On Sun, 7 Mar 2004 11:22:18 -0600, "D. Strang"
wrote:

"Ed Rasimus" wrote

A war that "could not be won" not because of lack of military
capability, but because of lack of political will--primarily as a
result of a confederation of draft dodging students, moralistic
professors, attention seeking movie stars and pandering politicians.

We could have won the war in '66 when we started to get serious and we
demonstrably DID end the war in eleven days at the end of '72.

I have a little bit different historical perspective.

The purpose of the countries division in half, was to let the people
cool down after having just dispatched the French colonists, who
attempted to return to the pre-Japanese world order.

The "country" was divided in four by the Geneva Accords--Laos,
Cambodia, N & S Vietnam. It recognized tribal and cultural differences
in the post-colonial period. It certainly wasn't a return to a
pre-Japanese order.


There was to be an election.

Very good. Provided of course that the elections could be guaranteed
by the ICC observers as fair and accurate.

It wasn't until the United States cancelled the elections, that all hell
broke loose. While I'll admit the North was very active in
convincing the south to follow their lead (a few assassinations,
here and there), the South wasn't made up of just idiots.

Adminstration of the elections was an ICC responsibility--Canadians,
Indians and Poles. The delay of the elections was a result of the
emergence of a full blown insurgency, AKA "a few assassinations here
and there."

Bringing elections to a region which has been a colonial subject for
fifteen years, an occupied territory for fifteen more years, and a
corrupt monarchy before--one without a history of democratic
traditions and without political parties, doesn't come easy. Witness
Iraq.

The failure of Democracy, ended in Communism. Which for
Vietnam may be a better form of government, as they are
mostly peasants outside the major cities.

You might want to read about the COMINTERN and the training of
revolutionaries in Moscow to facilitate the revolutions of the workers
of the world. Communism didn't follow the "failure of democracy"--it
was brought to the North by Ho Chi Minh (COMINTERN graduate and
revolutionary) and then infiltrated into the South to compete and
undermine the attempts at democracy.

Marx certainly didn't think of Communism as agrarian--it was a product
of industrialization.

You might also take a look at the preponderance of free market
capitalism in Vietnam today. There really is a "Hanoi Hilton" now--and
they feature an "American breakfast" in the price of the room!

The war could never have been won, without an invasion of
the North, and the resulting Chinese and Soviet retaliation
would have resulted in the loss of SE Asia, Germany, and
Turkey. Most of the planet would be still working through
the contaminated zones of the nuclear fallout problems.

That is very much the thinking of the period. We were still grappling
with the questions of how to keep wars from escalating into nuclear
conflict. Invasion of the North might have been necessary, but had we
not employed the gradualism of Rolling Thunder, we might very well
have achieved capitulation of the NVN much earlier.

In retrospect (although we had no way of knowing it at the time), the
Chinese were not at all eager to confront the US and the Soviets had
little interest other than maintenance of a client state.

To win Vietnam, would mean we would have to win WW#3.
To win China, meant we would have to go nuclear, as the
technology we have today wasn't invented then, or would
work reliably enough.

A lot of counters to that argument have been written in the ensuing
thirty plus years.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8