The Naval Institute is tracking them.
Based on the mood in Congress, I believe the expression is “Faster, please.”
(Wisconsin Congressman David) Obey said he would give the White House a year to demonstrate progress, just as he gave the Nixon administration a year to show progress in the Vietnam War inherited from the Johnson administration.
“With respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am extremely dubious that the administration will be able to accomplish what it wants to accomplish,” Mr. Obey said last week. “The problem is not the administration’s policy or its goals. The problem is that I doubt that we have the tools there that we need to implement virtually any policy in that region.”
Mr. Obey, who entered Congress in 1969, added: “At the end of the year, Nixon had not moved the policy, and so I began to oppose the war. I am following that same approach here.”
Because that worked so well before.
Has anyone on the left ever said that opposition to Vietnam didn’t work as they desired? except maybe to say they wished the end had come more quickly? I think when you see it as a failure you are not clearly seeing the goals which inspire our former domestic opposition and current government.
PJ – I know some guys who would be alive today, if Vietnam had ended earlier…. and without any difference in the outcome.
Indeed by the end of the Vietnam War, it was not only the “left.” It was a majority of citizens of differing political persuasions who had become disenchanted, and opposed to continuing a war we did not truly endeavor to win. Even the early hawks had a dramatic change of heart, and just wanted it to go away.
Sun Tzu – by no means a ‘lefty’ – said it well: “If victory is long in coming, then weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. … In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.”
One wonders what Sun Tzu would say today.
“I know some guys…” Is that supposed to give one “street cred”? Many of us knew & serverd with those guys. What I’d like to know is, besides sappy comments & sweeping generalities about “early hawks”et al, what would have actually occurred had the US not engaged in SEA? Obey is entited to his vacillations but that doesn’t make him a tactician or a strategist anymore than folks who quote Sun Tzu are…(-*
#3 TG -“What I’d like to know is… what would have actually occurred had the US not engaged in SEA?”
Surely you must know?
The end result would have been about the same as it eventually turned out. Except we wouldn’t have lost 58,000+ guys (and a number of gals), and the Vietnamese would not have lost 2+ million civilians. Nor would we have to have a “wall” in D.C.
Sorry, but 58,000 deaths are hardly “sappy”! It is a deep tragedy. Incredibly, all those many deaths made no difference in the war’s eventual outcome in Vietnam.
And as usual, we have at least one voice that demands that the Vietnam War be entirely separated from the wider geo-political context that found the champion of democracy engaged in a world wide epic struggle against communism. We were engaged on a thousand fronts in the war to defeat the USSR and its communist ideology. Vietnam was just a piece in the overall struggle. I think the results, post war, made a deep impression on most of the members of the ‘non-aligned’ countries. Vietnam was just one battle in a campaign that lasted for over 45 years. It is indeed sad that in the course of the 10,000 day war we lost almost as many men as were lost in the Battle of the Somme.
Context counts. Don’t let those who ignore it get away with it.
Oh yeah, the Domino Theory. You still ascribe to that mostly debunked theory? I admit I once thoroughly believed in it too – until it finally became apparent it was a deeply flawed casus belli.
“Just a ‘piece’ in the overall struggle” Losing 58,000 men and women can never be considered a “piece”. Tell me; in all the many years of the Cold war where were the ‘much larger pieces?’ On how many of your “thousand of fronts” did “thousands die”
Name me the other blood “campaigns” of equal significance during those 45 years.
Please tell me. I would love to know.
And huh? Comparing the Battle of the Somme to Vietnam? Oh, come on! And you try to talk of “geo-political context?”
The facts are North Vietnam took over South Vietnam, and our many years and lives lost made no damn difference in that result. Is not that so?
It is also a fact that our extensive involvement in Vietnam had no effect one way or another on the ultimate crumbling of the Soviet Union.
It is also a fact that the countries that President Eisenhower worried about when he spoke of the Domino Theory never did fall to Communism, after the fall of the South.
But what if they did. I hear Communist Vietnam is a great tourist destination now, hires some of our US unemployed workers now, and we have some vigorous trade deals with them.
Lots of people foolishly saw Commie’s under every bed back then, and made many gross errors because of that, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident. I wonder if we today make some of the same mistakes with our newer enemies? I venture we do.
Oh dear Flit,
So many questions. I have never in my life raised the Domino Theory in a debate. I studied history and politics and war. I don’t dismiss reality with a psshawww, that don’t count on account of the x theory. I tend to look at the structure of reality as it is not as progressives over the years have decided to all pretend it is.
Let us start with Korea. You may have heard of this minor conflict but you’re not sure of the context in which to place it. You’re an idiot. It was one front on that war of which I wrote earlier. I know your soul is truly happy to know that in N.Korea they enjoy progressive social policies that you appreciate and wish all people in Asia could gain the benefit from…cause you strike me as a progressive. That was a front in the global camaign in the early 1950′s, late 1940′s. Can you believe that at the same time the US Army was staving off the Red hordes in Berlin as the Berlin Wall went up and the Berlin Airlift began? I know. Shocking! There was some sort of Communist attack against Greece after WWII but you wouldn’t have so much as a clue about that. Don’t worry, you probably never heard about the Prague Spring and that whole complete entire communist takeover of China and the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan in the 40′s is a complete mystery to the likes of you as is whatever happened in Cuba as the communists positioned nuclear missiles that could range US cities in their new conquest.
I could go on comrade and start with the African continent and the various movements there but I suspect you’d just say they were perfectly legit independence movements and when I ask you, are the better off now then they were then you’d do the usual and either refuse to answer or dodge the question.
In South East Asia, what happened next? The Pathet Lao took over one country and the Khmer Rouge another and the anti-democracy SLORC took over a third country. I tell you what. You tell me how SE Asia is better off now then it was under the British. Feel free to extend on your remarks. Millions were murdered by totalitarians in the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam in addition to all the murdered S. Vietnamese during the war. I’m sure you cry yourself to sleep over those deaths because you never lifted so much as a finger to prevent those deaths.
Strangest of all to you Flit must be that at no time did the USA attack a communist country in an effort to take it over and claim it for our own. There are dozens of examples of communists attacking the west but there isn’t a single example of a counterstrike outside of the pathetic lame brained Bay of Pigs launched by Kennedy. He was progressive though and well beloved by the machine.
Curtis, the Vietnam war still has the power to inflame our passions thirty-odd years on, but please conform to the standard of attacking the message, not the messenger.
That’s because we left them hanging, Fliterman.
So those peace-loving black pajama-wearing economic geniuses could prevent the Evil Capitalist Basstrds ™ from exploiting the Vietnamese people. After all, We Are The Root Of All Evil.
The peaceniks had some influence. But it was far less and much later than Eisenhower, Kennedy, McNamara, Johnson, Westmoreland, Nixon, and many others – including both sides of Congress – who had a lot more.
Re-education camps, boat people, millions of people killed after we left (SE Asia), failed socialist economy… great legacy there.
And although tourism is starting to make a difference, it’s still a centralized system. Which has worked out so well in the last 100 years. But who knows, maybe we can make it work…
Re-education camps, “millions killed” et al would have happened anyway after the French left, and if we never entered their civil war conflict…. Eventually killing their 2 – 4 million civilians before we ever left.
So tell me, how it was worth 58,000 of our guys’ lives and the millions of Vietnamese men, women, and their children’s lives , if everything we did – and we did a lot for many years – didn’t make any one bit of difference in the outcome or ensuing years?
Tell me!
Tell me that was a “good war”. Tell me that was a worthwhile war. Tell me that was a necessary war. You tell me. You tell me and try to tell my dead friends!
Err… you do know that we had pretty much pulled out of Vietnam by 1972, right? And that the subsequent invasion–by tanks, not by guerillas–was stopped in a series of somewhat conventional battles, largely due to our air support?
And then, the *next* time the North invaded, not only did we refuse to honor the treaty we signed that said we would come back if they invaded again, but we also refused to allow the South to buy any weapons with which to defend themselves from the tanks.
The end result? Millions murdered (Pol Pot counts), millions enslaved, millions of refugees fleeing for their lives. But, that’s apparently just fine by you.
Actually, you are very wrong.
We had “pretty much pulled out of Vietnam” by 1969 when most ground troops had already left – in 1969, not 1972.
We had switched to a “cut and run” strategy of Vietnamization. Our air war of Linebacker I and II covered for our years of earlier failures and provided a phony, “peace with honor” withdrawal excuse.
While I regret the horrors and aftermath of war – of which I participated, (did you?) – the millions of killing and deaths on all sides would have been far less if we had never entered that debacle.
Can you not understand that?
Nope, I don’t understand that. I don’t see where you claiming that they would have all died anyway if we hadn’t intervened is true. I think many millions more would have died. And there is no way, if Communism had been allowed to spread that fewer people would have died than were lost in that war. Wherever Communism spread, it has killed through unfeeling, inhumane inaction, overbearing bureaucratic inertia, and absolutely tyrannical intention and oppression, to kill millions (in the Soviet Union, China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and throughout Eastern Europe) in the name of the State’s greater good. History is its judge. Millions died for nothing other than the whims of the dictators in charge and the uncaring inhumanity of Communism’s bureaucrats.
I don’t see where your claim that the sacrifice of the Men you knew in Vietnam was unworthy or useless when it was spent against the intentions and later actions of the winners of that conflict who, once victorious and still today, murder and murdered millions of people in death camps in VietNam, Laos and Cambodia, and “re-educated” additional millions in camps as well. The “lucky” ones being those who fled by boat or overland to other countries to begin new lives with nothing in their pockets and the shirts on their backs, and yet, who now run small fiefdoms of prosperity and civilized conduct in American cities all over this country. In Houston, they are pillars of the community and their enclaves are bastions of new buildings, small businesses, clean infrastructure, tax revenue producing entities, and extremely polite and civilized society. And that they don’t beat and rape women as a rule and behead men who disagree with them for sport is a welcome bonus.
Surely, our loss of 58,000 Great Men must be worth something to those millions throughout our land who descended from those thin, oppressed and tortured people who escaped horrendous fates at the hands of those who “would have killed them anyway” if America had not intervened somewhere.
Surely, the treasure the Soviet Union had to expend to oppose us could have been spent elsewhere to enslave other peoples if America had not tried to oppose tyranny, even temporarily (due to the Cowardice of the anti-war movement in wishing a fate of Death on the little brown and yellow people we were trying to defend in Vietnam from tyranny and oppression, which certainly appeared after we abandoned them to said Fate), and push back against a system which eventually killed near a hundred million people through the Gulags and political executions.
Surely some of us alive today owe our livelihoods and quality of existence to those 58,000 souls who gave their lives for us because WE asked them to, in order to protect us from Communism, bring the rule of law to places that didn’t have it so that enemies could not plan and plot to hurt us again later, closer to home, and with a result which could have been far higher Deaths of Americans than those who were our First Line of Defense?
I, for one, shall never believe that their lives were lost in vain. I believe they died defending my parent’s way of Life, so that I could actually continue to grow up, become a career Naval Officer, do my duty for 21 yrs, and raise my family in an age when I didn’t have to worry about when the nuclear bombs would rain down on us, when my government would be overthrown and I would be put in a re-education camp, or summarily shot because I was a possible insurgent against the Socialists and Communists who would take over. I view them as Heroes of the First Magnitude, and am forever in their debt.
Was their sacrifice worth it to me?
You’re damn straight it was…….
Subsunk
Fliterman,
A question though – there was serious Communist subversion in Indonesia in the mid to late 60s – if we had never been involved in Vietnam and a thoroughly Stalinist, expansionist Vietnam had had decades of peace to export the revolution to the rest of Southeast Asia do you think that we could have remained disengaged? Would not Ho Chi Mihn and his Soviet paymasters have shown a great deal of zeal in exporting their revolution beyond their borders?
Fliterman,
Another point that complements the question above is to what extent our intervention did, in a global geopolitical context, “force” the Soviet Union into pouring resources into a conflict in a place where, relatively speaking, we had more connections and sympathizers than we had in countries like Indonesia – i.e. you are assuming a static reality for the Cold War and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in which we can pull Vietnam out of the mix and still have the same basic dynamics of Communism reaching the limits of its expansion, and the lack of conflict in Southeast Asia not impacting, say, Chinese ambitions against India (or for that matter, Soviet ambitions against China).
I’m really not trying to do armchair geopolitics as much as just suggest that the war was not just about us – there was another side that also spent a great deal of its treasure to get a victory, that, relatively speaking in terms of the Soviet Union, was very late in the game. A pro-Soviet Vietnam, won on the cheap in the 50s would have emboldened an already adventurous Kremlin even more, and the Soviet capacity for geopolitical miscalculation was pretty close to boundless from the 60s to early 80s as was… We might have had more affection from Europe in the 60s had we not been in Vietnam, but I rather doubt it given the tensions of generational conflict, but we would have also been facing a very different military and political reality in the developing world, one in which a major Soviet ally would have had a longer time to consolidate itself AND in which the Soviets would have felt even more assured they had the wind at their back.
Sometimes, even a lost battle or a lost war can have positive results (Polish struggles in E. Europe taught the Soviets a caution in their policies toward that country missing in Soviet conduct towards much of the rest of Eastern Europe).
Oops – sorry for not having read the whole thread. But Flit, the question is not what we thought of, when we developed the domino theory, but what things looked like in Moscow. There really were two sides to the Cold War, and up to the 80s there was a very large part of the Soviet security/military apparat, the kind of happy people who attempted the Moscow coup in 1991, and whose legitimate heir/error, Vlad Putti-Put is the new Tsar of some of the Russias who thought they were winning and were doing nasty and crazy things based on that belief. I agree that the domino theory produced distortions in our pov but if you don’t think the Soviets were not (mis)calculating based on their own ambitions, and that those miscalculations would likely as not have increased, then I do disagree.
Ps: The Soviets in Afghanistan lost 30-50,000 killed, inflicted up to 1 million casualties, made refugees of 5 million more Afghans and their liberal use of land mines and “butterflies” (toy shaped mines) have given that country a very high rate of disabled/crippled people. So it seems to me that in Afghanistan we have a shooting war that at least comes close to what happened in Southeast Asia, not factoring in the kinds of postwar legacies of the Afghan war on Islam throughout the world. Furthermore, ’tis fair to say that a very large % of the Jihadi mythology grew out of the role of Mujahadeen in fighting there, so it seems to me that Afghanistan (in the late 70s, when the underlying sources of Soviet deterioration are discernable to us now) represents the kind of adventurism the Soviets could and did pull off, late in their day. That victories in Southeast Asia would have made them less prone to do that and more vulnerable to pressure seems doubtful to me.
pps: Or do you regard this all as domino theorizing by any other name, and what is your assessment of how the Soviets would have reacted to gaining a major client in Southeast Asia after the mid-late 50s?
From the Naval Institute presentation:
The secret lies, he proposed, in a whole-of-government approach in which multiple government agencies, most of them civilian, combine to address situations in underdeveloped parts of the world.
How does such an approach work if the civilian agencies are filled with people who distrust and despise the aims and methods of the American military?
ppps: Given that Vietnam had many more people in the 60s than Afghanistan in the 80s (30 million in Vietnam total in 1960, only 14 million in Afghanistan in 1980), the up to 1 million dead there is proportionally much higher than the similar losses in Vietnam – making such cultural developments as the fanatical, apocalyptic religiosity that is producing a new harvest of butchers much more comprehensible – i.e. in relative terms for the Afghans Soviet warmaking there inflicted worse losses than those suffered by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, and unlike Vietnam Afghanistan remains torn apart by the burdens of Soviet warmaking and its blowback over 30 years later.