"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"David Looser" wrote in
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I agree that the US should have handled Vietnam differently.

Indeed. The big mistake was to get involved with Vietnam at all.

After WW2 the French thought they could just take their former colony back
as if nothing had happened. Naturally the Vietnamese disagreed; they hadn't
fought to expel the Japanese just to let the French back in and were quite
prepared to continue their war of national liberation against any foreign
power that thought otherwise.

For example, Ho Chi Minh had made overtures to the US, but we were too
interested in remaining friends with the French to follow up on them.

Or: the US allowed it's cold-war paranoia about "communism" to determine
it's foreign policy.

Note that we handled Egypt differently.

When did the US "handle" Egypt?

I'm sure this is an error of omission on your part, but we had both
chemical and biological weapons on hand that we never used in Vietnam.

Well OK, but these weapons had never been used anywhere by the US, and
rarely by any other nation as much because of real doubts about their
utility and safety (to one's own troops) as because of ethical concerns.
Mind you the use of chemical defoliants sounds a lot like chemical and/or
biological warfare.


Near enough.

Not near enough to win! ;-)

It's understandable that some US troops, trained to
regard the Vietnamese as barely human, resented having
any rules imposed on them at all.

You're speculating wildly.

Am I? I don't think so.

I was trained to fight in Vietnam and knew many returnees. There was no
such training.

I didn't mean formal army training. But in any war the de-humanising of the
enemy is part of the process of psychologically preparing ones troops to
kill. Its certainly easier when there are racial and cultural differences,
as in Vietnam. But even when these differences do not exist this
dehumanising goes on. Look at some of the anti-German propaganda in British
newspapers in the early months of WW1.


But it's also understandable that
politicians, all too well aware of the devastating
effect news of each new massacre was having on both domestic
and international public opinion, wished to keep such
massacres to a minimum.

The fact is that massacres are not effective.

True, which is why rules of engagement are instituted to
try and stop them happening. But with the sort of
conflict that the Vietnam war was, they happen.

And did. But not so many.

Not so many as what? There are many well documented examples of atrocities
committed by both sides during the Vietnam war.

The US tried
it's damndest to win that war, and failed.

Not our damndist. Not even near.

I find that a bizarre claim. The Vietnam war cost the US dear. All the
deaths, the injuries and broken lives. The social disruption, the alienation
of a generation, the loss of international repetition not to mention the
huge financial cost. And you are telling me that the US paid that price, and
then lost the war simply *because it didn't try*? Unbelievable!

It didn't lose because it wasn't trying, it lost because it had the
wrong troops and the wrong strategy.

The troops were at least adequate.

Most historians seem to agree that poor moral amongst US conscripts was a
major factor in the US defeat.

It was the wrong strategy that ruined our effort,

And underestimating the enemy (always a mistake).

Not having rules of
engagement would not have made a difference to the final
outcome.

That makes me believe that you don't understand how limiting rules of
engagement can be and in this case, were.

So what were these limiting rules of engagement?


World opinion does not kill.

If it resulted in military action being taken by another
power?

Who is going to take the US over against our will?

Military action doesn't have to be a take-over. A limited attack on US
interests and US personel could still kill plenty.


I think that in both cases the option to simply not go there existed, and
both parties were foolish to not exercise that option.

Its interesting to see that left to their own devices, the Vietnamese have
become friendly enough with us.

Indeed, demonstrating that the outcome feared by the US when the French
withdrew was illusory.


Leaving aside the quaint
idea that the inhabitants of Europe would have all
started speaking German simply because Hitler wanted them
to, I simply argued that, even without US involvement,
the Soviet Union could, and would, (eventually) have
defeated Germany.

I don't think that the current collected undrstanding of of historians go
that far.

I imagine that Russian historians might disagree.

There has been an unfortunate tendency in the west to understate the Soviet
contribution to the defeat of Hitler. The Soviet forces stopped the German
advance at Stalingrad largely on their own, and then pushed the German
forces back, again largely on their own. The Soviet union was vast, and
could build huge armaments factories out of range of German bombers. Once
geared up for total war the Red Army was a formidable fighting force and the
Russians badly wanted revenge for the appalling way that German forces had
behaved in Russia. Given also that, unlike Hitler, Stalin had the sense to
leave strategy to his generals my money's on Stalin beating Hitler, rather
than the other way about.

Of course this can never be anything more than speculation. The other
alternative history is that Hitler kept to his non-aggression pact with
Stalin. In that case he could have consolidated a European Empire that ran
from the Atlantic coast to Poland. Whether he would have felt it worth
having another go at invading Britain or not there would have been little
that Britain, without US help, could have done about Hitler's continental
empire, especially with Fascist dictators in Italy and Spain as well. My
guess is that Britain would have sued for peace and, whilst remaining
outside of the German Empire, would have become marginalised on the world
stage.

I'm not sure what you mean by "We tried hard to keep WW2
from happening".

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

"The United States took a more conciliatory view toward the issue of
German reparations. Before the end of the war, President Woodrow Wilson,
along with other American officials including Edward M. House, put forward
his Fourteen Points, which he presented in a speech at the Paris Peace
Conference. The United States also wished to continue trading with
Germany, so in turn did not want to treat them too harshly for these
economic reasons."

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_nations

Are you telling me that Wilson had a 20-year crystal ball and could thus
forsee the rise of the Nazi party and Hitler's to the position of German
Chancellor?

*With hindsight* we can see that the harsh terms imposed on Germany
at the treaty of Versailles contributed to the conditions that lead,
eventually, to WW2. But to suggest that Wilson's "fouteen points" can be
interpreted as "trying to keep WW2 from happening" seems to me to be a
considerable misuse of historical hindsight.

David.