Did we lose in Vietnam and if so what besides 58000 lives did we lose?

[Winterblues]

They keep talking about how Democrats want us to lose the Iraq war as if there really was a war going on and they compare it to Vietnam. If we lost that "war" what exactly did we lose? The people there are as free as they have ever been and in fact actually friends with the USA. What did we lose?

[Bob Dobbs]

1. Our National Soul.

World credibility.

Not much.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

7. And...

Our Collective Mind. This country has been insane since then, and they haven't made a medication yet that touches what's wrong.

[elehhhhna]

32. fabulous. concise. sublime.

Welcome to DU, Bob Dobbs!

[Hydra]

2. I wasn't around back then

But I was under the impression that we were there in the hopes of having a permanently controlled country/military outpost not unlike S. Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's funny how little they are using the rhetoric of yesteryear. They barely mention things like "freedom" anymore...now they talk about the resources there and the evil dictator who owns said resources.

[cosmik debris]

3. Our objective was to prevent communist take over of S. E. Asia.

Remember the Domino theory?

We failed in that objective.

(some might say that it was a stupid objective in the first place, but that's another thread.)

[YankmeCrankme]

37. Well, no as the loss of Vietnam didn't, in fact, precipitate a domino effect. nt

[KG]

4. another failed attempt to occupy a county whose citizens didnt want us there, and

prop up a corrupt regime the the citizenry hated.

[Thothmes]

36. Lyndon Johnsons folly.

[Rex]

5. American media made public the systematic murder of foreign peoples in the

name of defense contractors and government charlatans. Vietnam was wrong and so is Iraq.

[iamtechus]

6. Corporate profits

How does one win or lose at war crimes?

[mdmc]

8. The commies won, capitalist lost

We lost face in our fight...

[DainBramaged]

9. We lost a LOT more than 58000 killed in action, a LOT

My older brother was one of the lost. After he returned.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. We lost our innocence and gullibility in Vietnam.

And, for an all too brief period, it made us almost sane. Then the flag-waving began again coupled with the usual bluster and bullying that led us into another lost war.

[coalition_unwilling]

24. We lost our innocence and gullibility on November 22, 1963. Vietnam

just put the icing on that particular cake, I would say.

[Greyhound]

11. We were quite plainly the bad guys and it irritated our national delusion.

We were the Hessian mercenaries that the English brought in to quell the terrorists that didn't want to be subjects of the crown.

We tried to kill George Washington and stop the revolution. We failed.

[sinkingfeeling]

12. Well, we lost that great undefined, 'victory', you silly goose.

[timtom]

13. The high ground

n/t

[Recursion]

14. We misread Vietnam: it was really between USSR and PRC

We were actually a bit player in the regional war that was raging in indochina; it was actually between the soviets and China. We helped improve China's position, which, given the state of the world, was a bit of a victory for us.

[islandmkl]

16. which has morphed into the victory for the multi-nationalist corporations...

as much at the expense of the american 'way of life' as any other factor...

[old mark]

15. We should never have been there at all.

The French colonised the country and lost a terrible war against the Viet Minh. For some reason the US thought there would be an advantage to insert large numbers of ground troops in that country. I have never really understood why.

I was in the Army at that time, and I can tell you we are still losing people from that stupid war. Many of the long-term homeless in the US are Vietnam veterans, and many who were fortunate enough not to wind up on the street die young after battles with cancers, addictions, heart problems, depression and other long term effects of stress and who knows what else.

What we lost was a hell of a lot of very good people from that generation who would have made a great contribution to the US over the last 45 years or so had they not been wasted for political bullshit and presidential ego.

Sadly, this is happening again. We seem to not learn very much.

I am not a totally anti-war person - I believe in fighting if and when necessary. Nowhere we are fighting now seems necessary to me, certainly not Iraq, at any rate.


mark

[indepat]

17. What we lost was a chance to keep racking up magnificent kill ratios on a people of color

for sadly we were willing to kill millions of people on their own soil and destroy most of their country and infrastructure through dropping more tonnage of bombs than was dropped during WWII, if memory serves me correctly, rather than let a civil war play out. But that would chance some of those dominoes starting to fall, so we sacrificed tens of thousands of our own, including my eldest 1st cousin, and countless millions of others to keep that from happening. And we're the good guys. :D

[LeftinOH]

18. There was nothing to 'win' in Vietnam. It was just an excuse to fight somewhere

and show the Russkie/pinko/commies that we had some balls. Fighting the Soviets themselves, of course, would have been dangerous -what with them having nuclear weapons and all.

[smoogatz]

19. It's the old stab-in-the-back theory all over again. Predictable as sunrise.

We killed 5 million people in SE Asia between 1960 and 1973, almost a fifth of the population of Vietnam. Only a few hardcore wingnut whackos thought there was any point in sticking around to kill a couple of million more by the time we rolled it up in '73. The whole "the war was lost at home" narrative is crap--the war was lost mostly because it was a poorly conceived ideological exercise intended mostly to satiate the bloodlust of the wingnuts back home. As conceived, planned and executed the Vietnam excursion utterly failed to take local conditions into account and exposed the vulnerabilities of both the military and our political system (not to mention the hypocrisy of our foreign policy, such as it was/is). And that's the main parallel to the present war, in case anybody missed it.

[coalition_unwilling]

25. Hitler and the fasicsts used it to great advantage to explain why

Imperial Germany had suffered such an ignominious defeat in World War I. To wit, if only it hadn't been for the Jews and the Commies back in Berlin, we (Germany) could have won World War I.

[smoogatz]

29. Exactly.

It's the standard conservative/fascist excuse for every war they've ever fucked up. And they'll blame Obama if he does what he says he'll do and gets us out of Iraq. Never mind the fact that strategically (and entirely predictably) we lost the war in Iraq the day we invaded--to the Iranians. Never mind that McCain isn't kidding when he says that the only way we don't hand the place entirely over to Iran is to stay forever, or until the last drop of oil is pumped and sold in U.S. dollars. After that, who cares?

[coalition_unwilling]

34. We lost the war in Iraq before we invaded, at least if you believe

the story in the epilogue to Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command." To wit, Hersh interviewed a high-ranking officer in Hussein's military in Jordan after Baghdad 'fell.' Saddam Hussein had concluded by March of 2002 (one year before the invasion) that Iraq would be invaded, no matter what compliance Hussein exhibited to UNPROFOR and IAEA inspections. Hussein thus issued orders to his general staff to begin re-organizing the Iraqi military into a cell-based structure, the better to wage guerilla war against imperial aggression. So the story of the so-called 'insurgency' is actually a story of Iraqi Resistance. It had relatively little to do with dis-banding the Iraqi Army or failing to guard weapons caches or failing to have a plan and strategy for counter-insurgency. Although those factors undoubtedly contributed to the debacle, the seeds of Iraq-Nam were sown before we ever crossed the border.

Stanley Karnow, in "Vietnam: A History" recounts a meeting between a US officer and his NVA counterpart after rapprochement occurred. "You know," the US officer said, "we never lost a battle." "True," his Vietnamese counterpart replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

[smoogatz]

35. There you go.

I didn't know that about Saddam's order to reform the army into cells. Wow. And of course the Vietnamese officer was correct: it is entirely irrelevant that the U.S. "never lost a battle" in Vietnam.

[coalition_unwilling]

41. I think that one moral of the story in the exchange between the

Vietnamese and U.S. officer is that, in assymetric armed conflict, each side fights the type of war it wishes to fight. As in Vietnam, so in Iraq.

In Vietnam, through 1968, Westmoreland was fighting a 'war of attrition' that manifested itself in a fixation with 'body counts' and other metrics. The NLF and North Vietnamese were fighting a 'war of national liberation' which viewed war as part of a larger geo-political tapestry. Ho Chi Minh at one point said that he could afford to lose 10 solders for every one U.S. soldier lost and maintain that ratio in perpetuity. So much for the U.S. winning any 'war of attrition.'

Bragadoccio on Ho's part? Perhaps a little, as morale among NVA and NLF soldiers plummeted after the tactical reverses the Vietnamese suffered in the months following Tet 1968. Few among the Vietnamese grunts had the perspective to see that, while Tet 1968 and its aftermath may have represented a tactical reverse for the Vietnamese forces but constituted a significant strategic victory, in the sense that it gravely undermined U.S. morale.

Likewise in Iraq. U.S. war aim was to institute regime change and control natural resources. Iraqi war aim (disparate because diffused through so many resistance groups) is basically to defeat foreign occupation and expel occupiers from Muslim lands. It may be fair to say that both sides have 'won' at least some of each side's war aims.

Hersh's claim of a general re-organization of Iraqi military and intelligence along cell-based lines before invasion\occupation commenced has never been verified in any other source to the best of my (admittedly limited) knowledge. If true, though, it shows that Hussein was a lot more patriotic than even many on the left give him credit for.

[NNN0LHI]

20. After Vietnam fell all the surrounding countries fell to communism like dominoes

And we had Vietnamese people raping our womenfolk in their beds right here in America. We had to fight them over there so we didn't have them raping our women over here. Oh what a minute, that is what the warmongers said was going to happen but it really didn't.

Don

[coalition_unwilling]

21. Our status as a global hegemon, among other things. Daniel Ellsburg

has made the interesting point that with the USA and USSR in MAD vis-a-vis nuclear forces, nuclear war was not feasible. Therefore, it became necessary for wars between superpowers to take place at the margins, in third-world nationalist struggles, using various sides as 'proxies' for the super-powers.

So what was lost exactly? Well, the idea that Western imperialist powers could impose their will on third-world countries took a severe beating. Remember that Vietnam was a primarily agrarian society and its forces still managed to defeat the most powerful military on the planet. You would think policy-makers would have learned from that experience that neo-colonial escapades no longer fly.

Ellsburg has actually published a new opinion piece quite recently where he says there is actual institutional resistance to learning from past mistakes. Maybe that explains why we're bogged down in Iraq-nam.

The only question now is whether we leave Iraq in a (somewhat) orderly retreat or whether we leave vis-a-vis Saigon in 1974. I hope for the former but am starting to think it will be the latter.

[peacetalksforall]

22. They told us it was about fighting Communism. They wanted the minerals,

the earth resources, the geography. Knowing what we know about the wonderful benefits of slave labor - they probably had that on their list also. It was a barons move, just as Bolivia, Venezuela, Iraq is/was. Oh, and don't forget about the drugs. And don't forget about their future private armies of world wide color and the languages that go with it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

23. 58,000 men wasn't enough?

[TahitiNut]

26. What's this "we" shit??

:eyes:

I was there. So were another 2.6 million American lepers. More than 58,148 of *US* didn't come back, and of those of *US* that did, most of *US* haven't survived. There are fewer than 1/3rd of *US* left alive. When *WE'RE* all dead, then the rest of you can declare VICTORY and write the "history" that makes y'all happy. Mission accomplished.

:puke: :puke:

[coalition_unwilling]

27. Hehe. Brings to mind Mohammed Ali's famous witticism when

explaining why he was not allowing himself to be drafted: "No Vietcong ever called me N***er!"

[Winterblues]

38. It was a collective we as in America

I also was there..

[Political Heretic]

28. We lost lives, we lost the fight to stop communism there, we lost a fee S. Vietnam, but mostly.....

...we lost the rubber, minerals and resources that we wanted to control for our interests and stop the communist block from controlling.

That's pretty much what the "war" was about.

The collateral damage to the American spirit and psyche was irreparable. It was a war that couldn't be understood in terms of a "just cause."

[B.S. Lewis]

30. who is "we"?

The threat to the U.S. was entirely fabricated, just like Iraq. There was no potential "gain" for common Americans even if the war went perfectly in terms of strategics.

Why would you even waste your time arguing with some American nationalist who frames the debate such that the only potential objection to an imperialist war is it's less-than-perfect execution?

[blindpig]

31. Yeah we lost

We were beaten by one of the best generals of the 20th century and a people who refused to be beaten.

We caused the deaths of over 1,000,000 people and devastated Southeast Asia.

Compared to that our losses are small change

Only the self-absorbed, the rabid nationalist and the racist could think otherwise.

[Winterblues]

39. Which Military battle did this supposed great General win?

Our military never lost a battle so IMO no General ever beat the USA at anything. America came to it's senses and left of our own free will, but we were never defeated.

[blindpig]

40. Convenient mythology

That started before the war was even over. Fact is that Gen Giap was able to deploy more maneuver battalions in the south than the US was willing or able. The US Army was in shambles, mutinies and fraggings were common, troops refused to fight. This myth was salve for the Pentagon and the public.

There was no great battle, no Waterloo or Sedan, it was the death of 1000 cuts. The Vietnamese just wore the US out, an often successful strategy in colonial warfare. Remember, Sun Tzu said that greatest general was he who won a war without a battle. Not quite the same thing, but the point is that they won the war without a great battle. Which they likely would have lost, it's a fool who gives battle on the enemy's terms, Giap was no fool.

[pitohui]

33. a great many vietnamese lost their homes and became refugees, i know plenty of them

i can't speak to the people "there" being as free as they have ever been, but living on the gulf coast i'm aware that a great many vietnamese people had to come here and start over with nothing, which i'm pretty sure you would feel as a terrible loss if it had happened to you or members of your family

i don't see the use of pretending we didn't lose and that people weren't hurt by the loss