Did we win in Viet Nam?

You can think whatever you want, but it's my opinion that we beat them down
by
outspending them and, once we adopted that as a policy, they couldn't win
because they couldn't match our resources and/or spendable assets. That
being
the case, we didn't need to fight them in any portion of the world in order
to
hasten their political collapse.....it was going to happen eventually
regardless
of whether or not armed conflict was resorted to. Having said that, why did
we
feel obliged to resort to armed conflict with one of their surrogates? Why
did
we spend 58,000+ lives to achieve what was going to happen anyway? Doesn't
that
make it a war that should not have been fought?

In all honesty, I am not sure. At that time we were committed to stopping
Soviet expansion wherever it was happening. This was during the era of the
Cuban Missile Crisis and other smaller standoffs around the world. I believe
that our government honestly felt that the USSR had to be stopped in SEA before
it could gain a toehold but unfortunately Soviet expansionism and the VN civil
war were tightly intertwined. Did we have to engage in SEA - I think yes.
Could it have been done with less loss of life - again I think yes because our
political strategies were flawed in the sixties.






.....Japan and Germany lost WWII because they ran out of
resources and their logistics streams were effectively blocked by the
allies.

I was aware of that, but I thought we were talking about the Viet Nam War.

If we "lost the war" in Vietnam it was not because the US was defeated.
My
contention is that our goal was to stop Soviet expansionism in SEA and
clearly
we did that by making the price for that expansionism too high. There were
wars on two levels, the VN civil war and the war against the Soviets. I am
not sure the former mattered to us nearly as much as the latter.

You can't measure victory or defeat unless you first define the yardstick
you
are measuring with. Our departure from Vietnam was in Jan 73 and was not a
lay down your arms, put your arms in the air, and surrender event. We
simply
stopped dropping bombs there and moved our operations to the supply routes
in
Cambodia and Laos. We turned the war over to the South Vietnamese who were
then defeated by the north because we failed to keep our commitments to
them
while the Soviets met theirs.

You can define victory or defeat however you wish. IMHO, a nation that
engages
in armed conflict and ultimately fails to gain the objectives it had adopted
in
going to war is a nation that has been defeated. It doesn't matter if your
troops raised their hands and surrendered or if your diplomats negotiate a
peaceful withdrawal, if you haven't achieved your objective, you've lost it.
Maybe I mis-remember, but I thought that our objective was to insure the
ongoing
vitality of an anti-communist government in the southern part of Viet Nam
which
would, by its existence, prevent the spread of the communist form of
government
elsewhere in SEA. The South Viet Namese government ultimately failed in 1975
and the nation was unified, and communism as a form of government did not
spread
in the area in spite of it. Taking credit for that failure because of the
punishment we inflicted before we withdrew is akin to the old Israeli gag
about
the child who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that
he's an orphan.

Our objective was to prevent the spread of communism in SEA. The Domino
theory is evidence of that. I believe we accomplished that. NVN was never
able to fully bring SVN into its mold of government. As was the strategy for
NVN, we made the cost of future incursions by the USSR too high. I am not sure
what the alternate history would have been had we not intervened and all any of
us can do is speculate. SVN lost their civil war in spite of our support or
maybe lack of it, but we accomplished the larger objective. The USSR never had
much of a presence after the war and later abandoned VN. Therefore I cannot
agree we "lost" the war. It was a conflict in which there were no clear
winners though no one will ever convnce me that our 58,000 KIAs died in vain
any more than our casualties in Irag.


IAC, I think we can agree on one thing. Cost and difficulty notwithstanding,
our armed forces in largest part performed magnificently and, in point of
fact,
won just about every battle in which they were engaged. Unfortunately,
because
of political constraints, they were not permitted to win the war.

George Z.


We can most certainbly agree on that

Steve