roronoa79 wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
You are making this too complicated. In "just war" WWII the vast majority of people went when drafted or volunteered. Once the US got involved there was no anti war movement. Come Vietnam the mentality still was once the fighting starts you support the government and the war effort, no questions asked, and if you do not you are a traitor, part of the fifth column. The President has the intelligence you don't who are you to question him? This do not question the authority mentality extended to cops, doctors, and teachers.
Yes there was an anti war movement and big societal changes, this is not made up but it did not go much beyond cities and college campuses. The liberalized attitudes did not hit middle America until the '70s and they were more cultural. In my suburban New York it was all "America Love or Leave It " stickers and buttons.
Good rebuttal. WWII was the last major war before Vietnam in the public's mind, after all (there's a reason Korea is known as the Forgotten War). North Vietnam couldn't have seemed like a match for the US for most people. "We beat the Axis, the Vietnamese will be no problem."
Hindsight is 2020 in military history, but I still think the US military could have realized with their intelligence that a war in Vietnam would be disastrous. The jungle climate of much of Vietnam is perfect for guerilla warfare; the Vietnamese would be fighting on their own turf; North Vietnam wasn't exactly a liberal democracy, but South Vietnam's government was despised for its autocracy and dependence on "imperialist" support; North Vietnam was more populous and developed. They overestimated the support they would win from the Vietnamese people and underestimated the determination of the North Vietnamese to unify Vietnam. I've heard it said that America always underestimated North Vietnam, but North Vietnam never underestimated America.
Still, Vietnam was maybe the first US war without a clear cause that made the endless years of bloodshed seem worth it. The Revolutionary War--independence. The Civil War--preserving the Union. Spanish-American War--"Remember the Maine!" World War I--the Lusitania and the Zimmerman telegram. World War II was probably hardest to not support at the time (or since). We had been trying to stay neutral, but we were attacked anyway. Not to mention the atrocities of the Axis. They needed to be stopped or they would conquer the world. It was clear.
Vietnam must have just seemed like a speed bump on the road to victory against communism. "Just go and do your duty and it will work out fine." Opposition to the war at the time was limited, despite its high visibility, but the US withdrawal left them vindicated. Popular culture turned against Vietnam as well. I struggle to think of a pro-Vietnam war film besides
Green Berets. I'd say much more of the country nowadays has realized the foolishness of US involvement in Vietnam, but almost every day I still see people who think we could or should have won.
We are getting into off topic territory but what we were stabbed in the back conservatives and it was a morally unwinnable war opponents from the get go often forget is that North Vietnam and the Viet Cong we're not the only factors. The US leadership did not want to take on Russia and China and risk it spiriling into nuclear conflict. That is why the war was fought “with our hands behind our backs”.
The American public always seems to have the war will be over in a few weeks mentality. The American leadership knew Vietnam was a lost cause early on but saw no good way out.
LBJ knew the Vietnam War was a disaster in the making. Here's why he couldn't walk away.Quote:
How did Lyndon Johnson, one of the most gifted political figures of his time, lose his way in a war he didn't start and didn't end?
Many historians believe that the November 1963 coup that brought down South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem was the event that started Johnson slogging through the morass that became the Vietnam War.
“By 1963, he had been more or less cut out of Vietnam policy and of foreign affairs in general,” says Dartmouth College history professor Ed Miller. “President Kennedy really didn't trust Johnson and so, therefore, Johnson didn't have a major role in most of the meetings that took place on Vietnam in 1963.”
Within a few months after the coup, the South Vietnamese government began to come apart at the seams,” Miller says. “There was another coup in Jan. of 1964 [and] the Vietcong make huge gains in the countryside.”
“It doesn't take very long to come to the conclusion that we were dealing with an absolute sinking ship,” recalls Paul Kattenberg, the State Department’s leading Vietnam watcher at the time. Prior to the coup, he’d been sent to Vietnam to investigate and had met with Diem, whom he'd known for a decade, and with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the US ambassador to South Vietnam.
Normally, a staffer of Kattenberg’s junior rank wouldn't have spoken in such a high-level gathering, but he was just back from Saigon. He was asked for an assessment.
“I said that, all things being equal, maybe it would be better if we just left with honor. I really did think that, and I thought it more [as] the year went on,” Kattenberg recalls.
Later, Kattenberg’s remark would be remembered, even celebrated, within the foreign policy community as something of a profile in courage. But at the time of the meeting, the idea of an American withdrawal from Vietnam was, to many in the Kennedy administration, unthinkable.
“The first one, as I recall, to react to this was Johnson,” Kattenberg says. “Johnson was very much a kind of a warrior type. He wasn’t going to give up. [He thought], ‘We haven't gone this far with this whole thing to give it up now.’”
In his private recording, Johnson notes that he told Diem he needed “to rise to the occasion and provide the same quality of leadership that Churchill [had]. … It makes no difference whether it’s a fascist aggressor or a communist aggressor, you people have got to stand up here and show some steel [and] not be the Chamberlains of your time. Be the Churchills of your time.
After Diem’s execution and JFK’s assassination, Johnson appears to have internalized the message he had communicated in his pep talk to Diem. As Churchill had stood up to aggression in Western Europe, it now fell to him, he seemed to believe, to do the same in Asia.
Ultimately, this deep, almost visceral, need to “show some steel,” to be Churchill the warrior rather than Chamberlain the appeaser, would paint the president into a terrible corner — knowing the war was a disaster in the making, but unable or unwilling to walk away.
I would also argue they actually believed on some level the domino theory and did not want to be the ones to set that in motion.
A case could be made that had the US had not held back due to China and Russia they would have won. It is fitting a narrative to conclude if the anti war movement did not demoralize US troops and embolden the communists. The US did beat an Asian guerilla Army far away from home two decades prior. But, But, If, If. South Vietnam was a political mess we did fight the war they way we did and it seems inevitable that opposition would happen. By the end the US military in Vietnam was a mess with widespread fraggings and drug use. This was spreading throughout the military and it was clear the military would have disintegrated if we did not get out.
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27 Apr 2021, 6:15 pm
