I think we should discuss the stupidity of starting another war in Yemen. Of course so far it is just a “police action” you know. If memory serves, didn’t Vietnam start with just some “advisors” being sent to help the local puppet regime fight the “terrorists”? And then a few more, and then more, and then many more and then finally half a million? Of course we don’t have half a million to spare, but we can pay billions for “contractors” or mercenaries to increase the number. Odd how our war on Islam makes me think of an animal stuck in quicksand. The more the animal struggles, the deeper in it sinks and worse it is trapped. Rather like Uncle Sam.
In May 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Saigon and enthusiastically declared Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia.”[85] Asked why he had made the comment, Johnson replied, “Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”[66] Johnson assured Diem of more aid in molding a fighting force that could resist the communists.
Kennedy’s policy toward South Vietnam rested on the assumption that Diem and his forces must ultimately defeat the guerrillas on their own. He was against the deployment of American combat troops and observed that “to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences.”
The quality of the South Vietnamese military, however, remained poor. Bad leadership, corruption, and political interference all played a part in emasculating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). The frequency of guerrilla attacks rose as the insurgency gathered steam. While Hanoi’s support for the NLF played a role, South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis.
Kennedy advisers Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended that U.S. troops be sent to South Vietnam disguised as flood relief workers. Kennedy rejected the idea but increased military assistance yet again. In April 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith warned Kennedy of the “danger we shall replace the French as a colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.”[88] By 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower’s 900 advisors.
Wikipedia
I do adore Johnson’s reference to “our boy”. Do I smell a whiff of imperialism there? Oh, heavens no, as so many tell us here on this blog the US has never been imperialist. We have no “boys” around the world. Kharzai isn’t “out boy” at all. And none of the Iraq “leaders” were our boys either. No no no.
Hmmm…. un-cooperative it seems. We may just have to overthrow the present regime in Yemen and put in one of “our boys” to work our will there and get really involved. Will be interesting to see what Obama does.
Margery, Why don’t you research the case for increased involvement in Yemen and then pick it apart. Also, why does everyone want to use Vietnam as “the” example of an unnecessary? For the United States World War I was stupider.
>>> South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis. <<<
Ho Chi Mihn’s willingness to get 3 million Vietnamese killed (including 1 million North Vietnamese infantry in the south) and possibly 12 million more killed (typical distribution) out of a population of 35 million was the core. If he had done that to evict the French colonialists he would be universally scored as a madman. Imagine if Ghandi proportionaltely… Vietnam was free of colonization (except for some withering away hooks) since 1949. The French army was defending the home government in 1956.
JFK did not want to help Martin Luther King either because of political costs (gain 5%; lose 10%) but got snagged into it in Selma. LBJ who got the 1964 Civil Rights Act through a 10X more recalcitrant than today’s Senate (which 10 JFKs could not have accomplished), passed Medicare and Medicaid, raised the minimum wage to $10/hr in today’s money (at half today’s average income); was a great man but his admittedly tough decision to stick it out in Vietnam makes him forgotten to today’s intelligentsia who mostly have forgotten the majority of working folks in this country too (why the minimum wage fell in half by two years ago — if you had predicted that in 1968 they would have thought it would take a nuclear war or a comet stike).
A mere two decades before the decision year in Vietnam two little countries tried to take over the world (ironically because they lacked resources). In 1965 the two big countries that they could not bite off were coming after us with leaders as militantly communist as Ho (Khrushchev was the Russian equivalent of Mao) with bombs that could leave a half-mile deep crater where Hiroshima used to be. Russia was turning out double the number of engineers and scientists we were and its economy was supposedly growing twice as fast (7% to 3% — 3% being high growth for us).
Very scary time. Vietnam was a very tough call. But the fear was that if the democracies did not defend against the maddest communist that all the other communists around the world would come out of the woodwork and take whatever was in front of the (Munich having been the big supposed lesson of WWII). By 1975 we had won globally so we (not the Vietnamese) could afford to lose locally. 1965 was Communism’s high tide.
Oh please. Let us not rewrite history to our liking. The French were in bitter battles to preserve their imperial control of Vietnam and LOST. They managed to divide the country and of course Vietnamese nationalists would not tolerate that. The South became a puppet government under French and then US control until we overthrew Diem and put in a “better” puppet. Americans are so imperialistic they can’t fathom that nations under our yoke as well as that of Europeans wanted to be free to rule themselves. So we keep at it, telling ourselves silly lies about what we do. I recall well a TV debate on whether we should get further into the Vietnamese morass with Hans Morgenthau of U of Chicago one of the few pointing out the simple fact that THEY DIDN’T WANT US THERE but to no avail against the stupidos who waved the red flag of communism taking over all of Asia and other nonsense. We were so stupid we couldn’t understand their wish for national self determination like our wish for the same vs George III. And the nonsense continues in Afghanistan and now Yemen with the scare being Islamic terrorism. By the way, Japan and Germany were not, power-wise, “little” countries. And it is beyond absurd to compare Mao to Krushchev. What ever gave you the idea that Ho was the “maddest” communist? Really!!!! I hate to say it, but your post is a load of rubbish.
Since this is open thread and Vietnam is already mentioned that gives me the excuse to go off on a tangent I wanted to go off on anyway but wasn’t sure it fit here.
I was recently disturbed to read in Paul Theroux’s “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” his sympathetic portrayal of today’s Vietnamese enthusiasts for good old Uncle Ho and their happy report that they were growing rich selling rice. I thought: you don’t grow rich selling rice; you get rich selling Kias and Samsung.
THEN IT HIT ME.
Israelis delirious over purloining olive groves from Palestinians in West Bank settlements are as exactly as foolishly happy as the poor rice sellers. “Making the desert bloom” in broader economic perspective is strictly new immigrant stuff equating to the joy of owning your own taxi cab in a free Western city.
How much industrial might does it take to produce a single nuclear bomb? Ask relatively (to Israel) giant Iran. Israel on half the population base of the city of Buenos Aires has reputedly produced 400! — while maintaining a air force that must be the envy of many NATO nations — while keeping almost as many tanks at the ready as India and Pakistan together.
If Israel had gone “legit” in 1949 — just took the 55% of the Palestinian homeland ceded to it by the UN and concentrated on economic development — today’s Israel could purchase all the olive groves it wanted anywhere in the world and everyone including the Palestinians would be sensibly happy.
WWI stupider? How? Vietnam is the best example since it is recent and at least in some memories quite fresh. And it is a very clear lesson in the stupidity of trampling on other nations and their wish to be free of foreign interference. We are still so stupid we think the world is our “oyster” to go anywhere and do anything, especially kill lots of innocent people, when and if we get the urge more or less for “kicks”, although we usually try to disguise our brutality by waving some scare crow around like Saddam’s supposed nukes and I don’t know what re the Taliban. I guess we are there to liberate female Afghans from domestic “slavery” or something nonsensical.
I believe that our boys are already in charge in Yemen, but Yemen is, oddly perhaps, a functioning democracy of sorts. It’s one of the few places in the Arab world where they have elections, let people vote as they please, and let the guy who got the most votes run the country (such as it is). My first guess is that if we continue to mindlessly pursue the war on terror in our present fashion, our guys possibly will not be in charge after the next election. Nothing like inadvertantly blowing up a few schoolkids and torturing the odd goatherd or taxi driver to alienate a population.
The reason that Al Quedda is there is because it is majority Sunni, has a gazillion largely autonomous tribes and provinces, and has a long and very leaky border with Saudi Arabia. Yemen exports qat and illegal migrants. It imports Saudi malcontents.
Looks to me like yet another opportunity for the US to emulate George Armstrong Custer’s ill advised attempt to teach those damn redskins a lesson.
I don’t know what history you read. I read Bernard B. Fall’s “The Two Vietnam’s” — the only fully scholarly Vietnamese history I know of and I read plenty of books on the subject at the time.
Recently a 400 page book called “Krushchev’s War” came out detailing his endless ideologically based efforts to take the cold war conflict to us (somewhat purposeless; he couldn’t really achieve his aims but he just thought that was his job as a believing communist).
It is simply a historical fact that the French let go of Vietnam in 1949 — not without tying Vietnam down to hundreds of pages of conditions — but the kind of silly stuff that is for home consumption and can be quickly ignored. in 1956 both were about to break off the last tangles: the French over Vietnamese keeping all the tariff income from the ocean ports and not sharing it with Laos and Cambodia; the Vietnamese because the French disconnected the Piaster from the Franc.
According to Fall — a noted scholar allowed to visit the North in the 50s and early 60s — 98% of the tillers of the soil in the north (70% in the south) owned the land they worked. Still, Ho had to have his communist land reform so he and his came up with a crackpot formula to make some owners and some peasants and some stages in between depending on things like how many pigs you owned. This led to the execution of 50,000 “capitalist-land owners” and the imprisonment of 100,000 more. Eventually of course all farm land was organized into collectives: not the sort of change that inspires peasants to revolt in favor of — always the opposite.
In 1956 — according to Fall — the year of the Hungarian revolution against the real bad guys (okay: “many are called but few are chosen” fits everybody including Americans) there was a revolt n Ho’s home province which the army suppressed by killing 6000 farmers.
I recently got the 1963 edition of Fall’s book in which Fall depicts the numerous economic projects the two giant communist countries were pouring into 13 million population North Vietnam in the fifties and early sixties to make it a communist show place. Ironically, Fall predicts that Ho will never get involved in a war with the Americans in the south because he would not risk all this economic prosperity being destroyed by American bombers (which latter is where you like to come into the movie I imagine). Am awaiting the 1967 edition from Amazon. Bought it in the 60s but it was too windy for me at the time — not too much fun now; pure scholarly stuff.
When the Cambodian domino fell more millions lost their lives to a dictator’s whims. That is called a “holocaust” with round-eyes. But we are the bad guys.
More death and we had no good reason to get involed in the breakdown in the treaties between the European colonial powers.
Also, more lies.
The purpose of the CPI was to influence American public opinion toward supporting U.S. intervention in World War I via a prolonged propaganda campaign. Among those who participated in it were Wilson advisers Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, the latter of whom had remarked that “the essence of democratic society” was the “engineering of consent”, by which propaganda was the necessary method for democracies to promote and garner support for policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information
I agree it is unwise to compare Mao to Kruschev. Mao was the greatest mass murderer in human history. Made Hitler and the Nazi’s look like rank amatuers at killing. Kruschev just inherited the mass graveyards of Stalin…
But I’m glad you thought South Vietnam got to ‘self-determine’ itself in 1975 when the North’s mechanized Tank Armies rolled into the South and destroyed them. Thus installing a tyrrany there that continues to this day. I think the people of South Korea got a much better deal – luckily Truman decided it was worth American lives to stop North Korea from “self-determining” South Korea into the totalitarian hell-hole that North Korea is today. But I bet North Korea and Vietnam have very low GINI indicies!!!
The defense of evil on the left gets tedious at times….
Margery – Another isolationist!!! Talk to ilsm. He’s big on the US giving up its global power and influence to such great human rights and supporters for freedom as China, Russia, and Islam. Who cares if the Taliban retakes Afghanistan and starts shootin women in soccer stadiums? Who cares if Saddam uses poisen gas on his own people? Its not like they are sticking people into ovens, or putting plastic bags over their heads, or just shooting them in a ‘great leap forward’ is it? They haven’t done that….yet.
Krushchev may not have killed millions — matter of fact he ended much of the terror in Russia. It was just that he was as dedicated a communist as Ho at a time when communism was at its scariest — he was not a bureacrat like Breznev who followed him. For that matter Krushchev was more sincere about conquring the world for his ideology than Stalin who seemed to just want to be czar. If Krush were head man in 1945 he very well might have marched the Red Army to the sea, taking over all of Europe.
Ho was first a nationalist, a communist second. And now Vietnam has left communism behind de facto as has China. Communism for those who don’t get it was used as an anti-IMPERIAL ideology more than anything else. I find the idea that the French left Vietnam ridiculous. They LOST the north and managed to keep a puppet regime going in the South. An unpopular regime. Johnson said it was run by “our boy”. Can’t you understand? Claiming that Ho should not have gone to war to reunite the country is like saying Stalin should have let Hitler continue to occupy vast amounts of Russia and done nothing about it for fear of casualties. Utterly absurd. Or that the UK should have made peace with Germany after France and most of Europe fell to avoid casualties. It is beyond belief how Americans can’t get it that the world doesn’t belong to us or to any colonial imperial power. ddrew2u your “supposition” about Krushchev taking over all of Europe is simply silly nonsense. It shows how little you understand.
The Vietnamese war failed in large part because the SOUTH and its population supported the NORTH and not us. We were the intruders; the NORTH were their liberators from French/US imperialism. We were constantly undermined in the south by the population that hated us and when we got our troops out our puppet regime in the south COLLAPSED because it had no public support. Wise up.
In 1948 Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked the state of Israel and tried to drive the jews into the sea. They lost, the Israelis won and then insisted on a buffer against future attacks. Had the mentioned Arab countries gone “legit” and accepted the United Nations plan today there be an Arab state and a Jewish state existing side by side.
You mean if we aren’t imperialists we are “isolationists”? Pretty silly I would say. The whole nonsense about our “saving the world” by conquering nations and killing their inhabitants is another piece of bizarre US thinking. If we want to stop evil, start in Africa where there is a lot of it. We don’t bother about Africa because we are not at war against blacks, just Muslims. PS We supported the Taliban when they were driving out the Russians and didn’t seem to mind what they did then. Nor did we mind Saddam’s gassing the Kurd when he was fighting against Iran. We liked that. You are very ignorant of recent history.
Well then we had no reason to get involved in WWII either. Right? In both wars we intervened to keep an undemocratic German regime from defeating the UK and France that were democracies. You think that was wrong? I marvel at the historical distortions that get into the brains of Americans who know so little of modern history. PS Roosevelt steered us into WWII. We should have stayed out?
I doubt the Palestinians would ever concede 55% of the land to the Zionists. Perhaps you think Russia should have conceded 55% of Russia to Hitler. Interesting idea. So stupid those Russians to have gone to war to drive the Germans out.
What will eventually get the US out of other nations is probably our failing finances. Wasting billions on imperialist ventures when there are demands for trillions for social programs at home will finally force one to give and it won’t be social programs; it will be the silly imperialism that does nothing for Americans at all.
What does the phony need for a buffer have to do with moving 400,000 Israeli settlers into Gaza (couldn’t hang on there) and the West Bank, the densest populated nation after Bangladesh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density Israel keeps 3000 NATO quality tanks with NATO quality trained crews on short notice. That should be enough to repel 9000 similar quality tanks. Need for what buffer — against China? During Lebanon II Israeli F-15s buzzed Jordan’s presidential quarters just to remind them who’s boss. I assert that after 1973 the Arab world had pretty much given up pushing Israel into the sea. Time to concentrate on modern economic development not “country cousin” clipping of other people’s orchards. If Israel had not begun ethnic cleansing Palestinians instead both Israel and the other 50 states (looking through Knesset member pages I noticed almost all claimed English for at least one language, also many Russian and Arabic — not too many Hebrew) would not be suffering the hate of so many in the Islamic world.
How about this for a deal? The US bases military forces in Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories AND East Jerusalem — Japan time. Then Israel would have no reason not to divert all that military effort into good money making businesses (better fit for the stereotype :-]). If I were president I would present Israel with that choice or the US putting military bases into the West Bank and Gaza (with Palestinian permission — we wouldn’t need to ask Israel) from which bases we would gradually squeeze out the IDF (open up the exclusive roads, close the checkpoints, charge Israel for water, etc.).
If you bothered to learn something you might know that French “influence” did not cease in 1949 and that even after the North was divided from the South, the French and Americans were the backers of the regime in the South that was a marvelous example of colonial corruption, etc. quite similar to Chiang’s regime in China that America so loved.
Diem was not a “good” puppet, so Kennedy arranged for a coup to put another one in his place, more useful to the USA. And just for the record the military power of the North and Ho was nothing like the vast military power the US put into the war. You remark about their “tank” crushing the south is silly nonsense. We had complete air control of the whole are and bombed the North and the South constantly. Killing hundreds of thousands without success.
what does the phony need for a buffer have to do with moving 400,000 Israeli settlers into Gaza (couldn’t hang on there) and the West Bank, the densest populated nation after Bangladesh? Phony? What don’t you understand about Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria attacking Israel in 1948?
Ho did not kill one single Vietnamese. The French and the US killed all those Vietnamese. Thinking otherwise is denying the moral responsibility the US and French have toward the operations and tactics which effected those casualties.
Read some other texts on the issue: Best and Brightest, Rumors of a Distant War.
Ask yourself who killed Diem?
When I was a child I did not think, I supported the Vietnam effort.
When I became a man I joined the war effort.
As I aged and saw things and talked to men who were there, I learned.
There was no honor is supporting the opposition to Ho.
Was Ho better than Diem, likely not.
Was he worse than them? Enough Vietnamese died saying he was better than the US puppets and drug lords to answer that question.
To sum up our experience in Vietnam: we were led by such brilliant people (Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger) who understood so well what was at stake and who expeditiously took the right steps that permitted us to win. So that we early on managed to send in only a few people who quickly got control of the situation and effectively stopped the North from getting anywhere trying to interfere in the South. We got the South so well organized and won so much public support that at the end our side emerged victorious. Almost no loss of US life, very little loss of life for the Vietnamese, and, as we know, Vietnam was quickly pacified by our brilliant intervention. So that today everybody sees this as our shining moment in which our decision to get involved turned out so well. How happy we have to be at the result. Right?
According to the book “Decent Interval” by Frank Snepp, Ho had thrown in the towel after the second Nixon bombing of his capital only to start up again after discovering that the US had virtually abandoned the south after the 1973 peace treaty. What is indisputable is that after we finally reached our goal of getting the south to take over all the bloody ground fighting we withdrew our financial support to such an extent that the south had to ration bullets and withdrew the decisive air support altogether (leaving the south without sufficient resources even to helicopter out its wounded!). http://www.amazon.com/Decent-Interval-Insiders-Indecent-Strategy/dp/0700612130/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262872370&sr=8-6
Ho’s version of winning “public support” was the Van Dich who would typically enter a village, take 5 young men who had recently joined some southern government education program and execute them on the spot. Once a village had developed sufficient “public support” for the communist insurgency Ho’s secret police folks would move in for routine intimidation and the Van Dich would move on: the original inkblot strategy. Ever ask yourself why peasants would join a bloody revolt to give up their land to government collectives? But we are the bad guys: only for abandoning the south and throwing away lives for (political) hesitation to spend a little money.
Actually there was a way to win the war quickly and relatively bloodlessly. It is mentioned in the book “Glenn, the Astronaut Who Would Be President.” It was under consideration to call up the reserves and send 2 million men to Vietnam. This is what the “Powell Doctrine” is all about: using overwhelming force if you have it — not going by “best and brightest” fine tuned calculations.
You still don’t get it, do you? The fact is with all our brains and power we FAILED. Do you understand the word FAILED?????? And we failed because we were on a fool’s errand of trying to maintain a colonial regime where the people didn’t want it. God, Jesus. Americans never get the fact that other people DON’T WANT US TRAMPLING OVER THEIR LAND. They never seem able to imagine how we would feel if, say, the Chinese had an army killing us and trying to impose their puppet as our leader. We got hysterical when Cuba (not ours, but we regarded it as “ours”) seemed likely to become a Russian puppet state. Imagine if Russia had tried to impose its authority and rule on us with a vast army sent over to kill and occupy us. The BLIINDNESS of some Americans is beyond belief.as well as well as their good sense and intelligence. Are you so uninformed that you think Nixon could have drafted and sent TWO MILLION to Vietnam? He was facing a national uproar with half a million there. There must be something wrong with your brain.
I did not say drafted — I said callling up the reserves was under consideration — in a post WWII environment when nobody questioned military defense much. And it probably (don’t remember the book) was much before Nixon came in.
Jordan, Lebanon and Syria of today are capable of mounting about as much of a threat to Israel as Rhode Island. For how little Egypt is to be feared look at the lastest Uri Anvery column:”Something odd, almost bizarre, is going on in Egypt these days.”http://avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html What buffer zone do the occupied territories offer against Egypt — the only possible physical threat — wrong side of the map? And what does any “buffer zone” have to do with moving hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the territories and tossing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Palestinians off their private properties — necessitating cruelly clamping down on the lives of all Palestinians to choke off resistance?
Margery your blindness to evil is beyond belief. You stand on the side of people who built the Gulags and murdered millions. When South Vietnam was overrun millions died, millions more fled, and the survivors live under tyrrany to this day.
Very few, except quasi-morons, think that we were not soundly defeated in Vietnam. Nor that all our power availed us nothing in the end. They don’t get anything except the reactionary imperialist line on America in the world and understand virtually nothing. In addition their information and facts are wrong or way off. There was no way two million men could have been put in Vietnam without vastly expanding an already hated draft. Reserves? What nonsense. The killing in Vietnam came from the US army and its gases and its napalm and its other horrors that it inflicted on a people who merely wanted to be free of foreigners messing in their affairs and trying to control their country. God, but the dunces never get it at all. In fact there is no reason to continue. I can’t educate ignoramuses endlessly and there is no benefit for me to argue with know-nothings.
“Margery Meanwell” is a very appropriate handle for this commenter.
“The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes is a children’s story by an anonymous author…
The fable tells of Goody Two-Shoes, the nickname of a poor orphan girl named Margery Meanwell, who goes through life with only one shoe.”
“The story popularized the phrase “goody two-shoes”, often used to describe an excessively or annoyingly virtuous person. In more recent years, the phrase has developed a more negative connotation, implying that the virtuousness of a “goody two-shoes” is insincere.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Little_Goody_Two-Shoes
For the benefit of other readers — now that MM is no longer with us — the French Army was still in Vietnam in 1956 to defend then free Vietnam from the communist insurgency. Didn’t know that myself until reading it in “The Two Vietnams” recently. The Walter Cronkite version of the war is all that seems to have survived. Couldn’t even find the only fully scholarly book on Amazon the first time around — only found the 1963 edition on Albris.
I think we should discuss the stupidity of starting another war in Yemen. Of course so far it is just a “police action” you know. If memory serves, didn’t Vietnam start with just some “advisors” being sent to help the local puppet regime fight the “terrorists”? And then a few more, and then more, and then many more and then finally half a million? Of course we don’t have half a million to spare, but we can pay billions for “contractors” or mercenaries to increase the number. Odd how our war on Islam makes me think of an animal stuck in quicksand. The more the animal struggles, the deeper in it sinks and worse it is trapped. Rather like Uncle Sam.
Here is how it all began:
In May 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Saigon and enthusiastically declared Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia.”[85] Asked why he had made the comment, Johnson replied, “Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”[66] Johnson assured Diem of more aid in molding a fighting force that could resist the communists.
Kennedy’s policy toward South Vietnam rested on the assumption that Diem and his forces must ultimately defeat the guerrillas on their own. He was against the deployment of American combat troops and observed that “to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences.”
The quality of the South Vietnamese military, however, remained poor. Bad leadership, corruption, and political interference all played a part in emasculating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). The frequency of guerrilla attacks rose as the insurgency gathered steam. While Hanoi’s support for the NLF played a role, South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis.
Kennedy advisers Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended that U.S. troops be sent to South Vietnam disguised as flood relief workers. Kennedy rejected the idea but increased military assistance yet again. In April 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith warned Kennedy of the “danger we shall replace the French as a colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.”[88] By 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower’s 900 advisors.
Wikipedia
I do adore Johnson’s reference to “our boy”. Do I smell a whiff of imperialism there? Oh, heavens no, as so many tell us here on this blog the US has never been imperialist. We have no “boys” around the world. Kharzai isn’t “out boy” at all. And none of the Iraq “leaders” were our boys either. No no no.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100106/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_yemen_al_qaida
Hmmm…. un-cooperative it seems. We may just have to overthrow the present regime in Yemen and put in one of “our boys” to work our will there and get really involved. Will be interesting to see what Obama does.
Margery,
Why don’t you research the case for increased involvement in Yemen and then pick it apart.
Also, why does everyone want to use Vietnam as “the” example of an unnecessary? For the United States World War I was stupider.
>>> South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis. <<<
Ho Chi Mihn’s willingness to get 3 million Vietnamese killed (including 1 million North Vietnamese infantry in the south) and possibly 12 million more killed (typical distribution) out of a population of 35 million was the core. If he had done that to evict the French colonialists he would be universally scored as a madman. Imagine if Ghandi proportionaltely… Vietnam was free of colonization (except for some withering away hooks) since 1949. The French army was defending the home government in 1956.
JFK did not want to help Martin Luther King either because of political costs (gain 5%; lose 10%) but got snagged into it in Selma. LBJ who got the 1964 Civil Rights Act through a 10X more recalcitrant than today’s Senate (which 10 JFKs could not have accomplished), passed Medicare and Medicaid, raised the minimum wage to $10/hr in today’s money (at half today’s average income); was a great man but his admittedly tough decision to stick it out in Vietnam makes him forgotten to today’s intelligentsia who mostly have forgotten the majority of working folks in this country too (why the minimum wage fell in half by two years ago — if you had predicted that in 1968 they would have thought it would take a nuclear war or a comet stike).
A mere two decades before the decision year in Vietnam two little countries tried to take over the world (ironically because they lacked resources). In 1965 the two big countries that they could not bite off were coming after us with leaders as militantly communist as Ho (Khrushchev was the Russian equivalent of Mao) with bombs that could leave a half-mile deep crater where Hiroshima used to be. Russia was turning out double the number of engineers and scientists we were and its economy was supposedly growing twice as fast (7% to 3% — 3% being high growth for us).
Very scary time. Vietnam was a very tough call. But the fear was that if the democracies did not defend against the maddest communist that all the other communists around the world would come out of the woodwork and take whatever was in front of the (Munich having been the big supposed lesson of WWII). By 1975 we had won globally so we (not the Vietnamese) could afford to lose locally. 1965 was Communism’s high tide.
But we are always the bad guys.
Oh please. Let us not rewrite history to our liking. The French were in bitter battles to preserve their imperial control of Vietnam and LOST. They managed to divide the country and of course Vietnamese nationalists would not tolerate that. The South became a puppet government under French and then US control until we overthrew Diem and put in a “better” puppet. Americans are so imperialistic they can’t fathom that nations under our yoke as well as that of Europeans wanted to be free to rule themselves. So we keep at it, telling ourselves silly lies about what we do. I recall well a TV debate on whether we should get further into the Vietnamese morass with Hans Morgenthau of U of Chicago one of the few pointing out the simple fact that THEY DIDN’T WANT US THERE but to no avail against the stupidos who waved the red flag of communism taking over all of Asia and other nonsense. We were so stupid we couldn’t understand their wish for national self determination like our wish for the same vs George III. And the nonsense continues in Afghanistan and now Yemen with the scare being Islamic terrorism. By the way, Japan and Germany were not, power-wise, “little” countries. And it is beyond absurd to compare Mao to Krushchev. What ever gave you the idea that Ho was the “maddest” communist? Really!!!! I hate to say it, but your post is a load of rubbish.
Since this is open thread and Vietnam is already mentioned that gives me the excuse to go off on a tangent I wanted to go off on anyway but wasn’t sure it fit here.
I was recently disturbed to read in Paul Theroux’s “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” his sympathetic portrayal of today’s Vietnamese enthusiasts for good old Uncle Ho and their happy report that they were growing rich selling rice. I thought: you don’t grow rich selling rice; you get rich selling Kias and Samsung.
THEN IT HIT ME.
Israelis delirious over purloining olive groves from Palestinians in West Bank settlements are as exactly as foolishly happy as the poor rice sellers. “Making the desert bloom” in broader economic perspective is strictly new immigrant stuff equating to the joy of owning your own taxi cab in a free Western city.
How much industrial might does it take to produce a single nuclear bomb? Ask relatively (to Israel) giant Iran. Israel on half the population base of the city of Buenos Aires has reputedly produced 400! — while maintaining a air force that must be the envy of many NATO nations — while keeping almost as many tanks at the ready as India and Pakistan together.
If Israel had gone “legit” in 1949 — just took the 55% of the Palestinian homeland ceded to it by the UN and concentrated on economic development — today’s Israel could purchase all the olive groves it wanted anywhere in the world and everyone including the Palestinians would be sensibly happy.
WWI stupider? How? Vietnam is the best example since it is recent and at least in some memories quite fresh. And it is a very clear lesson in the stupidity of trampling on other nations and their wish to be free of foreign interference. We are still so stupid we think the world is our “oyster” to go anywhere and do anything, especially kill lots of innocent people, when and if we get the urge more or less for “kicks”, although we usually try to disguise our brutality by waving some scare crow around like Saddam’s supposed nukes and I don’t know what re the Taliban. I guess we are there to liberate female Afghans from domestic “slavery” or something nonsensical.
I believe that our boys are already in charge in Yemen, but Yemen is, oddly perhaps, a functioning democracy of sorts. It’s one of the few places in the Arab world where they have elections, let people vote as they please, and let the guy who got the most votes run the country (such as it is). My first guess is that if we continue to mindlessly pursue the war on terror in our present fashion, our guys possibly will not be in charge after the next election. Nothing like inadvertantly blowing up a few schoolkids and torturing the odd goatherd or taxi driver to alienate a population.
The reason that Al Quedda is there is because it is majority Sunni, has a gazillion largely autonomous tribes and provinces, and has a long and very leaky border with Saudi Arabia. Yemen exports qat and illegal migrants. It imports Saudi malcontents.
Looks to me like yet another opportunity for the US to emulate George Armstrong Custer’s ill advised attempt to teach those damn redskins a lesson.
Just leaving people alone and getting out seems a concept so alien it never enters American heads.
I don’t know what history you read. I read Bernard B. Fall’s “The Two Vietnam’s” — the only fully scholarly Vietnamese history I know of and I read plenty of books on the subject at the time.
Recently a 400 page book called “Krushchev’s War” came out detailing his endless ideologically based efforts to take the cold war conflict to us (somewhat purposeless; he couldn’t really achieve his aims but he just thought that was his job as a believing communist).
It is simply a historical fact that the French let go of Vietnam in 1949 — not without tying Vietnam down to hundreds of pages of conditions — but the kind of silly stuff that is for home consumption and can be quickly ignored. in 1956 both were about to break off the last tangles: the French over Vietnamese keeping all the tariff income from the ocean ports and not sharing it with Laos and Cambodia; the Vietnamese because the French disconnected the Piaster from the Franc.
According to Fall — a noted scholar allowed to visit the North in the 50s and early 60s — 98% of the tillers of the soil in the north (70% in the south) owned the land they worked. Still, Ho had to have his communist land reform so he and his came up with a crackpot formula to make some owners and some peasants and some stages in between depending on things like how many pigs you owned. This led to the execution of 50,000 “capitalist-land owners” and the imprisonment of 100,000 more. Eventually of course all farm land was organized into collectives: not the sort of change that inspires peasants to revolt in favor of — always the opposite.
In 1956 — according to Fall — the year of the Hungarian revolution against the real bad guys (okay: “many are called but few are chosen” fits everybody including Americans) there was a revolt n Ho’s home province which the army suppressed by killing 6000 farmers.
I recently got the 1963 edition of Fall’s book in which Fall depicts the numerous economic projects the two giant communist countries were pouring into 13 million population North Vietnam in the fifties and early sixties to make it a communist show place. Ironically, Fall predicts that Ho will never get involved in a war with the Americans in the south because he would not risk all this economic prosperity being destroyed by American bombers (which latter is where you like to come into the movie I imagine). Am awaiting the 1967 edition from Amazon. Bought it in the 60s but it was too windy for me at the time — not too much fun now; pure scholarly stuff.
When the Cambodian domino fell more millions lost their lives to a dictator’s whims. That is called a “holocaust” with round-eyes. But we are the bad guys.
WWI stupider?
More death and we had no good reason to get involed in the breakdown in the treaties between the European colonial powers.
Also, more lies.
The purpose of the CPI was to influence American public opinion toward supporting U.S. intervention in World War I via a prolonged propaganda campaign. Among those who participated in it were Wilson advisers Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, the latter of whom had remarked that “the essence of democratic society” was the “engineering of consent”, by which propaganda was the necessary method for democracies to promote and garner support for policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information
MM,
I agree it is unwise to compare Mao to Kruschev. Mao was the greatest mass murderer in human history. Made Hitler and the Nazi’s look like rank amatuers at killing. Kruschev just inherited the mass graveyards of Stalin…
But I’m glad you thought South Vietnam got to ‘self-determine’ itself in 1975 when the North’s mechanized Tank Armies rolled into the South and destroyed them. Thus installing a tyrrany there that continues to this day. I think the people of South Korea got a much better deal – luckily Truman decided it was worth American lives to stop North Korea from “self-determining” South Korea into the totalitarian hell-hole that North Korea is today. But I bet North Korea and Vietnam have very low GINI indicies!!!
The defense of evil on the left gets tedious at times….
Islam will change
Margery – Another isolationist!!! Talk to ilsm. He’s big on the US giving up its global power and influence to such great human rights and supporters for freedom as China, Russia, and Islam. Who cares if the Taliban retakes Afghanistan and starts shootin women in soccer stadiums? Who cares if Saddam uses poisen gas on his own people? Its not like they are sticking people into ovens, or putting plastic bags over their heads, or just shooting them in a ‘great leap forward’ is it? They haven’t done that….yet.
Islam will change
Open means open drew. Go for it.
Krushchev may not have killed millions — matter of fact he ended much of the terror in Russia. It was just that he was as dedicated a communist as Ho at a time when communism was at its scariest — he was not a bureacrat like Breznev who followed him. For that matter Krushchev was more sincere about conquring the world for his ideology than Stalin who seemed to just want to be czar. If Krush were head man in 1945 he very well might have marched the Red Army to the sea, taking over all of Europe.
Ho was first a nationalist, a communist second. And now Vietnam has left communism behind de facto as has China. Communism for those who don’t get it was used as an anti-IMPERIAL ideology more than anything else. I find the idea that the French left Vietnam ridiculous. They LOST the north and managed to keep a puppet regime going in the South. An unpopular regime. Johnson said it was run by “our boy”. Can’t you understand? Claiming that Ho should not have gone to war to reunite the country is like saying Stalin should have let Hitler continue to occupy vast amounts of Russia and done nothing about it for fear of casualties. Utterly absurd. Or that the UK should have made peace with Germany after France and most of Europe fell to avoid casualties. It is beyond belief how Americans can’t get it that the world doesn’t belong to us or to any colonial imperial power. ddrew2u your “supposition” about Krushchev taking over all of Europe is simply silly nonsense. It shows how little you understand.
The Vietnamese war failed in large part because the SOUTH and its population supported the NORTH and not us. We were the intruders; the NORTH were their liberators from French/US imperialism. We were constantly undermined in the south by the population that hated us and when we got our troops out our puppet regime in the south COLLAPSED because it had no public support. Wise up.
We are wanted by the majority in S. Korea and that is why we have no problems there. Korea and Vietnam are not the same kettle of fish.
ddrew2u
If Israel had gone “legit” in 1949
In 1948 Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked the state of Israel and tried to drive the jews into the sea. They lost, the Israelis won and then insisted on a buffer against future attacks. Had the mentioned Arab countries gone “legit” and accepted the United Nations plan today there be an Arab state and a Jewish state existing side by side.
You mean if we aren’t imperialists we are “isolationists”? Pretty silly I would say. The whole nonsense about our “saving the world” by conquering nations and killing their inhabitants is another piece of bizarre US thinking. If we want to stop evil, start in Africa where there is a lot of it. We don’t bother about Africa because we are not at war against blacks, just Muslims. PS We supported the Taliban when they were driving out the Russians and didn’t seem to mind what they did then. Nor did we mind Saddam’s gassing the Kurd when he was fighting against Iran. We liked that. You are very ignorant of recent history.
Well then we had no reason to get involved in WWII either. Right? In both wars we intervened to keep an undemocratic German regime from defeating the UK and France that were democracies. You think that was wrong? I marvel at the historical distortions that get into the brains of Americans who know so little of modern history. PS Roosevelt steered us into WWII. We should have stayed out?
I doubt the Palestinians would ever concede 55% of the land to the Zionists. Perhaps you think Russia should have conceded 55% of Russia to Hitler. Interesting idea. So stupid those Russians to have gone to war to drive the Germans out.
What will eventually get the US out of other nations is probably our failing finances. Wasting billions on imperialist ventures when there are demands for trillions for social programs at home will finally force one to give and it won’t be social programs; it will be the silly imperialism that does nothing for Americans at all.
What does the phony need for a buffer have to do with moving 400,000 Israeli settlers into Gaza (couldn’t hang on there) and the West Bank, the densest populated nation after Bangladesh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Israel keeps 3000 NATO quality tanks with NATO quality trained crews on short notice. That should be enough to repel 9000 similar quality tanks. Need for what buffer — against China? During Lebanon II Israeli F-15s buzzed Jordan’s presidential quarters just to remind them who’s boss.
I assert that after 1973 the Arab world had pretty much given up pushing Israel into the sea. Time to concentrate on modern economic development not “country cousin” clipping of other people’s orchards. If Israel had not begun ethnic cleansing Palestinians instead both Israel and the other 50 states (looking through Knesset member pages I noticed almost all claimed English for at least one language, also many Russian and Arabic — not too many Hebrew) would not be suffering the hate of so many in the Islamic world.
How about this for a deal? The US bases military forces in Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories AND East Jerusalem — Japan time. Then Israel would have no reason not to divert all that military effort into good money making businesses (better fit for the stereotype :-]). If I were president I would present Israel with that choice or the US putting military bases into the West Bank and Gaza (with Palestinian permission — we wouldn’t need to ask Israel) from which bases we would gradually squeeze out the IDF (open up the exclusive roads, close the checkpoints, charge Israel for water, etc.).
Remember the Ady Gil.
If you bothered to learn something you might know that French “influence” did not cease in 1949 and that even after the North was divided from the South, the French and Americans were the backers of the regime in the South that was a marvelous example of colonial corruption, etc. quite similar to Chiang’s regime in China that America so loved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem#Establishment_of_the_Republic_of_Vietnam
And if you don’t understand that the US and the CIA controlled our puppet regime in the south you might read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ngo_Dinh_Diem
Diem was not a “good” puppet, so Kennedy arranged for a coup to put another one in his place, more useful to the USA. And just for the record the military power of the North and Ho was nothing like the vast military power the US put into the war. You remark about their “tank” crushing the south is silly nonsense. We had complete air control of the whole are and bombed the North and the South constantly. Killing hundreds of thousands without success.
Margery,
You think that was wrong?
Yes, our involvement in WWI was idiotic.
ddrew2u
what does the phony need for a buffer have to do with moving 400,000 Israeli settlers into Gaza (couldn’t hang on there) and the West Bank, the densest populated nation after Bangladesh?
Phony? What don’t you understand about Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria attacking Israel in 1948?
buff,
Back to some cushy Military Industrial Complex job from holiday shut down?
I am more anti militarism than isolationist, but yes it is better to take care of grandma than you.
Contab,
Puleeze!!!
WW I was inter-regnum war.
Kaiser Bill was Victoria’s nephew and King George his second cousin removed.
It was insane militarist against crazy militarist.
And the US initiated a warfare state to sell to the one side.
But not idiotic, it was profitable.
The Doughboys went over to use our stuff where the Eurpeans were failing to end it.
WW I prototyped the US military industrial welfare state.
After WW II the US decided to be like the French and Germans and waste its treasure on Maginot lines.
Investing Yemen is like Iraq and Afghnistan the 21st century version of miliatarism and waste of natiopnal resources.
Drew,
I do not know where you were in 1963.
Ho did not kill one single Vietnamese. The French and the US killed all those Vietnamese. Thinking otherwise is denying the moral responsibility the US and French have toward the operations and tactics which effected those casualties.
Read some other texts on the issue: Best and Brightest, Rumors of a Distant War.
Ask yourself who killed Diem?
When I was a child I did not think, I supported the Vietnam effort.
When I became a man I joined the war effort.
As I aged and saw things and talked to men who were there, I learned.
There was no honor is supporting the opposition to Ho.
Was Ho better than Diem, likely not.
Was he worse than them? Enough Vietnamese died saying he was better than the US puppets and drug lords to answer that question.
ilsm,
ditto would have done.
http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Shining-Lie-America-Vietnam/dp/0679724141/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
To sum up our experience in Vietnam: we were led by such brilliant people (Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger) who understood so well what was at stake and who expeditiously took the right steps that permitted us to win. So that we early on managed to send in only a few people who quickly got control of the situation and effectively stopped the North from getting anywhere trying to interfere in the South. We got the South so well organized and won so much public support that at the end our side emerged victorious. Almost no loss of US life, very little loss of life for the Vietnamese, and, as we know, Vietnam was quickly pacified by our brilliant intervention. So that today everybody sees this as our shining moment in which our decision to get involved turned out so well. How happy we have to be at the result. Right?
According to the book “Decent Interval” by Frank Snepp, Ho had thrown in the towel after the second Nixon bombing of his capital only to start up again after discovering that the US had virtually abandoned the south after the 1973 peace treaty. What is indisputable is that after we finally reached our goal of getting the south to take over all the bloody ground fighting we withdrew our financial support to such an extent that the south had to ration bullets and withdrew the decisive air support altogether (leaving the south without sufficient resources even to helicopter out its wounded!). http://www.amazon.com/Decent-Interval-Insiders-Indecent-Strategy/dp/0700612130/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262872370&sr=8-6
Ho’s version of winning “public support” was the Van Dich who would typically enter a village, take 5 young men who had recently joined some southern government education program and execute them on the spot. Once a village had developed sufficient “public support” for the communist insurgency Ho’s secret police folks would move in for routine intimidation and the Van Dich would move on: the original inkblot strategy. Ever ask yourself why peasants would join a bloody revolt to give up their land to government collectives?
But we are the bad guys: only for abandoning the south and throwing away lives for (political) hesitation to spend a little money.
Actually there was a way to win the war quickly and relatively bloodlessly. It is mentioned in the book “Glenn, the Astronaut Who Would Be President.” It was under consideration to call up the reserves and send 2 million men to Vietnam. This is what the “Powell Doctrine” is all about: using overwhelming force if you have it — not going by “best and brightest” fine tuned calculations.
You still don’t get it, do you? The fact is with all our brains and power we FAILED. Do you understand the word FAILED?????? And we failed because we were on a fool’s errand of trying to maintain a colonial regime where the people didn’t want it. God, Jesus. Americans never get the fact that other people DON’T WANT US TRAMPLING OVER THEIR LAND. They never seem able to imagine how we would feel if, say, the Chinese had an army killing us and trying to impose their puppet as our leader. We got hysterical when Cuba (not ours, but we regarded it as “ours”) seemed likely to become a Russian puppet state. Imagine if Russia had tried to impose its authority and rule on us with a vast army sent over to kill and occupy us. The BLIINDNESS of some Americans is beyond belief.as well as well as their good sense and intelligence. Are you so uninformed that you think Nixon could have drafted and sent TWO MILLION to Vietnam? He was facing a national uproar with half a million there. There must be something wrong with your brain.
You need to read more intelligent books, like Bright Shining Lie. If you really can read.
I did not say drafted — I said callling up the reserves was under consideration — in a post WWII environment when nobody questioned military defense much. And it probably (don’t remember the book) was much before Nixon came in.
Jordan, Lebanon and Syria of today are capable of mounting about as much of a threat to Israel as Rhode Island. For how little Egypt is to be feared look at the lastest Uri Anvery column:”Something odd, almost bizarre, is going on in Egypt these days.”http://avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
What buffer zone do the occupied territories offer against Egypt — the only possible physical threat — wrong side of the map? And what does any “buffer zone” have to do with moving hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the territories and tossing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Palestinians off their private properties — necessitating cruelly clamping down on the lives of all Palestinians to choke off resistance?
Margery your blindness to evil is beyond belief. You stand on the side of people who built the Gulags and murdered millions. When South Vietnam was overrun millions died, millions more fled, and the survivors live under tyrrany to this day.
Get a grip…
Islam will change
Margery Meanwell
mean well?
Could we have a troll among us? 🙂
Sounds unknowledgeable enough. But sounds too sincere and detailed. An excellent troll? 🙂
Here is something that the ignoramus who said the French were “out of Vietnam by 1949” should read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dien_Bien_Phu
Very few, except quasi-morons, think that we were not soundly defeated in Vietnam. Nor that all our power availed us nothing in the end. They don’t get anything except the reactionary imperialist line on America in the world and understand virtually nothing. In addition their information and facts are wrong or way off. There was no way two million men could have been put in Vietnam without vastly expanding an already hated draft. Reserves? What nonsense. The killing in Vietnam came from the US army and its gases and its napalm and its other horrors that it inflicted on a people who merely wanted to be free of foreigners messing in their affairs and trying to control their country. God, but the dunces never get it at all. In fact there is no reason to continue. I can’t educate ignoramuses endlessly and there is no benefit for me to argue with know-nothings.
Goodbye. You can continue to talk to yourselves and tell yourselves silly lies with my blessings.
Indicative of your lack of….er…brains is your inability to figure out my alias.
ddrew,
“Margery Meanwell” is a very appropriate handle for this commenter.
“The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes is a children’s story by an anonymous author…
The fable tells of Goody Two-Shoes, the nickname of a poor orphan girl named Margery Meanwell, who goes through life with only one shoe.”
“The story popularized the phrase “goody two-shoes”, often used to describe an excessively or annoyingly virtuous person. In more recent years, the phrase has developed a more negative connotation, implying that the virtuousness of a “goody two-shoes” is insincere.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Little_Goody_Two-Shoes
Thank you for leaving, MM. Your trolling was tiresome and generally pointless.
For the benefit of other readers — now that MM is no longer with us — the French Army was still in Vietnam in 1956 to defend then free Vietnam from the communist insurgency. Didn’t know that myself until reading it in “The Two Vietnams” recently. The Walter Cronkite version of the war is all that seems to have survived. Couldn’t even find the only fully scholarly book on Amazon the first time around — only found the 1963 edition on Albris.
The things this cab driver learns in the company of more cultured people. 🙂
Roll Tide! Four in a row for the SEC.