Xin đọc để biết thêm tại sao VNCH không thắng VC :

http://www.jbs.org/visitor/focus/vietnam/no_win/index.htm

-- thich du thu (toollovers@comcast.net), October 05, 2004

Answers

Xin các bác đọc bài sau đây về cuộcc chiến việt nam va sự cho6'ng đối của 1 người phản chiến đà cộng Nhận Nixon đă đúng. Bạn thân của tôi Samuel Fergerson cũng phản tỉnh và công nhận CSVN do tên Hồ Chí Mẹt 1 đảng viên CS QT kiểu chó sa9n đă tàn phá Việt Nam và đă tạo ra chiến tranh tại Đông Dương.

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Who Were We in Vietnam?

Opinion-Editoral

By Walter A. McDougall, April 26, 2000

Twas in another lifetime, full of toil and blood," began Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" in 1974, when "blackness was a virtue, and the road was full of mud." The fall of South Vietnam 25 years ago seems to me a scene from another lifetime.

I had returned from Vietnam in 1970, earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, and just received a job offer from Berkeley (the letter was dated April Fool's Day). I was as sick of the war as anyone and eager to "open up that Golden Gate." But news that the North Vietnamese had launched an invasion more akin to the blitzkrieg of Poland than to a Maoist "people's war," and had overrun my old base camp 30 miles up Thunder Road from Saigon, turned my heart to lead.

I could not deal with it any more than I had the death of my mother a few years earlier, so I repressed it until, in 1994, a former student invited me to lecture on Vietnam to his prep school students. Thanks to him, I dredged up and purged all my anger, disillusionment, fear and pity -- for myself and the Vietnamese -- and promptly worked up a seminar on the war that I have taught ever since.

No one disputes Vietnam's manifold effects on America. Richard Nixon presided over replacement of the draft with an all-volunteer (and increasingly mixed-gender) force and reduction of the voting age to 18. The Vietnam syndrome and the public's aversion to casualties inspired the strict Weinberger-Powell guidelines for the commitment of forces abroad. Congress attacked the so-called imperial presidency through the War Powers Act, C.I.A. hearings and the movement to impeach Richard Nixon for abuses committed in the name of national security. A loss of trust in the presidency ensued, and the media became adversarial. Yet the turmoil at home also allowed Nixon to pursue the Silent Majority and Southern strategies that paved the way for Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, and our policies are still perturbed by what candidates did, or did not do, back in the 60's.

Vietnam also completed the integration of the armed forces and launched the careers of thousands of African-American officers and noncommissioned officers, as well as others who returned home to work in law enforcement, government and the professions. The Pentagon itself addressed racial tensions so well after 1975 that the military became a model for civilian institutions.

The war's primary economic effect was "guns and butter" budgets that helped to spark the inflation of the 1970's and hooked the federal government on deficit spending until the 1990's.

But the deepest long-term effect on America may stem from the rich and undeserved contributions made to American life by the Vietnamese refugees who quietly went to work restoring blighted neighborhoods, building businesses and sending their children to college.

The lessons of the war, by contrast, are still up for grabs, as demonstrated by the flow of new books. Was the military derelict in its duty when it promised, then pretended, to win the war, or did arrogant civilians order the military into battle with one hand tied and no clear goals? Was the American effort in Vietnam a sin, a blunder or a "necessary war"? Should it stand as a warning against state-building projects in strange and violent settings, like the Balkans? Or did Vietnam's school of hard knocks teach Americans to do peacemaking and state building right?

Drawing lessons from Vietnam remains a political enterprise. It is also a deeply psychological one for those who designed the war and for the baby boomers who were obliged to wage, resist or just run from it. No one wants to admit being wrong back then, and all want to believe that what happened back then proves they are right today.

Still, post-cold war historians have revealed certain facts that Americans need to digest. One is that there was nothing inevitable about Ho Chi Minh's rise to the status of icon. He spent his mysterious years in Moscow and China doing virtually nothing useful, and was little regarded in the Indochinese Communist Party. What made possible his "triumphant return" in 1941 was Vietnam's premature uprising against the French in 1940 and the decimation of its Communist leadership.

We know, too, that Ho promoted the broad-based Viet Minh movement not only to rally the masses against the Japanese and the French, but also to co-opt or eliminate rivals. To be sure, he was a puppet of no one, least of all Vietnam's old nemesis, China. But when Hanoi decided in 1959 to approve armed struggle against Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in Saigon, Ho personified the third world "national liberation movements" that Khrushchev and Mao vowed to support and Kennedy was determined to thwart.

It is easy to chastise Americans for backing the French and then replacing them as patrons of South Vietnam. But we did, and great nations are responsible for their acts. That is why the most shameful aspect of all is how the United States, having adopted the non-Communist Vietnamese, betrayed them repeatedly. The first time was in 1963 when President Kennedy's men sanctioned the overthrow of Diem because he was an authoritarian patriot who refused to play puppet. If they were intent on judging the Saigon regime by different standards than they did South Korea and Taiwan, then they should have pulled out.

Instead, the Johnson administration not only took over the war, but chose means -- search and destroy missions in the South and calibrated bombing in the North, without any effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- that were as ineffective as they were destructive. Then Lyndon Johnson just washed his hands of the mess after Tet 1968, when he halted the bombing, begged for peace talks, gave Hanoi time to recoup from the devastating losses suffered by Viet Cong cadres and bequeathed to his successor 540,000 demoralized American troops who knew we "weren't in it to win." That was America's second betrayal of the South Vietnamese.

When Paul O'Dwyer, a New York Democratic Senate candidate, told the 1968 Democratic convention that Democratic voters had registered "an indictment" against the war, it was over so far as doves were concerned. But the people who voted for Nixon and George Wallace were not tired of fighting; they were tired of losing. What is more, Nixon and Henry Kissinger hoped to salvage America's global posture through the China Opening, and soon suspected that the Chinese wanted Americans in Southeast Asia. Beset on their northern frontier by Soviet armies and rocket divisions, the Chinese were loath to see Vietnam unite under the tough pro-Soviet regime in Hanoi. So instead of blaming the Democrats and "bugging out" in his personal interest, Nixon determined to withdraw gradually. That did him in. He was a war president held to peacetime standards of governance, and when Congress cut off aid to Saigon after the 1973 Paris Accords, it was voting for defeat, not for peace. That was America's third betrayal.

A bright student from New York taught me that. Throughout the semester he had criticized United States involvement in Vietnam until, in the penultimate class, he suddenly changed his mind. Later I asked him wryly, "Who are you?"

He asked what I meant, and I referred to his flip-flop. He blushed, then said, "Nixon was right!" About geopolitics? No, he said, about honor: maybe we shouldn't have been there, but having created South Vietnam, urged its people to fight for 10 years at the risk of exile, prison and death if they lost, and done so much damage to their country, how could Americans just desert them? He even likened it to turning our backs on the Holocaust.

Who are you? It seems Americans will be answering that question for some time to come, with that other lifetime on their minds.

Walter A. McDougall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and University of Pennsylvania professor, was an army artilleryman in Vietnam.

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Go to: Vietnam Medal of Honor Citations

neil@mishalov.com

© 2000 by Neil Mishalov

-- Who Were We in Vietnam? (Cán_Ngố_Ăn-Dải-Dút@BBP.govt), October 05, 2004.

June 23, 2003 From the desk of Jane Galt:

Kevin Drum asks an interesting question:

could South Vietnam have beaten the North if we had continued to support them after 1975? (Not with ground troops, that is, but with air support and supplies.) Tacitus thinks so, and blames Democrats of the era for cutting off support, while my reading has convinced me that we were simply throwing good money after bad and the cutoff was justified. Nothing short of nuclear war would have allowed the South the beat the North, and we were simply facing reality when we finally ended our support of a corrupt and hopelessly inept South Vietnamese regime that had no chance of winning. Better late than never.

However, I'm no expert on Vietnam-era military history, so perhaps I need to read up on this. Aside from Rambo-esque "they wouldn't let us win" rhetoric, this is really the first time I've heard a serious argument that the South could have won, either with or without us. Interesting topic.

UPDATE: On a broader level, this discussion gets to a more fundamental question: why did communism fail? Was it because of our consistent military opposition (as in Vietnam, for example), or was it because communism was a lousy economic system and would have failed regardless of all the proxy wars we fought?

Some of both, surely, but I suspect more of the latter. Anti- communists in the U.S., I sometimes think, don't really show the courage of their convictions when they insist that the Soviet Union fell only because Reagan pushed so hard on them militarily. That betrays a confidence in communism as a political and economic system that I really don't share.

Based on my extremely limited reading, I agree with Kevin that communism would probably have fallen anyway. It seems to me that after the initial frenzy of Stalinist/Maoist mad energy, which involved the (I think) historically unique idea of building capital plant out of a low-accumulated capital society simply by murdering whatever number of people were required (25,000 were killed building a single large steel facility in the USSR), communist regimes were simply accidents waiting to happen. The soviet union was saved by repeated miracles that propped them up financially just enough to keep going; I'd argue that it was the failure of another miracle to materialize in the 80's, as had happened in the 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70's, that put the Soviet Union out of business, not Uncle Ronnie's military spending.

But does it therefore follow, as my triumphant liberal friends have proclaimed, that we should not have opposed the Soviet Union militarily? I think not. For one thing, while military spending didn't cause the downfall of Soviet Communism, it probably hastened the demise. And for another, if we hadn't opposed the Soviets, and later the Chinese, I think it's a safe bet that a lot more of the world would have fallen under communist domination. Communism, in its major forms, became wrapped up with the strident nationalist impulses of two very large countries. And for the people so dominated, things were very much more awful than they had previously been (even in Cuba, which probably got the best deal in the Soviet bloc due to its proximity to us.)

If we hadn't actively sought to contain communism, the Russians would certainly have rolled through much more of Western Europe. Southeast Asia would be a solid wall of quasi-communist hellholes, with South Korea participating in all the unbearable awfulness that's going on right now in the North. The rest of Asia might have fallen too. If 30 years of Soviet occupation could do what it did to Hungary, one hates to imagine what it might have achieved in Bangladesh.

Our military opposition increased the cost of acquiring new countries for their empire until it was too high for a communist economy to bear. And considering just how bad communism was for the countries where Russia and China succeeded, I'd say that that alone is worth the price we paid.

Posted by Jane Galt at June 23, 2003 04:40 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links

Comments I think uncle Ronnie does deserve some of the credit and I believe that you make my argument for me at the end of your post (thank you very much). Yes, their economic system stunk but was also be propped up by the west in many instances as well. Had we trade embargoed them in the 50's and we also leaned on them through European and Japanese trade and made it stick until they cracked, all of this in ADDITION to an arms race they could not afford nor win, I think we could have brought them down by the late 60's or early 70's. That would have solved the Viet Nam issue. Nixon's détente policy just prolonged the misery.

Posted by: Jimbo on June 23, 2003 05:09 AM What if?

According to the Black Book of Communism, communist states murdered around 100 million people during the 20th century, mostly people of their own countries. That toll is not over yet since communist parties still rule over a large fraction of mankind. Who can predict how high the final cost will be?

What if, instead of looking at Vietnam 1975, we look at Europe in 1945. What if America confronted the Russians fully rather than just contained them. It would have been bloody, no doubt, bloody for America for certain. But if communism was finished off then instead of lingering and spreading, and even abiding, how many lives would have been saved? 50 million? Maybe more?

As harsh as some think the Cold War was, it still was a policy of fighting on the cheap, cheap for America, and without full regard for the horrible cost the rest of the world would pay.

The importance of Reagan was not so much the military build up as important as that was, but the desire to roll back communism. And even though Reagan's campaign was fought on the cheap and in the margins, it still marked an important change from the old policy of containment. I think the confrontational policy of Reagan deserves credit. Another president, such as Nixon, might have aided the Soviets to stumble along, in the interest of 'world stability', and prolonging the agony of the fall. Remember how feckless the elder Bush was when occupied Europe began to throw off it's chains? And how Bush made nice with the butchers of Tiananmen Square?

Even if the South Vietnamese were a lost cause in 1975, we should not have abandoned them. We should have given them the chance to survive. Not only did we abondon Vietnam, the craveness of the American lack of will spurred the Soviets into a burst of aggression not seen since the end of WWII. The period from 1975 to 1980 was a disaster.

Posted by: Brad on June 23, 2003 08:01 AM If Communism had been "done in" in 1945, it would not have had an opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot work. This would have led to LOTS more people trying it out some time in the future. The benefit from allowing it to fall on its own, in both the western and eastern hemisphere, is that we not have experimental evidence that the concept is unworkable. The partition of Germany and Korea (some might include China, but that is a stretch) provided the opportunity to test two divergent political systems in two different cultures, head-to-head. And in both cases, Communism failed - it couldn't (can't) feed people, house them, or provide them with satisfying work. Experimental evidence in a direct comparison is the gold standard of science.

There are still some stalwart intellectuals in the west who will argue that it just wasn't tried "the right way", but they don't have any good examples to point to, so they should just be ignored.

Posted by: Ralph on June 23, 2003 08:15 AM Could the ARVN have beaten the NVA?

Possibly, but we will never know.

North Vietnam by 1972-73 was at the end of its manpower rope. Some North Vietnamese were hiding from conscription, and a trip south to what was viewed as inevitable death.

At the same period, the ARVN were doing something that had never been done before -- repelling armor attacks with unsupported light infantry. Their army had become professional enough to begin rolling back the North.

That ended when the '73 Arab-Israeli war began. Congress cut off all military aid to South Vietnam, using aid to Israel as the lever to pry Nixon's approval. Starved of supplies -- bullets and anti-tank missiles, rather than airstrikes -- the South began a slow collapse as their troops increasingly lacked the means to fight. By the end of the war M-16 bullets were being rationed and surgical dressings were being reused.

Despite this, it still took the NVA two years to beat an almost defenseless foe. What would have happened had we simply given the South munitions for their ground forces, absent any American air or naval support? Hard to tell, but I find it difficult to believe that the North would have made it to "Ho Chi Mihn City" before the end of the Carter Administration.

Posted by: Mark L on June 23, 2003 09:25 AM Could the ARVN have beaten the NVA?

Possibly, but we will never know.

North Vietnam by 1972-73 was at the end of its manpower rope. Some North Vietnamese were hiding from conscription, and a trip south to what was viewed as inevitable death.

At the same period, the ARVN were doing something that had never been done before -- repelling armor attacks with unsupported light infantry. Their army had become professional enough to begin rolling back the North.

That ended when the '73 Arab-Israeli war began. Congress cut off all military aid to South Vietnam, using aid to Israel as the lever to pry Nixon's approval. Starved of supplies -- bullets and anti-tank missiles, rather than airstrikes -- the South began a slow collapse as their troops increasingly lacked the means to fight. By the end of the war M-16 bullets were being rationed and surgical dressings were being reused.

Despite this, it still took the NVA two years to beat an almost defenseless foe. What would have happened had we simply given the South munitions for their ground forces, absent any American air or naval support? Hard to tell, but I find it difficult to believe that the North would have made it to "Ho Chi Mihn City" before the end of the Carter Administration.

Posted by: Mark L on June 23, 2003 09:26 AM The Soviet Unions's demise was no doubt hastened by its extraordinary high rate of military spending, but conservatives give Reagan too much credit. It was Brezhnev who started spending the S.U. into the ground. Maybe we should credit Kennedy with humiliating Krushchev in the Cuban Missile crisis and thereby contributing to his downfall. Also, the Vietnam War was a great drain on U.S. military resources and I wonder if that encouraged the Brezhnev regime to try (successfully) to catch up to the U.S. militarily. If so, then the Vietnam War might have contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, in a thoroughly ironic way.

Posted by: Phil P on June 23, 2003 09:57 AM Nothing ironic about it. Soviet GDP invested in propping up the NVA was much higher than almost anybody in the West was willing to believe. The true cost to the Soviets weren't known until over a decade afterwards, after the Soviet collapse. A few analyst had it right but the folks with the numbers that were a mere fraction of the reality were the ones who won the ears of the White House and Congress.

Posted by: Eric Pobirs on June 23, 2003 10:40 AM Brad - the problem with what you suggest is that there was no way in hell that the Allies were going to continue the war once the Axis was defeated. Repeat, none - the will to fight didn't exist on either side.

It's a nice thought, fifty years after the invention of the H-Bomb. But any analysis you read will make it clear that it wasn't gonna happen.

Thus the Yalta concessions - "how can we create a modus viviendi that stands a snowball's chance in hell of remaining stable?"

Posted by: ben on June 23, 2003 10:58 AM Back in 1984, Jonathan Kwitny, a WSJ reporter, published a fascinating book called Endless Enemies. He pointed out that outside of Eastern Europe, the only countries that joined the Soviet empire were the ones where the US had intervened to suppress a local communist movement. Where we let nature take its course, so to speak, and didn't associate the US flag with a bloodthirsty tyrant slaughtering anyone to the left of Walter Mondale, countries affiliated themselves with the West of their own accord.

Posted by: Seth Gordon on June 23, 2003 11:03 AM The question boils down to "was opposing Communism a waste of time?"

Of course not. They laughed at the domino theory, but we spent ten years fighting the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. They did not ALL fall like dominos, yet some did - Cambodia, Laos - with typically dreadful results.

I don't think that Gorbachev would have decided on his own, hey, let's do some glasnost if there was no power opposing him.

Communism is an evil in itself - look at the results EVERY SINGLE TIME it is tried. Opposing it is simply the right thing to do - even if you don't win every battle.

Posted by: blaster on June 23, 2003 11:07 AM

-- Somthings we want to khow (Cán_Ngố_Ăn-Dải-Dút@BBP.govt), October 05, 2004.

No excuse , will you. loosers are still loosers , whatever the matters . We're talking about Viet-nam cong -tru o day !

-- chi-bua (mingo@netscape.net), October 05, 2004.

This cimmie chi bua can not stand the truth about the Vietnam War. I will sorry for you!!!!

-- (Foxtrott@Foxtrott.com), October 05, 2004.

This cimmie chi bua can not stand the truth about the Vietnam War. I Feel sorry for you!!!!

-- (Foxtrott@Foxtrott.com), October 05, 2004.