Mighty ARVN

George WIll reviews Rick Perlstein's masterpiece, Nixonland and picks a very strange nit: "Calling South Vietnam’s army 'a joke' is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade."

But, look, South Vietnam's military was a joke. That was the whole crux of the issue with Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government had little legitimacy and couldn't build workable state institutions. Even after years of intensive U.S. backing, the South Vietnamese army couldn't hold off the North without substantial financial and logistical aid, and the assistance of American air and sea power.

UPDATE: Rick comments to say he "have chosen a better word than 'joke.'" Still, ARVN was not a very competent fighting force -- that's why they lost! It's true, as various commenters are pointing out, that North Vietnamese forces also received Soviet support, but the quantity of U.S. support for the South was always much greater than the quantity of Soviet support for the North. It was like Afghanistan in reverse (or Afghanistan was like Vietnam in reverse) -- the commies had better proxies, so a low-cost endeavor for the U.S.S.R. was able to create a high cost endeavor for the U.S.A.

Comments

exactly why the nytimes thought it was worthwhile to have george will review perlstein's book is yet another one of those puzzles whose only real solution is that pinch sulzberger is an idiot who out of some oedipal struggle wants to devalue the franchise his dad left him. i certainly won't read it (life being too short to spend any more of what i have left reading george will), so i thank matthew for doing the reading so i don't have to.

i will say this: they don't make columnists more condescending than george will but somehow, the ARVN is something he holds up as honorable.

i repeat, life is too short to spend any more of what i have left reading george will.

Posted by howard | May 10, 2008 12:31 PM

Umm, well... not in the sense that "Switzerland's navy" is, in fact, a joke. South Vietnam's government was weak, divided, and corrupt. But it was not amusing.

Posted by MattF | May 10, 2008 12:33 PM

the South Vietnamese army couldn't hold off the North without substantial financial and logistical aid, and the assistance of American air and sea power.

They held them off for nearly two years ('73-'75), and the NVA was getting covert support from China and Russia the whole time, no?

Posted by Kolohe | May 10, 2008 12:33 PM

What Kolohe said: PAVN was getting very large amounts of supplies from the XSSR and some supplies from the Chinese. ARVN got similar support from Stateside.

That said, the PAVN was less corrupt and more disciplined in the way communist armies usually are - they shoot everybody.

max
['I have no idea whether Will has a point or not as far the book goes, since I've read neither. It seems like a waste of time.']

Posted by max | May 10, 2008 12:39 PM

Old VietNam war protestor and foe George Will here to say that it is in fact not fair to call the South VietNamese army a joke. It was usually poorly led from the top, its associated militia was nothing compared to the Viet Cong irregulars, and some of its troops were mediocre. It did have some excellent units and a lot of brave men who believed in what they were fighting for. (I've always suspected the Catholic/Buddhist split vs. the uniform ideology of the North VietNamese/Viet Cong may also have been a fact.)

When you come right down to it, the single most relevant fact about the North VietNamese victory has to be that Giap was one of the best generals of the war-torn 20th century and Westmoreland was the kind of guy that Lincoln used to fire every six months, but was propped up by the media and the political factions for whom bashing the anti-war groups was a working tactic.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | May 10, 2008 12:40 PM

"People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one -- Hitler. I admire Hitler because he has pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state in the early thirties. But the situation here is so desperate now that one man would not be enough. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam."
-- Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky

Nice bunch of people we were supporting in Viet Nam, indeed.

The North Vietnamese actually cared about the landless peasantry which may have been a factor in why they won the civil war and why the corrupt, decadent, avaricious oligarchy in Saigon lost it.

Posted by Hector | May 10, 2008 12:45 PM

ARVN was overwhelmed in a few weeks by a North Vietnamese invasion force in spring 1975. Despite all the massive U.S. aid and assistance over many years, the Saigon government collapsed in an embarrassing military rout when forced to fend for itself.

Comparing Vietnam to Iraq today, ARVN was a much more coherent force than the motley collection of sectarian militias nominally on "our side" of the conflict. Ironically these militias would probably put up more of a fight in the wake of our withdrawal than ARVN did back in the day.

Posted by jimBOB | May 10, 2008 12:50 PM

That was the oddest book review i have ever read. I think Will enjoyed the book, its fast pace, it's anthropologist's eye for little details...but can't bring himself to be honest or positive. So we get "romp", "rollicking", "riveting", "compulsively readable chronicle". The Times would have been well-served to have an honest conservative historian write the review, rather than a polemicist who can't abide by the thought that the book might achieve some popularity.

Posted by Stav | May 10, 2008 12:55 PM

George Will doesn't make a terrible point about ARVN (he makes other terrible points, but about that: more later). For more see this fine essay:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/steinglass

I could have chosen a better word than "joke."

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 12:58 PM

Well, yes and no. Many in the upper ranks of the ARVN reached their position because of their political leanings rather than any military ability and, in some cases, because they were in fact *not* competent enough to be a threat to Ngo Dinh Diem and family. Lower down in the ranks, the proportion of capable, committed soldiers was much higher. Andrew Wiest's Vietnam's Forgotten Army (which I reviewed for BN Magazine) tells this story very movingly through a dual biography of two officers, both of whom served with distinction but who were failed by senior officers. One called for reinforcements after his position was overrun, but his commander couldn't be bothered to help - the commander was already running late for his nightly tennis game.

Posted by evelynkm | May 10, 2008 1:00 PM

"Calling South Vietnam’s army 'a joke' is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade."

You could say the same thing about the World War II era Italian army.

Posted by Ed | May 10, 2008 1:01 PM

They held them off for nearly two years ('73-'75), and the NVA was getting covert support from China and Russia the whole time, no?

NVN probably didn't want to violate the treaty so blatantly and so quickly with an offensive in '73. Nixon would have resumed bombing.

Posted by ragamuffinman | May 10, 2008 1:03 PM

thank you, rick: that is a very choice essay indeed. too bad george will will never read it.

Posted by howard | May 10, 2008 1:11 PM

I knew a US army vet who was assigned during the Tet offensive to a machine gun overlooking a bridge in Hue, with orders to shoot any ARVN troops fleeing across the bridge.

His opinion of the quality of the ARVN was worse than unprintable.

Posted by Marshall | May 10, 2008 1:13 PM

That was less a review than an example of George Will trying to talk himself out of remembering what he read.

Personally, I'm curious who will be the first conservative to address Nixonland's casual mention of Nixon and Kissinger sabotaging the 1968 Paris Peace talks. Is high treason now just another 'thing' that happened because of the radical 60s.

Posted by modulo myself | May 10, 2008 1:23 PM

Strangely, George Fucking Will has never shown such concern when making jokes about, say, the French Army.

exactly why the nytimes thought it was worthwhile to have george will review perlstein's book is yet another one of those puzzles whose only real solution is that pinch sulzberger is an idiot who out of some oedipal struggle wants to devalue the franchise his dad left him.

It's not a puzzle at all: it's that Sam Tanenhaus always selects sympathetic reviewers for wingnut books, and tends towards commissioning hackjobs for liberal authors.

Why? Because he's a fucking movementarian tool.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 10, 2008 1:32 PM

There are many contemporary accounts of US troops in Vietnam telling some variation of the joke "Want to buy an ARVN rifle? It's a good deal--it's never been fired and has only been dropped once." Will is an accomplished establishment hack who knew exactly what line to cherrypick to put Perlstein on the defensive over his language.

Rick Perlstein didn't invent the idea that the ARVN sucked (all forces fighting for nothing suck unless you pay them big $$$), it was US SOLDIERS who invented ARVN jokes to pass the time in-between battles where the ARVN retreat was predictable.

George Will thinks all soldiers are brave because they ARE all brave -- compared to George Will. The US soldiers who fought alongside the ARVN had a different verdict.

From Vietnam Magazine, April 2006:

Specialist 4 Gary Noller, an RTO at LZ Mildred, later wrote: ‘I remember an incident where a GI came to the TOC and said that an ARVN was signaling with a flashlight to someone outside the wire.’ He said he went to check it out. ‘[I] did encounter an ARVN with a GI flashlight near the east perimeter wire,’ Noller remembered. ‘I told him not to use it, in English, which he probably didn’t understand, and then reported this to an officer. The incident was not treated seriously by the officers, but added credence as far as the GIs were concerned that some of the ARVN were not on our side.’

George Will should go polish Cal Ripken's head or something. He's a hack.

Posted by joejoejoe | May 10, 2008 1:39 PM

I assume that George Will's book review and judgment on the ARVN is based upon personal experience gained during his multiple tours of military duty in Vietnam. He's in the right age profile, no?

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 1:52 PM

After all, George Will has made his living for years preaching virtue to the common rabble and condemming their many faults.

Given that he turned 18 in May 1959 -- and was only 29 in 1970 -- I'm sure George didn't dodge the draft for 11 years of war and let the sons of the common rabble die in his place. We were fighting global Communism, after all.

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 1:57 PM

There were very dedicated units in the ARVN. The Hac Bao were disciplined fighters who fought to the end, and the ARVN's last stand at Xuan Loc was a savage battle in which the South acquitted itself well, though by then the war was long lost.

But here's the difference between the ARVN and the PAVN. I was reading the Vietnam News's Sunday edition this morning, and they had a story about Lt. Gen. Nguyen Huu An, best known to Americans as the Vietnamese commander at the Battle of Ia Drang, depicted in the movie "We Were Soldiers", with Mel Gibson playing US Gen. Harold G. Moore. An finished the war as commander of the PAVN's 2nd Corps, which helped take Saigon. But the story was about An's role at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where he commanded a regiment that was supposed to take Hill A1 from the French. Apparently there was a screwup, the phone lines were cut by artillery fire and An didn't get the go-ahead to attack, which delayed his unit and meant he only took half the hill on the first day of the offensive. Gen. Giap then chewed him out that night in front of all the other officers, and over the next few weeks An's unit took the hill.

Anyway, the story is about a letter An wrote to Gen. Giap but never sent, which An's wife found after his death. The letter laid out An's argument for why he had been unjustly blamed for not taking Hill A1 on the first day of the offensive. In fact, on two occasions in the '70 and '80s, An had met Giap and related his side of the story, and Giap ultimately admitted it hadn't been his fault. And after An died, his wife mailed Giap the letter, and Giap replied two months later that An was right, it had not been his fault that the hill was not taken immediately.

Here was an officer who, over two decades, had covered himself in glory at Ia Drang, in Quang Tri, and in the final offensive that took Saigon, and yet he spent decades trying to erase the shame of not having taken his assigned targets quickly enough in March 1954, letting down his fellow officers. That was how intensely loyal and dedicated the PAVN and the CPVN were to their comrades and to their cause. Regardless of the merits of that cause, one cannot help but be awestruck at their unity and courage. Only a few units in the ARVN ever approached that kind of loyalty and dedication.

This is why the North won the war.

Posted by brooksfoe | May 10, 2008 1:59 PM

'Brave' isn't exactly the right word. Resolute would be better choice above. ARVN didn't fight to the last to defend US interests because WHY WOULD THEY? They had to hedge at every moment against the day that the US would leave the country. In hindsight, not betting their lives on the future of the ARVN government was a damn sight smarter than anything that came out of DC during the war.

Posted by joejoejoe | May 10, 2008 2:02 PM

Pseudonymous beat me to it, but I think we can safely assume no more French Army in WWII jokes from George Will.

Posted by Walt | May 10, 2008 2:10 PM

Though it was of Henry James that Clover Adams is reputed to have remarked, "[He]chews more than he bites off," the same may be consistently said of George F. Will (himself an unparalleled paragon of pseudo-intellectualism).

Posted by ed | May 10, 2008 2:24 PM

I think Perlstein said it best himself:

I could have chosen a better word than "joke."

The word 'dysfunctional' comes to my mind. With the author commenting it seems the proper blogger etiquette would be for Matt to include it in an update.

Posted by AJ | May 10, 2008 2:30 PM

The person who mentioned the World War II Italian army may have been more accurate than he realized -- it really was a bad joke under Mussolini, but in the last two years of the war not only the partisans but even much of the Italian royalist army fought hard and well at the cost of rather heavy casualties. Part of the reason why the Italian state did so well in the thirty years after the war. Hell, even some of the guys fighting for the republic of Salo (a cause that makes Grant's eloquent words at the end of his memoirs pale by comparison) actually fought sometimes.

And a word in honor of Admiral Iacchino and the crew of the battleship Roma who went to their deaths to deprive the Nazis of the one military significant thing the Italians had might not be inappropriate.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | May 10, 2008 2:39 PM

Matt,

You don't think North Vietnam got massive amounts of weaponry, training and logistical assistance from the Soviet Union? You think they made their MiG fighter planes from scratch?

And Hector,

The NVA cared so much about the peasantry that they routinely killed those they suspected of supporting the South Vietnamese government with flame throwers. This was of a piece with the brutal means the North Vietnamese communists used to get to power (look up what "crabbing" was, for example, their extra-cruel method of political assassination). That you claim to be a Christian and at the same time think the folks running Communist North Vietnam were somehow good people is ridiculous.

It's true that the folks running the south weren't saints either, but had we not abandoned them, South Vietnam would probably be a prosperous, democratic country today, like South Korea. Instead the whole country is trying to go the China route of capitalism (which you love so much) combined with autocracy. The Vietnamese communists were so late getting on board this program, that their economy is about twenty years behind the rest of Asia and rats are still considered a delicacy there.

The only consistent theme in your world view seems to be anti-Americanism. Perhaps you've been indoctrinated with too much Liberation Theology, or perhaps you are just ignorant, as your comment about African Americans and homosexuality demonstrated.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 2:50 PM

What no one has yet bothered to do is practically test the theory that "The South Vietnam army was a 'joke'." Here's one try:

Q: How many South Vietnam armies would it have taken to screw in a lightbulb?

A: George F. Will is a vacuous dickhead.

It's a little funny, but not on so many levels.

Also, a bleg. The next time George F. Will begins a paragraph with "Well." (to dismiss some point with which he disagrees) would someone please kick Mr. Will's fucking teeth in? Thanks in advance.

Posted by ed | May 10, 2008 3:01 PM

Matt, I love your blog but your assertion that the ARVN was a joke is simply incorrect. I suggest you read Lewis Sorley's excellent military history of Creighton Abrams' heroic and creative efforts as field commander in Vietnam from 1968-1972 ("A Better War"). I was in Vietnam from 1968-1969 with the Ist Marine Division. We rarely saw the ARVN or shared operations with them, so I had no opinion aside from what I read in the popular media and various overviews of the war, many of which seemed to conclude the war ended with the 1968 TET Offensive. Sorley's research, based on his exclusive access to Abrams' voluminious audio tapes in Carlisle, PA was an eye opener. Anyone interested in the war should read this book. BTW, keep up the good work.

Posted by DocR | May 10, 2008 3:05 PM

Fred:

Fred, this makes no sense at all. The U.S., at its highest point, had 550,000 troops in Vietnam. The Soviet Union and China at their highest point, had zero troops in Vietnam.

In the early 1960s, before we committed troops (save for around 19,000 "advisors) we were remitting a million dollars a day in aid to the South Vietnamese government and military. By the time of the fall of Diem Bien Phu, we were providing 75 percent of the budget of the forces fighting Ho Chi Minh; they were basically an American mercenary army. Neither the Soviet Union nor China could ever have dreamed of pouring in a fraction of the resources we poured in to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, as for, "had we not abandoned them, South Vietnam would probably be a prosperous, democratic country today, like South Korea":

Richard Nixon didn't think so. Henry Kissinger didn't think so. Barry Goldwater didn't think so. So why do you think so?

See here:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/lying-about-liberals-our-national-sport

The only consistent theme in your comment, Fred, seems to be that everything you claim is made up by right-wing propagandists, and has no foundation in history or fact.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 3:08 PM

DocR, Lewis Sorley is about as good a historian as our Fred. Here's my review:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/perlstein/single

99 percent of his sourcing for how great Abrams was is: tape recordings of Abrams' own staff meetings.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 3:16 PM

Yes, the North Vietnamese were cruel to their enemies, and committed atrocities. Ultimately, like the Crusaders, they fought dirty for a good cause, while the Americans and the Muslims fought (relatively) cleanly for a bad one. (The South Vietnamese, less scrupulous than the Americans, were a bunch of decadent oligarchic thugs and traitors to their people.)

I seem to recall that the French Resistance was pretty cruel to the bloody Nazis too. Howver I don't think I have too many tears to shed for the poor Nazis. I'd prefer to shed them for the victims of My Lai and the Tiger Cages.

The kind of society I believe in has often fallen into the hands of corrupt and evil men and oppressions have been committed in its name. But the kind of society you believe in is evil at its very core, and nothing can save it.

Posted by Hector | May 10, 2008 3:18 PM

"So why do you think so?"

Because:

1) The NVA insurgency had proven incapable of deposing the South Vietnamese government (which is why the North Vietnamese resorted to a mechanized invasion in 1972).

2) That invasion was defeated by a combination, mainly, of ARVN ground forces and U.S. air power (enhanced by the relatively new invention of laser-guided bombs, which devastated the NVA's tanks).

3) Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that a similar combination of U.S. air power and ARVN ground forces would have been able to defeat the 1974-75 invasion which destroyed South Vietnam.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 3:19 PM

The relevant paragraphs:

*******

Sorley's plot is even simpler than Moyar's: Everything was going atrociously in Vietnam until a new general, Creighton Abrams, became the new commander in June 1968, with a nifty new way of war. And by 1970, Sorley proclaims, "the war was won." Westmoreland, the previous commander of US forces, had defined victory via attrition: "to inflict on the enemy more casualties than they could tolerate, thereby forcing them to abandon the effort to subjugate South Vietnam." What came to be known as Abrams's "strategic somersault" was aimed at creating an atmosphere of security for Vietnamese civilians, winning their hearts and minds. Westmoreland's addiction to reckless search-and-destroy missions was replaced with a "one war" approach integrating "military and civilian approaches to an unprecedented degree."

It was also, Sorley asserts, a more humane approach to the war. "Compassion for the Vietnamese was something Abrams felt strongly and could express eloquently," he insists. The doctrine was known as "clear and hold," and Sorley's account of it allegedly inspired the November 30, 2005, White House document "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" and its doctrine of "clear, hold, and build"--which, in turn, is the foundation for the Republican argument that nothing that happened before the installation of General Petraeus should count in evaluating our adventure in Iraq.

Sorley's claim that the war effort became more successful because it became more sensitive is so surpassingly strange he can't sustain it. Here he is approvingly quoting an American military briefer on the air assaults launched by the United States to check North Vietnam's massive 1972 Easter Offensive: "If ther're any lights burning in Hanoi tonight, they'll be candlepower." He boasts that this particular aerial campaign "ruined North Vietnam's economy, paralyzed its transportation system" and "reduced imports by 80 percent." He describes Col. George Patton, son of the great general, as one of the commanders who "took seriously Abrams' message" of winning hearts and minds. And yet this was an officer, as Seymour Hersh reported in the book My Lai 4, who sent out a Christmas card in 1968 in which the message "From Colonel and Mrs. Patton II--Peace on Earth" accompanied a color photograph of a stack of corpses, and who was famous for saying, "I do like to see arms and legs fly."

In December 2005 in the Boston Globe, Hanoi-based journalist Matthew Steinglass interviewed experts in an outstanding position to evaluate Sorley's claims about "clear and hold." Steinglass talked to David Elliot, who interviewed 400 Vietcong defectors during the Vietnam War for the Rand Corporation (and later wrote The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975). Elliot found Sorley's claims absurd: "Only the 'clear' part was a success." What was the "clear" part? "Indiscriminate bombing and artillery shelling which led to rural depopulation"--with some villages hit by more than 300 mortar shells a day. Another one of Steinglass's interviewees was the chief Communist strategist, Gen. Le Ngoc Hien, who has been openly critical of the Communist side's mistakes. He finds Sorley's claim that the war effort became more successful because it became more sensitive "completely wrong."

Sorley is not much of a historian. He did not base his arguments on a canvass of a representative sample of relevant sources but instead on hundreds of hours of tape recordings of his hero General Abrams's weekly staff sessions. And the number of outright mistakes and misconceptions in the book is staggering. He offers the rise of South Vietnam's 4 million-strong People's Self-Defense Forces as prima facie "evidence of both the loyalty of the population and President Thieu's confidence in their support"; you wouldn't know from A Better War that this corps was forcibly conscripted. He holds up the 1970 Senate repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution as evidence of a liberal stab in the back. He is unaware, apparently, that Nixon had engineered that vote, the better to prove his point that he didn't need Congress's permission to make war. Sorley cites Melvin Laird as a contemporary authority about goings-on in Washington, unacquainted, apparently, with the fundamental fact that during his tenure as Nixon's Defense Secretary, Laird was utterly out of the loop. Sorley's Lyndon Johnson is not mercurial, and his Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are not liars. He thinks "the first Watergate revelations came to light" in April 1973, par for the course for a book so bereft of political context it doesn't even discuss the 1972 opening to China, let alone the way it fundamentally shattered the supposed strategic rationale for the war.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 3:20 PM

You don't think North Vietnam got massive amounts of weaponry, training and logistical assistance from the Soviet Union? - Fred

Yeah. And they used it to win the war. The ARVN got far more materiel, as well as training and logistical assistance from the US, and unlike the North it got direct combat support and bombing support from the US for 8 years (really 10 if you count the 10,000+ "advisers" under Kennedy). And they used this support to lose the war.

The US gave South Vietnam so much military aid in the run-up to the Paris Accords that in 1973 South Vietnam had the world's fourth-largest air force. The PAVN force that rolled into the South in 1975 counted less than 200,000 soldiers; a couple of years earlier the ARVN listed itself at over a million men. Yet most of the ARVN evaporated. A PAVN officer famously described the army they encountered as "not an army at all, but a collection of dissociated individuals, some of whom happened to be carrying weapons."

This was not true of the entire ARVN. Some units fought well; other units came apart because of incompetent strategic direction by President Thieu and other conflicting general staff officers. But the overall difference between the North and the South was that the North's armed forces were unified, disciplined, and loyal to the point of death, while the South's were not.

Posted by brooksfoe | May 10, 2008 3:22 PM

Hector,

"The kind of society I believe in has often fallen into the hands of corrupt and evil men..."

"Often" or always? Have you ever considered there may be something intrinsically wrong with the kind of society you believe in if this always happens?

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 3:25 PM

You people realize, of course, that in this post you have once again summoned the zombie Neo-Confederate Jew-Fearer Chris Ford to explain in a very, very long rant how the failure of the U.S. war effort across Indochina was all the fault of the cowardly lefties, liberals, blacks & immigrants back home?

Is this a price you're willing to pay?

Posted by El Cid | May 10, 2008 3:29 PM

Fred, read the piece I linked to, which quotes Barry Goldwater calling you full of shit:

"Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam." The House turned down the president's emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic ("The Unrealist," November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an "austere program." Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a "decent interval" until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, "no one will give a damn."

Here, from another article by me (both published in The New Republic, whose archives are down; find excerpt at http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/31397.html), is Nixon and Kissinger, in private, calling you full of shit:

*****

... To begin unraveling the true meaning of Kissinger's advice to the White House [as reported by Bob Woodward in State of Denial], we have to go back to August 3, 1972. On that date, President Nixon repeated to the good doctor, his national security adviser, what he'd been saying in private since 1966: America's war aim (standing up a pro-American and anti-Communist South Vietnamese government in Saigon) was a fantasy. "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway," the president sighed. But a presidential election was coming up. He had long before promised he was removing the U.S. presence, more-or-less victoriously (though "victory" was a word Nixon, by then, wisely avoided; instead, he called it "peace with honor").

It was Kissinger, who had been shuttling back and forth to Paris for peace negotiations with the enemy, who named the dilemma: "We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which--after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74, no one will give a damn." Thus was confirmed what historians would come to call the "decent interval" strategy. Having pledged to Saigon--and American conservatives--that Communist troops would not be allowed in South Vietnam after a peace deal was signed, Kissinger negotiated the opposite. "Peace is at hand," he announced on the eve of the 1972 presidential election, in one of his rare appearances before the TV cameras. The United States left the following spring; the Communists moved in; Saigon fell.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 3:32 PM

Brooksfoe,

Right. There are perhaps some reasons why the North's army was more disciplined and loyal than the South. The North was fighting for an ideal- the Southern army was basically fighting to preserve greed and oligarchy. People usually can fight harder and longer, even unto death, when they're motivated by idealism rather than cynicism. See the revolution in Cuba for an example.

Fred,

No, not always. I would defend the North Vietnamese the same way I would defend the Crusaders. And no, I've never had reason to consider your hypothesis. Perhaps you should consider your faith in American liberalism (i.e. greed, self-interest, and the dominance of the world by parasitic social classes) first.

Posted by Hector | May 10, 2008 3:35 PM

"But the overall difference between the North and the South was that the North's armed forces were unified, disciplined, and loyal to the point of death, while the South's were not."

Steve Sailer mentioned once Kissinger's recollection that a cultural difference between North Vietnam and South Vietnam was that the South reminded him of Austria, and the north reminded him of Prussia. The North's armed forces were certainly more disciplined, overall, than the South's, but nevertheless, the combination of the South's ground forces and our air power had stopped the 1972 invasion and a similar combination would likely have stopped the 1974-75 invasion. So my point that South Vietnam would likely still be around today had we not abandoned it in 1974-75 stands.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 3:37 PM

Re Fred's comment "It's true that the folks running the south weren't saints either, but had we not abandoned them, South Vietnam would probably be a prosperous, democratic country today, like South Korea "
------------
What utter bullshit.

1) In his polemic against Noam Chomsky, right winger
Anders G. Lewis indicates that:

"The population of North Vietnam rose from 18.7 million to over 23 million. The population of South Vietnam increased from 16.1 million to just below 20 million.[23] "
Ref: http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Read.aspx?GUID=3B9B62D3-66CC-4BEB-B5CD-B19C65AABDB5

2) The rule of thumb in military operations is that an aggressor needs a 5 to one manpower advantage over the defender to be successful, other things being equal.

If the South Vietnamese government had had the support of the majority of its population, then North Vietnam would never had had a chance of a successful invasion. Especially with the enormous material and financial support South Vietnam received from the USA.

3) But the South Vietnamese government was despised by its own people. Which means Fred's vision of a prosperous country is total bullshit.

The self-serving corruption of Saigon would have doomed South Vietnam to deep poverty even if North Vietnam had stayed on its side of the DMZ.
South Vietnam's economy crashed after the US Big PX left.

4) And if the South Vietnamese people did not support Saigon, then the US government had no damm business killing several million Vietnamese
people -- and dousing 4 million more with Dioxin -- in order to prop up Saigon. Or killing 58,000 American boys for a clusterfuck that had nothing to do with defense of the USA.

5) I knew some men killed in that war. I don't understand why some parent has never paid a visit to McNamara some night, chopped McNamara's fucking head off and stuck it on a stake
in front of the Capitol Steps.

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 3:37 PM

"Fred, read the piece I linked to, which quotes Barry Goldwater calling you full of shit:"

Rick Perlstein,

Is resorting to expletives generally your tack when you find are unable to refute three simple points? It's hard to believe you are a professional author.

Here are my three points again, in response to your question about why I think South Vietnam would have still been around today if we ("we" = the U.S.A. -- I didn't say "liberals") hadn't abandoned it. Can I expect a direct, civil response from you this time?

1) The NVA insurgency had proven incapable of deposing the South Vietnamese government (which is why the North Vietnamese resorted to a mechanized invasion in 1972).

2) That invasion was defeated by a combination, mainly, of ARVN ground forces and U.S. air power (enhanced by the relatively new invention of laser-guided bombs, which devastated the NVA's tanks).

3) Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that a similar combination of U.S. air power and ARVN ground forces would have been able to defeat the 1974-75 invasion which destroyed South Vietnam.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 3:49 PM

Fred: I don't think there are that many people arguing that an infinite and eternal effort by the U.S. to prop up the tottering state of South Vietnam would have no effect.

Yes, it's entirely possible that if the U.S. had remained there, we could be gloriously fighting for South Vietnamese independence to this very day.

Your point?

Posted by El Cid | May 10, 2008 3:58 PM

"That invasion was defeated by a combination, mainly, of ARVN ground forces and U.S. air power (enhanced by the relatively new invention of laser-guided bombs, which devastated the NVA's tanks).

Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that a similar combination of U.S. air power and ARVN ground forces would have been able to defeat the 1974-75 invasion which destroyed South Vietnam."

Fred,

Would it have defeated the 1976-1977 invasion of South Vietnam that would have occurred in the alternate history you propose? Or the 1978-79, 1980-81, etc invasions that would have taken place? In addition, you are not taking into account the growing unpopularity of the Saigon regime within South Vietnam itself compared to its Hanoi adversaries. This would have reduced the already limited effectiveness of the ARVN ground forces over time, to the point that American air power would have been insufficient to sustain the Saigon regime. In order to maintain the Saigon regime, the US would have had to reinvade Vietnam with ground troops, and get bogged down in South Vietnam the way the Red Army did in Afghanistan.

Tke key to victory in Vietnam, Fred, was to create a Saigon government that had the unwavering support of a South Vietnamese populace dedicated to fighting a great patriotic war against the North Vietnamese. Under those circumstances, the South, with its larger population and more dynamic economy than the Communist North combined with superior military equipment and training from the US, would have crushed the North. That didn't happen, though, Fred, even in your alternate history.

Posted by eltoro | May 10, 2008 4:02 PM

Rick,

Thank you for posting your article, which included a review of Sorley's book, "A Better War." I agree with you completely about the Iraq War, a tragic strategic error and a horrible waste of lives. I try to keep an open mind about Vietnam since we did have a (SEATO) treaty obligation and it was fought (poorly at first) in the context of the Cold War.

One of the intriguing aspects of Sorley's book, for me, is that it is not overtly political. It concentrated on events on the ground in Vietnam, although it does periodically place them in the context of the Cold War, the Paris Peace talks, the anti-war convulsions at home, national politics, etc.

I also found it to be very well sourced, well beyond the scope of the Abrams audio tapes. The last one hundred pages of my paperwork volume included references to many other sources, including hundreds of personal interviews, books, government documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews with individuals from the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army, and former ARVN officials.

Coincidentally, I arrived in Vietnam the same month that Abrams assumed command. The change in tactics in our area of responsibility was quite dramatic. Search and destroy operations were replaced by saturation patrols, more interaction with the local villagers including medcaps and the establishment and support of CAP units (Marines living and working in the villages). This should have been the approach from the beginning. Our casualties fell off dramatically and when we did launch operations we normally had fixed targets instead of wandering around waiting to be attacked.

My point about this book is that it did help me better understand what I experienced because there has been so little serious scholarship about the post TET Offensive part of the war. I enjoyed your article and my sense is I share your general political views. Peace.

Posted by DocR | May 10, 2008 4:20 PM

3) Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that a similar combination of U.S. air power and ARVN ground forces would have been able to defeat the 1974-75 invasion which destroyed South Vietnam.

What "seems reasonable" is to not assume counterfactuals in which what happens is the opposite of what actually took place.

South Vietnam hung on in 1972 by the skin of its teeth and through the grace of thousands of B-52 "Arc Light" sorties -- basically annihilating entire square kilometers of territory. The NVA was within a hair of taking Buon Ma Thuot in 1972. If it had fallen, the war might have ended 3 years earlier. After the 1972 offensive was driven back, the North changed its strategy for the 1975 offensive, first grabbing a southern province near Saigon with NVA troops already present in the South, rather than attacking in the north over the DMZ. How would the US have responded to the seizure of that province? By Arc Lighting the southern countryside? What if the North moved to station its MiGs near the border, rather than around Hanoi - which it had never done - in order to shoot down some B-52s over the south? Would the US continue its Arc Lights if B-52s were getting shot down? For how long?

For thirty years, from 1945 to 1975, the CPVN kept fighting, kept adapting its strategies, kept searching for weaknesses, kept changing the game, never let up. They had the resolve to win. While South Vietnam lacked that resolve, there was no way for the US to substitute for it. Sooner or later, South Vietnam was going to fall.

Posted by brooksfoe | May 10, 2008 4:21 PM

One thing that no one has commented on yet is how thoroughly the RVN was penetrated by the North. After the fall of Saigon, it turned out that there were agents everywhere, many with years of association with the US, and including at the highest levels of government. The US knew that they couldn't trust the peasantry; what they did not know was that many of the educated, westernized urban dwellers they relied on were on the other side too.

Posted by Marshall | May 10, 2008 4:39 PM

Poopy poopy poopy poopy poopy.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 4:42 PM

Poopy poopy poopy poopy poopy.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 4:42 PM

"South Vietnam hung on in 1972 by the skin of its teeth and through the grace of thousands of B-52 "Arc Light" sorties"

Brooksfoe, the Air Force's Historical Studies Office doesn't mention any Arc light sorties after 1970. Laser-guided bombs weren't widely used in Vietnam until 1972. It was laser-guided bombs dropped from fighter-bombers that devastated North Vietnam's tanks in 1972.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 4:44 PM

Amazing. All through the Nixon administration—yes, from the very beginning—the Pentagon dismissed reports they were accidentally hitting civilian targets by arguing for the accuracy of their laser-guided munitions.

Now Fred says the Pentagon was lying.

Posted by Rick Perlstein | May 10, 2008 4:48 PM

so a low-cost endeavor for the U.S.S.R. was able to create a high cost endeavor for the U.S.A.

It's more that it became a high cost, almost no benefit endeavor. In the events were outspending the soviets would accomplish something substantial it was a perfectly valid strategy.

If Iraq invasion had accomplished half the stuff Charles Krauthammer said it would, it be worth it to start planning the next round.

Posted by Christopher Colaninno | May 10, 2008 4:50 PM

Rick: "The only consistent theme in your comment, Fred, seems to be that everything you claim is made up by right-wing propagandists, and has no foundation in history or fact."

You're new here, Rick. This is what Fred DOES.

Not to mention Robert Powell, Al, SLC, Mixner, Chris Ford, Danceswithgoats, Sonic Charmer, and others.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 10, 2008 7:46 PM

Re Rick Perlstein

Before Mr. Perlstein gets into bed with HIV+ Richard Steven Hack, he should be aware that Mr. Hack is a convicted bank robber who spent 9 years in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Ka. Mr. Hack stuck a gun in a bank tellers face and demanded all the cash in the drawer. He claims he was sticking up the bank as part of an effort to overthrow the government (Mr. Hack is a self declared anarchist) but, of course, he really needed the bread to purchase smack.

Posted by SLC | May 10, 2008 9:14 PM

Rick Perlstein,

"Now Fred says the Pentagon was lying."

Your book is on the cover of tomorrow's NY Times Book Review and you still resort to this puerile sort of goading? Amazing.

From what I've read, laser-guided bombs were used in combat trials as early as 1968 (which would mean there was at least some use of them throughout the Nixon administration), but not widely used until 1972. In any case, the salient point is that American fighter bombers used them to devastating effect against North Vietnam's tanks during the 1972 invasion, and presumably would have used them to devastating effect against the NVA's tanks during the North's invasion of 1974-75, had we not bailed on South Vietnam at that point.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 9:27 PM

I'm coming in late, but:

the combination of the South's ground forces and our air power had stopped the 1972 invasion and a similar combination would likely have stopped the 1974-75 invasion. So my point that South Vietnam would likely still be around today had we not abandoned it in 1974-75 stands.

Just to reiterate what others have said: Even if the first statement is correct, Fred, the second statement assumes that the North would have *stopped trying* after such a failure. There's no reason to believe it would have. So yes, as El Cid says, in your hypothetical it's possible the RVN might still exist today, valiantly struggling for its survival with US help. (And interestingly, I see you've downgraded its hypothtical prospects from "prosperous like South Korea" to "still around", which is an admission in itself.) So what? This is a good outcome for you? How many lives and resources should the US have spent propping up an artificially created country with no legitimate government that could never get its act together even with exponentially more foreign resources to help it than its enemies were getting?

Posted by Ryan | May 10, 2008 9:35 PM

Will is a second-rate Mencken and a third-rate Edmund Burke. His preference for dry, fey Peggy Noonan-esque apercus to encapsulate a time of volcanic national schisms reveals him a a cloying, userious bit of twiddle-twaddle. Beneath Perlstein's fabulous savagery of the Nixon legacy -lay rich layers of deep perceptions. Of course, like a silent film extra - Georgie Porgie yearns for nostalgic rhapsodies to a gestative time, a time when "The Movement" slowly worked its magic to transform America into the shining hellhole on a hill Peg wrote so eloquently about. One day in the not-too-distant future...George will pass away into a distant Hell where he'll wish he'd wriiten a memorable old "Star Trek" episode rather than the smug, unevocative, ruling class tripe he did.

Posted by Trevor | May 10, 2008 10:08 PM

Your book is on the cover of tomorrow's NY Times Book Review and you still resort to this puerile sort of goading? Amazing.

Since we're glossing commenters here, Fred is an old fart who doesn't like brown people, and 'Mr' SLC is a David Duke fan who pretends to be a rabid Kahanist on the internet. Little else needs saying.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 10, 2008 10:28 PM

Even if South Vietnam would have been around in 1980, what would it have mattered to our national interest? It would have been one thing if instead that war was East German Soviet proxies invading West Germany, which would have directly threatened our national interest, but Vietnam was rather peripheral. After all, we were leaning to China at the point that we stopped supporting the South as a way to balance against the Soviet Union, which basically meant Nixon and Kissinger pretty much stopped caring about that sideshow. Communist Vietnam could have been a threat as an extension of the PRC that could then be used as a club to hammer away at the rest of Southeast Asia, but instead it was an ally of the USSR that China invaded and Moscow found constantly annoying. In addition, Vietnam's communists ended up overthrowing the worst communist regime in history: the Khmer Rouge.

It also took Korea about 35 years or so years after the Korean War to become democratic (with the exception of one year of disastrous democratic rule that reverted back to a dictatorship). Following that timeline in a bigger and more diverse country like Vietnam and assuming that the Vietnam War, if we continued to fight it, ended in 1980 (I'm being really generous here), it would become a democracy like Korea only about 3 years ago. Somehow I doubt this entire scenario would have been likely.

Posted by Reality Man | May 10, 2008 10:37 PM

'Mr' SLC is a David Duke fan who pretends to be a rabid Kahanist on the internet (psudononymous in nc)

And, offline- does Stinky (LevClump)wear a girdle and pumps to suck trucker's dicks at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel? I guess we can add to his list of sins that he's a bizarre, neo-dadaist little shape-shifting shtoonk.

Posted by Trevor | May 10, 2008 10:39 PM

Ryan,

"Just to reiterate what others have said: Even if the first statement is correct, Fred, the second statement assumes that the North would have *stopped trying* after such a failure."

It actually doesn't assume that, Ryan. They could have kept trying. But for all the craftiness and tenacity of the North Vietnamese, no one has figured out how to make tanks and other armored vehicles impervious to laser-guided bombs. So if we responded with the same use of air power as we did in 1972, the North's conventional invasions would likely have been similarly unsuccessful.

"And interestingly, I see you've downgraded its hypothtical prospects from "prosperous like South Korea" to "still around", which is an admission in itself."

You're reading I still think that had we continued to defend South Vietnam it would probably be prosperous and democratic today. Rightist autocracies allied with the U.S. have tended to transition toward democracy, and often prosperity.

"So what? This is a good outcome for you?"

More relevantly, I'd say it would have been a good outcome for the South Vietnamese. But it would have also been better for the U.S.. Our abandonment of South Vietnam certainly didn't do a lot of good for us, considering the emboldening effects it had on a variety of enemies over the next decade, from Central Asia to Central America.

"How many lives and resources should the US have spent..."

The cost in lives and resources of continuing to defend South Vietnam with tactical air power from 1974 on would have been minimal compared to what we spent up to that point.

Posted by Fred | May 10, 2008 10:40 PM

Ah, the Scooby Doo theory of foreign policy re-emerges in its full glory: ...And we woulda done it, too, if it hadn't been for them meddlin' [liberals / lefties / cowards / Congress]...

Posted by El Cid | May 10, 2008 11:20 PM

Brooksfoe, the Air Force's Historical Studies Office doesn't mention any Arc light sorties after 1970. -- Fred

"[In May 1972] the Strategic Air Command was sending Creighton Abrams three-plane flights of B-52s at roughly hourly intervals around the clock.... Between May 14 and the end of the first week of June [1972], John Vann laid the best part of 300 B-52 strikes in the environs of Kontum."

-- "A Bright Shining Lie," Neil Sheehan, P.783

Posted by brooksfoe | May 10, 2008 11:21 PM

Re Fred's comment "But for all the craftiness and tenacity of the North Vietnamese, no one has figured out how to make tanks and other armored vehicles impervious to laser-guided bombs."
----------
Actually, I suspect the solution's not difficult.

Camouflage handles the visual spectrum. As does cloud cover and smoke.

Or darkness. And before you mention thermal imaging, realize that such sensors detect SURFACE temperature.

You can, for example, walk right by the ubiquitous Infrared sensors in home security systems without triggering the alarm if you simply cover your body with a golf umbrella. Try it, heh heh heh.

Tens of millions of US households THINK they are protected by their very expensive security systems. They are wrong -- they have been merely sold the ILLUSION of security.

Same goes for Fred believing all those Pentagon press releases. Although Fred and the rest of us have definitely paid RETAIL for that illusion.

A mere canvas tarp suspended six inches above the top of the tank would conceal its heat from thermal sensors.

That leaves Radar -- JSTARS i believe. But that can be defeated with a stealth covering on top of the tank. When Bill Clinton lost that Stealth fighter in Kosevo in early 1999 -- and failed to bomb the wreckage -- he gave our enemies lots of samples. It would take the ordinary college chemistry teacher a few days to do a spectroscopic analysis of one of those samples.

But the evil Russkies were looking into that area years earlier. I can't help wondering what would have happened if the North Vietnamese had put an inch or so of carbon (charcoal) on top of that canvas tarp (covering the tank) and sewed another tarp on top to form a cover. With cross stitching similar to what's done in down sleeping bags to prevent the charcoal from bunching up or shifting around.

I kinda like that image of Fred with his ass hanging out in the breeze. Staring at a hostile armored division bearing down on his butt after it bypassed his Maginot Line in the sky.

But it would never happen, of course. Because this country is guarded by the Republicans and they would never allow an enemy to strike at the US Homeland.

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 11:32 PM

Fred, NEVER trust your ass to the US Air Force.

It is a hideously expensive, highly inaccurate and throughly unreliable form of artillery.

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 11:40 PM

Note that if any of our enemies didn't get samples of stealth covering from the Kosevo fiasco, the US Air Force will no doubt deliver some more to them as soon as the F22 and Joint Strike Fighters come online.

The consequences of that will be much less amusing than the sight of Fred getting his ass run over by a herd of T-54s.

Posted by Don Williams | May 10, 2008 11:45 PM

Afghanistan was like Vietnam in reverse? Only up to the victory.

Once the North Vietnamese declared victory, they consolidated power and set about organizing their state. Once the mujahadeen declared victory they set about fighting with each other, and supporting and protecting a band of terrorists whose target was the country that had supported them during their war with the Soviets.

The aftermath of warfare is more important than the war itself, you know, and by those standards Vietnam was a victory for Moscow, while Afghanistan proved to be a dramatic failure for Washington.

Posted by west coast | May 11, 2008 2:03 AM

Fred: I don't think there are that many people arguing that an infinite and eternal effort by the U.S. to prop up the tottering state of South Vietnam would have no effect. Yes, it's entirely possible that if the U.S. had remained there, we could be gloriously fighting for South Vietnamese independence to this very day.

This is the key point. If Fred is right, it means we could have maintained a stalemate and a civil war in Vietnam at great cost indefinitely.

But Fred's original claim was that Vietnam could have been like South Korea and instead has 20 years catching up to do because the South fell. And there's no evidence of that. Rather, the likely scenario is that the country would have remained dirt poor and in a state of perpetual war.

Further, it needs to be mentioned that the original goal of the Vietnam War was to stop the Soviet Union from spreading Communism. Not to save the South Vietnamese. In fact, we lost the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union still fell. So, obviously, keeping Vietnam from going communist wasn't actually as important as the Vietnam War's advocates claimed, and losing Vietnam didn't prevent us from achieving that ultimate objective.

So, with a choice between perpetual civil war for Vietnam and letting the North win, we chose the right choice.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 11, 2008 3:13 AM

Fred is doing a great job injecting some reality in Matt and Steve Pearlstein's fantasy history of the Vietnam War

The North Vietnamese Army was entirely and constantly equipped by the Russians, Chines and North Koreans. N Korean pilots even took turns flying MIGs over the north. Russians manned the SAM missile batteries of the north. To portray the ARVN as a joke and the north as some sort of self-propelled machine is, well, A JOKE, and typical leftist revisionism.

Posted by Jozef | May 11, 2008 7:14 AM

Fred is doing a great job injecting some reality in Matt and Steve Pearlstein's fantasy history of the Vietnam War

The North Vietnamese Army was entirely and constantly equipped by the Russians, Chines and North Koreans. N Korean pilots even took turns flying MIGs over the north. Russians manned the SAM missile batteries of the north. To portray the ARVN as a joke and the north as some sort of self-propelled machine is, well, A JOKE, and typical leftist revisionism.

Posted by Jozef | May 11, 2008 7:15 AM

Fred is doing a great job injecting some reality in Matt and Steve Pearlstein's fantasy history of the Vietnam War

The North Vietnamese Army was entirely and constantly equipped by the Russians, Chines and North Koreans. N Korean pilots even took turns flying MIGs over the north. Russians manned the SAM missile batteries of the north. To portray the ARVN as a joke and the north as some sort of self-propelled machine is, well, A JOKE, and typical leftist revisionism.

Posted by Jozef | May 11, 2008 7:16 AM

Those 'enemies' of ours that Fred keeps talking about were only 'enemies' because we anted to control their countries and impose on them the blessings of cpaitalism, 'freedom', 'democracy', and I don't know what else. News to Fred....the United States needs to mind its own f---ing business. It's none of our business what sort of government they have in Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else. And not all of us value either 'prosperity' or 'democracy' in the sense that Fred means those terms. thank God.

It was a good thing for the world when Thieu and Ky had to scuttle like rats out of Saigon. As the man said, 'Two, three, many Viet Nams.'

Posted by Hector | May 11, 2008 9:49 AM

Re Dilan Esper's comment "Further, it needs to be mentioned that the original goal of the Vietnam War was to stop the Soviet Union from spreading Communism ...
...So, with a choice between perpetual civil war for Vietnam and letting the North win, we chose the right choice."
----------------

1)I think this is wrong -- the result of Dilan commenting upon a subject which he has evidently not chosen to research. (Note: Simply reciting whatever line of bullshit propaganda Republican leaders put out to disguise their objectives is not research nor is it critical thought.)

2) If you look at the REAL Pentagon Papers (the ones Mike Gravel read into the COngressional Record -- NOT the bullshit paraphrase of the New York Times), I think you can see several reasons:

a) The USA had a desperate need for TUNGSTEN -- and one of the few mines outside the USSR and China was in Thailand. (The Other one was in South Korea. Anyone see a pattern?)

The huge Air Force (missiles, SAC bombers etc)needed to fight the Cold War could not be built without huge imports of tungsten. Eisenhower noted this need during his Presidential campaign.
Malaysian rubber (for tires) was also a strategic material.

b) If you analyze the geography, you see that Vietnam is a cork in the bottle that contains CHINESE --NOT Soviet -- expansion. China was hemmed in by the Himalayan Mountains to the southwest -- and by US offshore bases in the Phillipines, Taiwan, Okinawa and Japan. Plus the narrow straits /chokepoints of Malaysia and Indonesia.

c) Because of its fertile soil, Vietnam was a regional power -- it's population far higher than that of infertile countries like Cambodia and Laos. US air bases on the Vietnamese coast could interdict any attempt by China to slip through Laos/Cambodia and link up with Burma for access to the the Indian Ocean -- and to Middle Eastern oil.

d) Plus the US badly needed Japan as an offshore base -- and did not want Japan to be gradually pulled into the Communist orbit. Controlling Japan's food supply --Vietnamese rice -- was one lever to push.

3) Many of the above reasons --rational during Eisenhower's administration -- had lost their importance by 1967. (We sucked in huge amounts of Tungsten and stockpiled it in the late 1950s-early 1960s. And Japan was firmly in our court because of intertwined supply chains.)

At that point, the driving force
seems to have been Johnson's refusal to accept the political cost of "losing Vietnam". Which I think did not justify the loss of a single US soldier.

Posted by Don Williams | May 11, 2008 11:02 AM

Re Jozef's comment "The North Vietnamese Army was entirely and constantly equipped by the Russians, Chines and North Koreans. N Korean pilots even took turns flying MIGs over the north. Russians manned the SAM missile batteries of the north."
-----------
Again, bullshit.

Did we see waves of Soviet MIGS flying over Saigon? Did we see waves of Soviet bombers carpetbombing the shit out of square miles of Vietnam?

NO -- that was the US government.

To suggest that Chinese and Soviet support for North Vietnam came close to equaling what the US threw into supporting Saigon is , in my opinion, deceitful.

Again, the result of Jozef simply reciting propaganda put out by US hawks to justify their
aggression. Right wing supporters never seem to THINK about what they are saying -- they never actually look at the statements of their leaders to see if the statements make sense.

The Chinese sent roughly 170,000 men to North Vietnam --but mostly as workers, not combat troops. The USSR only sent roughly 3000 men.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war#Soviet_Union and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war#China

Plus Jozef fails to note the men and supplies contributed by US allies -- SOuth Korea, Australia, etc.

Posted by Don Williams | May 11, 2008 11:19 AM

Don Williams as CPUSA hack

No, I don't listen to right wing propagandists, just the DOZENs of men I served with in the USAF who flew missions over NVietnam from SVietnam, Thailand and Guam and colleagues who served in intel. The USAF even bought in linguists from Korea to monitor the heavy air-to-ground communication of NKorean forces (flying some of the "North Vietnamese" force's MIGs).

My colleagues also saw and were tracked by "North Vietnamese" antiaircraft radar as they flew over Laos and even Cambodia although the leftist scum (Shawcross, Sheehan, Pearlstein) will I'm sure insist that only brave peasants were lugging heavy bags of rice to support their comrades rather than that the whole thing was a huge undertaking by the Soviets and their pawns. This went on for years. No, I'd venture to say that the Soviets and chines poured far more money and DIRECT military intervention into the Vietnam war than the US ever did while the USSR was in Afghanistan. Now, they communists have a huge cadre of liars and deluded fools right here in the US as their apologists.

Posted by Jozef | May 11, 2008 12:09 PM