what would a 'victory' in Viet Nam have entailed?

[KG]

how was it supposed to be achieved, what conditions would have to have been met?

curious, because it's obvious the fuck-ups in the WH never envisioned anything like the resistance the iragis have put up to the occupation, and because there are some DUers that advocate 'finishing the job', even tho i'm sure they have no clue what that really means.

were the administraion running the VN clusterfuck just as clueless about what the end game was supposed to look like as the present criminals?

[applegrove]

1. Even McNamara admitted in the end that nobody can win an insurgency

when the people feel it is their country that is being fought for. If the US is viewed as imperialist and trying to diminish the lives of the people of the country or steal all their potential wealth - nobody can win. Where are the insurgents going to go? They live there. They feel they have nothing to loose. Look at East Timor or Afghanistan or anywhere.

[TahitiNut]

2. At least they had the good(?) sense ...

... not to invade and occupy North Viet Nam. :eyes: (I guess.)

[Must_B_Free]

3. My father in Law says

we would have won, if only we would have killed more people.

This is you basic garden variety FOX watcher's opinion, he is also a vet of that war.

[KG]

7. we've all heard that 'we could have won if...' but nobody could say

how that could have been achieved. over a million vietnamese were killed and the mightiest army the world has ever seen still ended up packing up and leaving.

[tsuki]

31. My Father said it was a lost cause. He was a vet of Korea and Nam.

[Redstone]

4. Well, you asked, so don't fucking flame me for my answer, OK?

At the beginning, it would have been to kick the NVA out of South Viet Nam.

People seem to forget the fact that the North Vietnamese did indeed invade South Vietnam. You can disagree with this statement, but you need to study your history if you do.

Nothing at all like Iraq; we're the invading army in that country.

No excuses for what we did in Viet Nam, and anyone who knows me will know I believe that, but that doesn't change history.

Redstone

[KG]

8. no flame, but wasn't 250k US soldiers basically an invasion of S. VN?

[Redstone]

14. No. The fact that we were invited there by a corrupt,

puppet government does not negate the fact that we were, indeed, invited there.

I saw the NVA in action. They were the invaders.

All of the horribly wrong things we did there do not change the facts. Just because we did wrong, does not make them right.

Redstone

[KG]

16. the rightness or wrongness of the war wasn't the point of my post

i was interested if to know if there was any cohoherent plan, any vision to what a 'victory' was sposed to look like.

it seemed mostly to be a battle of attrition that the US thought it could win.

[Redstone]

19. Not a "coherent" plan, and centainly it got less coherent

as the years went on, but the basic idea was indeed to kick the Norht Vietnamese back to North Viet Nam, and quiet Charlie down enough that the ARVN could deal with him.

The disgusting thing is, through all the suffering and dying and slaughter and wast of blood, time, and fortune, none of it made a goddamn bit of difference to the average South Vietnamese.

Whoever was in charge was going to make his life miserable, and kill him if he didn't follow the rules; communist or non-communist, it was all the same to him or her. If either side had won decisively in 1965, 1966, take your pick, life would have been the same for the peasants.

Except for the war part, but you know what I mean.

Hope this does a better job of answering your original question.

Redstone

[Debs]

32. It doesnt wash

Vietnams colonial status was ended by the Vienna accord of 1954. This called for a military division of Vietnam and a reunification election that the US NEVER ALLOWED. When Eisenhower first cancelled this election he said he did it because Ho Chi Minh would have won with 80% of the vote. The Vietnamese people wanted one country WE admitted that so talk about saving the South from the North just doesnt wash. It is certainly debatable according to what I read that the North invaded South Vietnam. What is NOT debatable is that 80% of the bombs we dropped we dropped on SOUTH VIETNAM, and most of the Vietnamese we killed were South Vietnamese. In short we INVADED SOUTH VIETNAM.

[Freedomfried]

20. North Vietnamese = Vietnamese / Americans = NOT Vietnamese

How can you begin to call Vietnamese in their own country "invaders"?

[Redstone]

23. I just KNEW this was coming. So if the North Koreans invaded

South Korea, they wouldn't be invaders by your reasoning, right?

And if we helped the South Koreans fight them off, WE would be invaders?

I'm sorry, but your position is pretty simplistic and naive.

Redstone

[manic expression]

26. Completely different scenario

The S Koreans opposed N Korean efforts to invade the country. However, IF the S Koreans WANTED unification and disliked BOTH the government in S Korea AND the US, as well as expressing this sentiment by actively fighting the S Korean government, the S Korean government would lose legitimacy, and it would not be a real invasion of another land, but a fight for unification.

Yes, we would be the invaders, because the S Koreans wouldn't want us there, and wouldn't like the government we were propping up, and so that is an occupation, which is the period after an invasion.

[Debs]

30. Did you buy

that excuse when it was used by the USSR when they invaded Afghanistan?

[manic expression]

25. North and South Vietnam were SUPPOSED to unify

but our man in SV, Diem, refused to have fair elections (with US support). Diem oppressed the S Vietnamese and they saw him as a pawn of the imperialist Americans (correctly). The people of S Vietnam largely rose against the US, and N Vietnam also fought to unify the country unfairly split by the US with the people of S Vietnam.

If West Germany invaded East Germany to kick out the Soviets, heavily aided by a large number of East German fighters (impossible situation, but try to work with me here), would it really be an invasion?

[Just Me]

5. "Victory"? For what? To accomplish what?

What the hell is victory?

How is "victory" achieved in a war based on lies by profiteers?

[KG]

11. well, that's my questions.

seems there ever is a victory over a determined 'insurgency'. the occupiers usually end up leaving. and i'm pretty sure thats what will happen in the ME

[UTUSN]

6. Umm, I Would Have Seen the Sitcoms in the Late '60s? n/t

[kodi]

9. use of nuclear weapons against north viet nam,

600,000 servicemen and women couldn't do it.

conventional weapons couldn't do it.

what's left?

The Yuri Geller battalion of spoon benders?

[annabanana]

10. "Peace with Dignity"

is a phrase I remember..."Vietnamization" is another

meant about as much them as it does now
bupkis

[KG]

12. those phrases seemed to pop-up when it looked like the resistance

movement in SVN wasn't going to be defeated.

[kenny blankenship]

13. It would have entailed invasion of N. Vietnam

something that had been ruled unthinkable from the beginning because of the risk of drawing the People's Republic Of China directly into the war, as happened ten years before in Korea.

The PRC lost an insane number of soldiers in Korea, something like half a million. But the fear in official Washington was that Mao would be ready to do it again. China had become an atomic power between Korea and the early years of Vietnam. And maybe the USSR also would want to go to war over it as well, after all they had advisors and technical people in N. Vietnam and in an invasion Americans would meet Russians face to face. I think the odds are that none of those doomsday scenarios would have happened had we invaded N. Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't important to either China nor the USSR. In 1954, both Russia and China were tired of Korea and hung Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Viet Minh out to dry. The Viet Minh had controlled 3/4 of the country directly but thanks to lack of interest on their behalf from allies in Moscow and Beijing they had to settle for a temporary partitition along the 17th parallel. But no one in Washington could know for sure the shallowness of "international Communism" and the lack of coordination among the eastern bloc around a longrange plan for "subversion in S.E. Asia", and in the calculations of sane Americans at least, it had to admitted that Vietnam wasn't that important to us either. It was not worth risking a wider conflict over. At the same time, everybody but everybody in official Washington erroneously believed the existence and direction of the Viet Cong was determined in the Kremlin, right down to unit level actions. It was a result of our own paranoia and brainwashing. Of course some of that can be excused because the Soviet Union and China were hardly what you could call transparent societies. Knowing what they were up to and what their intentions were was totally impossible, and in an absence of reliable evidence the mind of America's foreign policy elite reeled towards the darkest assumptions.
They were sure Communism had a plan, and it had to be countered. But they also were sure Vietnam wasn't worth even the risk of WWIII, so the war had to be contained to S. Vietnam. It had to be a "police action", in which an internal rebellion would be put down instead of an all-or-nothing fight to the finish between the south and the north.
They could look at the experience of Korea and conclude that the "fight to finish" was probably going to reach a similar impasse as it had there and nobody would say the slight fluctuation of a border was worth 50,000 dead Americans.

Had they broken with those assumptions and pursued unconditional victory over Hanoi, the resultant numbers of dead would have been doubled surely for the Vietnamese people. American dead, I wouldn't predict because it would depend on the tactics used. It would get worse and worse for us the later in the conflict we decided to go north of the 17th parallel. By the time the North crushed the South, they had a large army indeed. The NVA had of course carried the brunt of the fighting since Tet, and had tried another conventional invasion of the south in 1972, but when they finally succeeded in 1975, they invaded with 17 full divisions. In terms of raw manpower that's larger than our entire Army at present. And I wouldn't doubt the committment of the NVA to the defense of the Hanoi government in the face of any odds. They wouldn't run off like the Iraqi Army did or surrender easily even when facing defeat. American planners had to be remembering the way the Japanese fought on, though militarily defeated, in places like Okinawa. From all we could see, the North also had that level of ideological committment to its government and nationhood. Instead of 58,000 dead Americans we could easily be talking about 250,000 or 300,000 dead Americans. Would that be victory?

Victory, as the RW defines it, would have been insanely costly. Of course they never give a shit about how many Vietnamese died or would die following a different course of action in the conflict. (Then they have the gall to talk about how we shouldn't have pulled out because the Vietnamese would be so much better off under us rather than Communist rule. Funny how we never allowed that to come to a vote in S. Vietnam. Ike didn't allow it, and Kennedy was informed in no uncertain terms by the CIA that the Communists would win in an election, followed by Buddhists, not our French collaborator friends.) 58,000 Americans weren't enough for the RW either. They'd still be there today saying the 58,000 dead demand to be avenged, even if it meant all S. Vietnamese dead and Cambodia and Laos in flames. If the hypothetical gamble to invade the North had failed or hit a snag, the Wingnutters would insist that our stalemated invasion of the North be restarted with a nuclear assault on Hanoi, Haiphong and any center of resistance in the field, lest it fail and require a humiliating retreat and abandonment of our war aims. And the use of nukes would be the last straw with the PRC and the USSR, and then very likely none of us would be here to chat so pleasantly about what might have been.

[KG]

22. thanksf or the well thought out response

and of course then, as now, there was a cabal of ghouls more than willing to spend those 100,000 plus soldiers just to satify some craven desire to 'win'.

and the present day mafia doesn't have the soviet threat to keep a check on their ambitions. very scary.

[B Calm]

15. Is Vietnam better off today, or would it have been better if we won?

[KG]

17. i don't know - not the question i'm asking.

there are many in this country, and on DU, that think the US should 'finish the job' without giving any type of answer to what that would mean. i guess they are willing to spill unlimited amounts of blood, and spend and endless fortunes, to achieve a 'win'

[B Calm]

27. I'm certain if we stay in Iraq, the war will only get worse and world

will be a lot less safer.

[kenny blankenship]

18. Please define "won"

For us to win, the North would have had to give up on the goal of unifying the country. They would have to be persuaded and it's not like we didn't try. Johnson tried buying them off, and then bombing them into resignation. He put 300,000 men in the south to root out the insurgency and the answer to that was Tet and invasion from the North by a huge ass army. The committment from our side escalated to 565,000 Americans. The VC was decimated (because of overcommittment in Tet) but the NVA remained in longterm control of chunks of the south and clearly had no intention of going home. Johnson left office in disgrace. Nixon tried bombing them even more, and widened the war into Cambodian sanctuaries, but the VC/NVA were still there. Then Nixon left too.
Vietnam wasn't going to give up on expelling the foreign invaders short of nuclear annihilation, it's fair to assume. There was no committment too large for them as it turned out.

So no, what it would take for us to "win" would in no ways make VN better off today or ten years ago or thirty years from now. It was all a gigantic mistake.

Vietnam would be better off today if we had accepted the impossibility of our goals in 1967 or 68, or if we had never tried to impose our will in 64-65.

[Selatius]

21. I think it would be roughly the same

The South Vietnamese government was hopelessly corrupt and abusive. Even if Hanoi was unseated from power and the country unified under the South, chances are there would still be human rights abuses similar to ones that go on today in Viet Nam.

Of course, this is conjecture on my part. If the North was invaded, I couldn't tell you the outcome except to say there would be a lot more dead Vietnamese and a lot more dead Americans for an outcome that is uncertain.

[Redstone]

35. I agree with you. As I said, for the common Vietnamese there would

be no difference...they'd be just as miserable either way.

Your second paragraph is right on the mark as well.

Redstone

[Bigmack]

24. Could NOT have "won".....

because the military was collapsing.... much as it is in Iraq. We could have nuked NV into a parking lot, I suppose. Vietnam and Iraq are perfect examples of wars started by people who apparently have no understanding of human nature... theirs, ours, or the enemy's.

In "The collapse of the Armed Forces" - Col Robert Heinl in Armed Forces Journal june 1971
"They have separate companies for men who refuse to go into the field..... Operations have incredibly rag-tag..... American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed.. .. In the Americal divisions fragging during 1971 have averaged one a week... in 1969 196th lt infantry brigade refused to advance into combat.....520 attacks on officers between 69 & 71...... estimated one in ten reported.....Sedition, desertion, race, drugs, breakdown of authority, abandonment of discipline, result in the lowest state of military morale in the history of the country."

In addition:

Congress reported the 15% of troops in 1970 using heroin...racial incidents are erupting murderously in all services. desertion rate in the army in 1970 was 22.5 per thousand, over twice the peak rate for Korea but below the highest rate of 63 per thousand in early 1945. The marines rate for 1970 was actually higher than the army's..24.1 per thousand in 1970

[Debs]

28. Killing about 90%

Of the people IN Vietnam.

[pointless]

29. Ho Chi Minh

had been courting the US for decades to try and get them to support his revolution. He idolised the American style democracy and wanted to see it in Vietnam. The US refused to even acknowledge him. He eventually was given support by the Russians and dealt with communism in order to fund his revolution. I believe he still had intentions of forming a democratic government and was just placating the Russians and using their money for his own goals. Problem is, as soon as Communism came in, the US got involved and began fighting the man who had tried to get their attention and support for so many years but was simply ignored.

It's possible that we could have avoided it altogether.

[H2O Man]

34. Valid point.

In fact, Ho worked in coordination with US intelligence in SouthEast Asia during WW2. When the French threw in the towel, Ho led the resistance to occupation by the enemies of our country. FDR was impressed by the leadership abilities of Ho, who the OSS called, "our little man in the jungle." FDR was supportive of Ho's plans to set up a democratic state in a sovereign Vietnam, but of course he died before he could have aided the effort.

In the book "Vietnam: A History in Documents," we know that Ho crafted his Declaration of Independence on our own. Many of his early works showed a clear Jeffersonian influence. But Harry Truman would write in his opinion, the yellow people were "not ready" for democracy. Truman, more than any other American president, set us on the course to defeat in Vietnam.

Thus said, a "victory" should have been possible: the USA should have recognized that Ho represented exactly the type of friend we wanted in the world. A driend who would cover our backs when other friends were overwhelmed and quit. A friend who read and grasped Jefferson. A friend who wanted his country to be respected as a sovereign state. I think we could have trusted "yellow people" to be just as ready as anyone else for democracy -- if there was any race/color who seemed unabled to be "ready," it might have been those found in Europe.

The OP is correct in noting that this administration's inability to understand history has resulted in their leading us down the exact same dead-end route we have been on before. And it is rooted in the same ignorance that Truman reflected: the USA has leaders who are convinced that they know better than any non-white, non-christian people what form of government they need.

[pointless]

37. right about the leaders

You are exactly right about our leaders.

I didn't know that Ho was a fan of Jefferson. That's pretty cool. :)

[JHB]

33. Very Simple, really... (First, Steal Underpants!)

.. First, throw all the traitorous hippies, yippies, zippies, or whatever they call themselves in jail at hard labor and turn Hanoi Jane into a "comfort woman" so that they all do something useful

Second, Kill Charlie, and keep killing him until he doesn't come back.

Third, (perplexed silence (see South Park underpants gnomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underpants_Gnomes))

Fourth, march to cheering crowds in Hanoi and ticker-tape parades at home, on streets newly-paved with crushed rocks, courtesy of the hard labor of the pinko hippies.

You see how simple it is?
:sarcasm: :banghead:

[blindpig]

36. get a telescope and look at the moon

That's what a US victory would look like.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

38. Permanent U.S. military bases and redesign of the economy

along the lines of an acceptable U.S. capitalist model along with a major presence of U.S. corporations and banking interests in the country, as well as opening of Vietnam's natural resources to the access of U.S. investors and entrepreneurs. The eventual political system in place might have involved several options as long as it favored U.S. interests.