"David Looser" wrote in
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"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"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.

Some of that, too. History says that we overestimated the Russians.

Note that we handled Egypt differently.

When did the US "handle" Egypt?

The Suez crisis. We chose not to support the UK.

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.

Agreed.

Mind you the use of chemical defoliants sounds a lot like chemical
and/or biological warfare.

That is a really broad brush you're weilding there. The defoliants were
mostly 2, 4D which is a household chemical in the US.

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.

That's not training. In fact its a training failure.

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.

They were exceptional cases. Everybody makes mistakes.

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

Not our damndist. Not even near.

I find that a bizarre claim.

You seem to prefer to underestimate the US.

The Vietnam war cost the US dear.

Not really all that bad.

All the deaths, the injuries and broken lives.

Vietnam 58,209 deaths
Korea 53,686 deaths
WW2 405,399 deaths
WW1 116,516 deaths

The social disruption, the alienation of a generation, the
loss of international repetition not to mention the huge
financial cost.

The Vietnam war had hardly any actual impact on day-to-day life in the US
other than TV news. And, the current wars may actually be causing more
perceived loss.

And you are telling me that the US paid
that price, and then lost the war simply *because it
didn't try*? Unbelievable!

AFAIK, Britiain lost the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 for
exactly that reason. Together, they cost Britain one of the most valuable
colonies in the history of man.

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.

No, history says that the poor morale was in Washington DC and among
civilians.

It was the wrong strategy that ruined our effort,

And underestimating the enemy (always a mistake).

If you want to talk about paying a price, count their costs!

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?

That's a long story:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tpilsch/AirOps/cas-roe.html

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.

Vague. Nothing to respond to.

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.

I'm not disagreeing with that. It is possible that a perception of that
fact is one reason why we stopped our devastation of Vietnam.

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.

Probably, but that is just them. ;-)

There has been an unfortunate tendency in the west to
understate the Soviet contribution to the defeat of
Hitler.

I don't know about that.

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.

You seem to forget that Stalin killed or jailed virtually every senior
officer before the war started.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tpilsch/AirOps/cas-roe.html

"He eliminated all political enemies, including a revolutionary rival named
Leonid Trotsky, *all high commanding officers in his army*, all foreign
ministers that had left the country and returned, all religious leaders and
priests, and an extra 40 random people every day."


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?

His crystal ball was probably too fuzzy for that level of detail.

*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.

You get to have whatever opinon you want. ;-)

I don't think that anybody else tried harder to do the right thing than
Wilson and the US. Certainly France and Britain were all to eager to do the
wrong things.