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The antiwar movement of the Vietnam era represented a real domestic opposition inside the aggressor country. And they absolutely contributed to the outcome of the US invasion of Vietnam, mainly by the indirect means of sucessfully winning over enough of the GIs to make the prosecution of the war untenable on the ground. The antiwar movement infected the draftees as well as the enlisted army. After the Tet offensive soldiers began to engage in mass noncompliance and by the Pentagon's numbers they also killed 500 of their own officers in the decisive 1969-70 period. After that Nixon escalated carpet bombings and "Vietnamization," committing an even greater genocide just to save imperialist face. It fell short of a full mutiny, but too many of the US soldiers were no longer willing to take the field and the combat forces were drawn down by 1973.
You can be certain that if there had been sufficient domestic support for a course of further escalation, the USG would not have backed down even by that tortuously slow and murderous timetable. The USG would have sent a million troops. They would have bombed the dikes to drown millions of people in northern Vietnam. They might have even been willing to use nuclear weapons to avoid what they regarded as an apocalyptic loss to Communism.
The Vietnamese people won the war against the foreign invaders, and paid for it with millions of lives lost and people maimed, and decades of national devastation, but the domestic US resistance was the decisive factor in setting the limits on what the near-psychotic USG was willing to try. Again, above all by winning over enough of the army.
EVERYONE should see this incredible documentary:
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http://www.sirnosir.com/
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An excellent sequence deals with the construction of the myth of the hippie woman who spat on a returning veterans. More likely she was dancing with them in antiwar cafes - in the middle of Texas, even.
Since then a lot of domestic propaganda-war effort has gone into constructing the myth that the antiwar movement had no impact and was just "a bunch of hippies," that a shift in opinion among the geostrategists and the revolt of the domestic manufacturing capitalists were the only decisive factor, or that the US lost on military terms (as though the USG would not have been willing to escalate the carnage on the ground). The Rambo mythology arose to re-legitimize foreign wars. The difference today is a volunteer army, most of them with several layers of technology shielding them from ground combat. And even so, there are resisters and veterans against the war...
