A serious question for GD...

I will probably get flamed for this and am opening a can of worms bigger than ever seen on DU, but here goes...

tell me, why the Vietnam war was fought? I can not come up with any valid (even made up valid) reasons to fight the vietnam war.

So please, those of you that have been around longer than I have, tell me why we fought the Vietnam war.

:shrug:

ps You ask her yet? :D

I have not asked Dr Strangelove yet... :P

lol...

we leave for Whistler tomorrow.

He has posted office hours, but good luck finding him there. :shrug: :P

he likes the skiing too...

who knew :shrug:

:P

Supposedly, it was to resist the Red Menace, prevent China from controlling the rest of Southeast Asia. But it never made any real sense to me.

from toppling one Asian nation after another like dominoes... was the ostensible reason.

I think the real reason was to help U.S. corporations gain control of offshore oil deposits around the southeast Asian penninsula.

but its a long way to travel to stop an ideology no one really understood anyway.

We were based in Japan and the Philippines, Australia was an ally...

And we had the most deployable military in the world..

The other reason I came up with was that the MIlitary wanted to test new ideas and theories.

Which sounds absolutely horrifying.

They went right to work field-testing the torture techniques they'd paid academics in the U.S. and Canada to develop, including sensory deprivation and electric shocks.

The ostensible reason was that if Vietnam became communist, the rest of southeast Asia and therefore the world would "go communist." The fear of communism in the U.S. at the time - fanned by the government and media of course - was very intense. It was much more intense than the current fear of terrorism. Children were taught that "the communists" (the Soviet Union and China) were going to drop atomic bombs on our houses anytime.

We had those along with the fire drills. There were two bell rings, a steady bell meant a fire drill and an intermittent one meant a civil defense drill. You sat along the hallway and covered your head (as if that was going to protect you from an atom bomb).

The way my Dad explained it to me and the age I was at gave me the mistaken idea we were fighting the Russians directly, just in Viet Nam! He was trying to explain the ideology and it was too much for my third grade head, I suppose.

against the dangers of the military industrial complex gaining too much power, whether they seek it or not.

takeover threatened the world's supply of tin and manganese. The odd thing about this, if my memory isn't too far off, is that within 2-3 years, we had perfected a way of extruding aluminum in such a way that producing aluminum was so cheap that it replaced any need for tin. And, I never understood the need for manganese. What is it good for?
By the time I was a sophomore, the domino theory was all the rage.

I have never heard that before.

to fill the void? Something like that seems to ring a bell.

but I don't know how soon after the French left, we got there.

There was an "event" precipitating our involvement as I understand it anyway in the "pueblo incident"

"The Vietnam War: A History in Documents," by Young, Fitzgerald, and Grunfeld. It covers the war in Vietnam from around WW2 on. Had FDR lived, there very likely would not have been the decades of violence that followed the end of the WW2. The French had been there as a colonial power before WW2; in many ways, Ho's forces, which were coordinating efforts with the agency that became the CIA, were more reliable as allies than the French. Ho's declaration of independence was based upon our own. But after WW2, Truman felt that the Vietnamese were "not ready" for democracy, and supported the French attempt to re-establish colonial rule. For many years, the USA footed the bill, while the French fought in Vietnam. After the French were unable to defeat the Vietnamese, the US sent in more "advisers," and the rest is fairly well known.

I will add it to the list of books I either am reading or plan on reading.

Vietnam was a leftover from WW II. The Japanese were outed and the French decided they needed to occupy it to restore it. The French were kicked out and the USA sort of took over for them. The country had been divided in two very much like Korea and the Vietnamese people wanted it reunited. They eventually go their way and the world is far better off for it. The USA was proved to be very wrong at that time just as they are now..

several years after our involvement in Viet Nam began.

The "Pueblo Incident" had nothing to do with Viet Nam.

http://www.usspueblo.org/

ok, thanks for clearing that up.

Money and only Money?

God if that is true, there is no hope for the human race, although it appears to be the case in Iraq.

I'm not sure it's true of WWII, though. But the argument is that the US would have stayed out of it but for the money to be made by the war manufacturers.

A disgraced Nixon going to China had more of an impact on East Asia than the entire Vietnam War. We could have saved thousands of lives, but the politicians wanted a 'political war'. Mass murderers then, mass murderers today. Nothing changes. Just the body count.

as though it were Ebola or TB....

Seriously...

While I would agree with them that communism is bad, I also would disagree with them that unrestricted capitalism and war is good.

If you want to see an example of a country that fought a war without no military might, but instead economic might, and WON, just look at how China has beaten us in the economics game.

The Soviet Union and China were portrayed as evil countries, run by madmen intent on invading and destroying the United States.

draftees, patriotism, egos, fudged statistics and the effects of being in a quagmire. I thank God and some Congressional figures that the draft has ended, or we would be looking at even more horrible losses now.

presumption that Communism would topple state after state in SE Asia (see the "Domino Theory"), a sibling to the same meme being played out in Europe at the time, albeit with less deadly results and absent the nuclear stand off with the Soviet Union.

Communism was the world wide threat being touted in those days. A line was drawn. Advisors in the region grew to support troops grew to all out war.

Political containment became conflict, inherited from the failed French colonization/occupation of VietNam.

It was a disaster.

(This may not answer your question, "why?", just off the top of my head.)

I lived in No. Virginia in the mid-seventies. At that time, Alexandria had the largest VietNamese population of any other city outside of Saigon and Paris. Most were tri-lingual, speaking VietNamese, French and English.

They were ex-pats, of course, bitter at the wholesale corruption of the South VietNamese government, and what they saw as the sell out of the West, yet poignantly proud of the history of what had been called the Paris of Asia.

An odd conflation of issues, for me.

I really admired them, though, and their ability to rebuild lives here.

Because no American President had the guts to take the political hit for failing to "stand up to communism."

This started with Truman, who could have tried to prevent Ho Chi Mi nh from going communist in the first place by some timely diplomacy and a willingness to stand with the colonized rather then the colonizing power. Ho Chi Mi nh actually wrote to Truman--and was ignored--prior to seeking help from the communist Chinese against the French.


Eisenhower had been seen as backing down by allowing Korea to be divided; he was willing to see Korea divided too, but he was unwilling to see all of Vietnam go communist. Instead he chose to actively assist the French even though the French were moving more and more toward getting the hell out, which they did.

Kennedy had won his election in part by posturing as being tougher on communism than the Republicans had been. There is some reason to believe that he had decided that we had to get out prior to his assassination. I guess we'll never know for sure. It is clear that when he first became President he was guided by a CIA that had taken shape under the Eisenhower Administration, and he was willing to give it more credibility than, in retrospect, it deserved. This got us not only into Vietnam, but also into the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis.

Johnson??? Good Lord, what the hell was anybody thinking when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution went down--like the invasion of Iraq--on fabricated evidence.

Nixon--campaigned in 1968 on having a plan to get us out of Vietnam. . . .

When he ran in 1972, in part on a slogan of "Four More Years" (no particular reason given), one place they did not use that slogan was in Vietnam itself, because the trial balloons there found the Vietnamese equating the slogan with four more years of war. That turned out to be pretty close to the truth.

He wanted to take the US in a different direction in foreign policy w/ more emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation as opposed to military action and Cold War tactics.

He was stuck w/ Eisenhower's CIA and Joint Chiefs who rebelled against this approach and undermined him when possible. To them, negotiation with Communist governments was a threat to the US and the world.

Given his approach with Cuba, Russia and Turkey, he probably would not have escalated the Vietnam War. He really wanted to avoid military solutions. May have gotten him killed - not Vietnam as much, but his overall plan to change direction of foreign policy against the resistance of the CIA and US military leaders.

Gulf of Tonkin Incident never happened.

The entire slaughter was manufactured, primarily by Democrats that time, under the old "what's good for GM, is good for America" meme.

We also have ignored the lesson taught to us there. We killed ~4 million people and still lost, because we were the invaders trying to occupy a country that didn't want us there.

in my mind because that was not the lesson being looked for...

The dominoes didn't fall, communism didn't win, etc., etc., etc.

All the same god damn things we're hearing today, only replacing terrorists / islamists for communists.

50,000 Americans, and a damn sight more innocent Vietnamese, and for no good reason.

Oh, and what happened in Cambodia had N*O*T*H*I*N*G to do with our pulling out. The same thing would have happened if we had still been in Vietnam.

Why did 50,000 Americans die in Vietnam? FOR NOTHING. NOTHING BUT WAR ECONOMY BULLSHIT.

The proof is that we LOST, and look what happened. NOTHING.

We now trade with Vietnam and China. Hell, we DEPEND upon China...

Our war economy is based upon bullshit. Pure bullshit. We are living a lie.

Merry Christmas

unfortunately.

Those happened. They lost there, however. It seems Thailand, Malaysia, etc spent that decade building up their own defenses while we were engaging the communists in Vietnam.

But I am sure that was just a coincidence. The leaders of those countries who credit our action in Vietnam as having probably saved their butts must be mistaken.

Read this: Even now, we lie to ourselves about Vietnam, written in 2000 by Robert Jensen.

Excerpt:



sw

was all to make rich people richer.

This and many, many more examples, is why I have lost all hope for the extraordinary opportunity that was America, and which we have simply pissed away as if it were meaningless.

In the words of FDR; we "have surrendered our liberty exchange for the illusion of a living". Shame on us.

We just didn't want Vietnam choosing a form of government we didn't approve of, plain and simple.

But I fooled them, I enlisted in the Navy. Got my induction letter in week three at San Diego RTC.

That does a great job of explaining the thought process of the decision makers.

Ike warned us.

And, an unfounded faith in the might of the American military.

if you can source that quote? I've read a great deal about LBJ, and know that he said some vile, racist things. But I've never read that one anywhere but on DU, and when I've asked another person for a source, I was ignored.

http://www.counterpunch.org/meyers04142006.html

President Johnson, on the other hand, fully inhabited his Texasness, sprinkling his speech with colorful and vivid images such as the famous:

"Without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife."

http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/janefonda.html

Weren’t these images of racism and male arrogance the cultural background against which Lyndon Johnson could say, referring to the Vietnamese, “The U. S. won’t be bullied by a bunch of yellow dwarfs with pocket knives”.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040204.htm

Chomsky: Putting aside judgments about the situation in Iraq, if the (very surprising) failures of the military occupation continue, they may engender the kinds of reactions you describe, but alongside of others that are much more healthy and offer plenty of opportunities. That is generally true of wars. Anti-Japanese racism during World War II was incredible - I can well remember it, as a young teenager. And the cities were not much fun here either, as again I remember very well; in my own city, teenagers were often under a curfew because of race riots. Nevertheless, the war gave a strong impetus to a social democratic culture, in some ways going well beyond, which led to significant improvements in the domestic society. The same was true of Vietnam. Many shared Lyndon Johnson's perception that if we don't fight the "yellow dwarves" over there, they'll "sweep over us and take all we have" (approximate quote). But it also was a major stimulus to popular movements that made it a far more civilized country, and are very much alive today.

Noam Chomsky is a good source in my opinion.

I know how unpopular some of LBJ's other sayings about Vietnam were -- such as the one about bringing the coonskin home. (Yikes!) Little wonder that biographers leave certain gems out.

Again, thank you.

Communists had taken China, North Korea and were doing well there. Ideological tensions (i.e. McCarthyism) made it impossible for us to make overatures to Ho Chi Minh (which probably would have been favorably received), so North Vietnam drifted into the Soviet Sphere. The leaders of South Vietnam were out of touch with the people and engendered an opposition force, which allied with North Vietnam. We sent in troops to support the South Vietnamese government; under Eisenhower it looked like a cheap way to stick it to the Soviet Union; but our commitment kept growing, largely because nobody wanted to lose the war.

Or that's my take.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

You're not actually Dana Perino, are you?

The other 'reasons' for this conflict are merely excuses and window dressing

on Communism. He'd declared war on Poverty, and he wanted to pull the teeth of any criticism from the Repubs that he was soft on the "Commanists".

I don't honestly LBJ thought it would turn out bad. From what I read, he figured he'd kick their asses a bit, and then sit down at a peace table and negotiate... like he did with the Repubs... and get a peace that would make everybody - especially LBJ - look good.

"If ya grab 'em by the balls... their hearts and minds will follow."

Our precious bodily fluids were being polluted, for cryin' out loud.

there needed to be a new war for a new generation. Sounds trite, but I'm sticking with it.

them here". Doesn't that sound familiar?

And, it's spread. Communism (and in some regards, socialist economics) is highly unlikely to spread into countires with a comfortable and large middle class. So, the concern about the spread of communism was irrational and unwarranted.

Nonetheless, enough people got stirred up in fear that it justified massive expenditures in militarization and adventures overseas to prevent the dreaded "domino effect". (Which of course was based upon wild conjecture, since there was no evidence or data to support the existence of said effect.)

As a result, in a misguided effort to prop up a marginally democratic government in Vietnam, we stuck our feet in the water. We then waded in a bit, and then fell completely into the water. By then, a matter of "national pride" kicked in and we couldn't just say "Never mind." and go home. (Egos can so get in the way.)

So, don't try to hard looking for valid and truly justifiable reasons for that conflict. There really aren't any.
The Professor

It was a contest with the other superpower, too. The USSR had declared that communism was going to spread and take over the entire world. We let that comment get to us when your point is probably right - the Western World was not really in that much danger. Though the Third World was, and we were probably afraid the Russians would get all the resources there. We hated it when the Russians won a gold medal at the Olympics, so we had to beat them somewhere. We could not war with them directly, they having WMDs and all, so we had proxy battles with them in Korea and Viet Nam and various other places at a lesser level of intensity.

It was a very black and white (or red and not) world. Cuba was a big threat supposedly, because it was a red island. Later we got involved in Nicaragua - wherever there was any sort of left wing movement anywhere, we considered it a threat and to be indirectly from the Soviets.

Call it made up or not but the reason was to stop the Domoino effect..

Other than scale, it was very similar to Iraq. We got involved where we should not have, and the longer we were there, the harder it became to extricate ourselves.

It started out small, as a covert operation to increase the chances of a "friendly" government at a time of transition frok French colonial rule.

Similar to many other countries at the time, where the US was working to prevent spread of Communism, which was seen as a "worldwide conspiracy."

But Vietnam turned into a giant tarbaby, and we gradually got one foot stuck in, then another....etc.

As our involvement increased, so did the stakes. It was one of those Catch 22's where our involvement increased out perceived need to stay involved.

Synthetic rubber was not so great at the time. We wanted to protect our access to the rubber plantations in the South Vietnam.

In addition, since the end of World War II, Eastern Europe, China and North Korea had all gone Communist. There were active Communist insurgencies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippinnes, etc. These insurgencies were supplied and advised by the Soviet Union just as we supplied and advised the other side.

When we allocated our resources into Vietnam, the Soviets did the same. Following the Vietnam War the Soviets began assisting communist rebels in Thailand where they got their asses kicked because Thailand got to spend the entirety of the Vietnam War preparing. Ditto Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.

And from a purely altrustic point of view it would have been nice if we could have saved the South Vietnamese. Though I doubt altruism had very much to do with our actions.

time of the Cuban missile crisis was that the US would never invade Cuba again. LBJ was trying to be all things to all people, especially to elements within the Democratic party. He had given the liberals almost everything they wanted in all of the social legislation that was passed during his term and the right wing in the party, the people who would become the "neo-conservatives" at a later time, had wanted desperately to invade Cuba and overthrow the communist Fidel Castro. When JFK made the promise not to invade Cuba, LBJ had to give them something, hence our full scale military presence and occupation of South Vietnam. The ostensible reason was to prevent North Vietnam from overrunning the south and uniting Vietnam into one (communist) country, as it was supposed to be.

Google: Lyndon Johnson + Brown and Root

Then do a search on DU for posts by Octafish.

:rofl:

"I will probably get flamed for this and am opening a can of worms bigger than ever seen on DU, but here goes..."

:rofl:

This isn't even a section of one worm, much less a can of worms. You don't know from worms.