and then the phony elections in 1967 which the US helped rig.

The vaunted and always correct CIA said the South could last until 1976, well the South didn't last but a few weeks.

And the executed 65,000 people, and I'm all for that. Those people were traitors and they were executed for treason, because they sold out to the French and the Americans, and they profited off the backs of Vietnamese under the protection of the French and Americans and under Universal Law, their deaths were sanctioned.

And the moral is, if you're going to be a sycophant, then you'd best pick the winning side.

So what if 1 Million were put in re-education camps? They were always smarter than you. It's called "eliminating a problem before it becomes a problem."

All of those people were traitors and they should be thankful that the North Vietnamese government showed leniency and mercy on those people. And yes, they're traitors, they were like the sondercommando, Jews who sold out to the Germans and lorded over other Jews so they could get a regular pay check and have a better place to sleep at night and because they thought that at the end of the war they'd be in a better financial position than their fellow Jews.

So sure 1.2 Million fled. You want to mistreat and be mean to a dog in cage, well if that dog ever got free, you'd be running down the street screaming for your life.

That's exactly what those 1.2 Million people were doing. They mistreated other Vietnamese and they profited off of them, and then once the cage (the protection by the Americans) disappeared, the dogs were loose and those people wisely fled.

We saw the same thing in Cuba. Why does this Cuban own land? Because his family kissed Spanish ass and when the US took over, they kissed American ass and they got to lord over other Cubans, and then when [the US helped] Castro take over they all fled before their Cuban brethren strung them up.

So the US took all of its toys and it went home with its tail between its legs and then it banned trade with Vietnam and froze their assets and harassed the poor little country, but the people never gave up, and look were they are today. Their economy has been growing at 7%-10% per year in spited of US sanctions and trade embargoes.

Without US interference, Vietnam would have been even more wealthier than it is today. Ho was a nationalist, not a communist, and he was always a supporter of the Free Market (much more so than the US is).

[oz in SC]

Originally Posted by Mircea

Yeah, so what?
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You sound a like a good little potential genocidal maniac.