Originally posted by: Common Courtesy
Originally posted by: BeauJangles
Originally posted by: eleison
Originally posted by: BeauJangles
The better question is what exactly were we fighting for?
Stop the spread of communism. I should know because a lot of my friends left SE asia during that time. What is communism? Look up "little red book" "Eastern Europe".. Soviet union... The Cuban missile crises. Massive famines in like Holodomor.. etc.. fun times... It could be argued that because of USA involvement of the Vietnam war. The dominoes did stop. Thailand is next to Vietnam but is not communist.
What were the motives of the Vietnamese, really? Ho Chin Minh had written to President *Wilson* asking for help in spreading our liberty to them to free them from colonization.
The US did not reply.
After the Japanese replaced the French in occupying the nation and were driven out in WWII, Ho Chi Minh asked for our support again for their freedom from colonization, that we not support the French in re-occupying them. Our leadership, the Dulles brothers, were very pro-European alliance and completely sided with the French, up to the point of paying up to 90% of the war costs of the French. When the French lost the war to the Vietnamese, the US supported a scheme to cut their country in half with our allied leader in charge of half, and a promise to soon re-unify the nation under elections - elections that we blocked because the guy we wanted to win wasn't going to. Instead, the guy who had fought for their independance for decades would win, not our ally (not quite puppet).
While JFK refused to escalate the situation to war and was working to leave, he was unique among our leaders, and soon after he was killed, war was the bi-partisan policy, based on trumped on nonsensical attacks by the North Vietnamese on two occassions on our small boats - one that didn't happen, the other on our boat in their waters, which we denied, as our boat escorted terrorists we'd trained to infiltrate North Vietnam.
This was not a war about the USSR or Chinese goal to rule the world. That's not what they were after - the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was to create a buffer zone for their defense, after the massive losses they'd had in WWII and the ongoing hostility from the west, which began the moment they overthrew the czar, when the US sent the Marines in to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia alongside Europeans, in a little-known war. The 'domino theory' was one of those perverse constructions which served to justify aggressive war.
How do you get peaceful people to support aggressive murder? Convince them they target is a threat. How do you lose an election? Look weak by challnging the myth that they are.
And that's how you get unnecessary war.
West Germany actually shares a border with East Germany and never became communist either. Thankfully, that didn't require the loss of 50,000 American and millions of civilian lives.
The whole idea of "stopping the spread of communism" had no basis in reality. Sure, I understand that there was a lot of fear in the 1950s and 1960s, but "losing" Vietnam wouldn't have made a damn difference in the fight against the Russians.
As history came to show - as Vietnam, far from the tools of the Chinese for dominoes, were at war with China right after we left. It was about their own freedom.
What does that make our role, in expending such effort on the other side - killing 2 million of them with Napalm, Agent Orange, more bombs than WWII, terrorist squads?
That doesn't change the lessons to be learned.
When Eastern Europe fell to communism in the 50's & 60's, that triggered the fear of spreading throughout. Cuba became communist and SE Asia was the next battle zone.
See above on Eastern Europe 'falling to communism' - it was terrible, but it was the Soviets defending themselves, more than threatening us. We played a role - there's a long pattern where our aggression leads to the conflicts. We refused to 'get along' with the Bolshviks, because our wealthy ruling class was terrified of the Bolsheviks inspiring and policies that would reduce their own wealth; just as we refused for decades to deal with the Chinese Communists, or Castro - and in every one of these stories, lies bad government that we were friendly with, that was overthrown because of its abuses against the people, from the czar of Russia, to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, to Batista in Cuba - our own complacency and support for corrupt regimes paved the way for bad replacements. Need we go on with the Shah of Iran, the corrupt leadership of Venezuela, and many more?
Had Eastern Europe not fallen, maybe the fear of SE Asia would not have been in place, I do not think so.
There would have only been Japan and S Korea left in SE Asia that were friendly to the US - Thailand would have been folded up due to the borders with Cambodia and Laos.
After that the Phillipines and the other island nations would have potentially become targets.
communism would have replaces the situation that Japan had 30 years earlier.
Except that you are not only inventing that aggressive agenda for them, you are projecting that we were the ones trying to expand the areas of our 'influence' or control.
How was that supposed to look to the Asians, especially China, as *we* pushed over dominoes? That would be like their creating enemies for us throughout the Americas.
We did the same thing with the Soviet Union - their invasion of Afghanistan was largely motivated by their feeling surrounded by our forces against them.
It's all good fun, I guess, when the result is for them to fall (and the wonderful democrat Putin to take over, now that they're thriving with the freedom of Western Capitalism).
But it's a pretty aggressive policy on our part, that we'd consider grounds for war the other direction.
There's little room for 'peaceful co-existence'. Rather it becomes a mutually validating cause for for as each sid epoints to the other as a threat.
In Vietnam, we were the enemy of freedom, for reasons selfish and incompetent, and millions were killed for no reason. We still haven't learned the real lessons of that war.
We're in strong denial - it's still 'politically incorrect' to say that our motives were less than pure in the government, that our public was too quick to support them and be duped.
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