War on Vietnam motivated by false allegations

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4492190.stm

[ December 05, 2005, 17:14: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

It matters not whether there was a second attack; the first was an act of war. Still, one wonders what would have happened differently if we hadn't gotten involved in that quagmire. Significantly less cases of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and KIA (Killed In Action) back in the States, certainly, but I wonder what would have happened in 'Nam.

 

A silly war based on very strange reasoning (like most, I guess). Other than the death toll, it's very hard to tell how different things would have been. I would imagin that the same would have happened eventually, but the communist rule would have had much less (or prehaps much more) support. It's hard to say.

 

The world with the Vietnam War?

We would have missed out on a number of great movies. Where would Stanley Kubrick be without Full Metal Jacket?

This is just pure guesswork on my part, as I wasn't alive then, but I think the backlash against the Vietnam War radicalized homeland political thought to the point that other political/social movements could gust forward with siphoned wind in their sails; what is more, the socially conservative authoritarians of society were preoccupied and overwhelmed.

I wish I could remember the singer/songwriter's name, as then I could look up his actual statement, but I will paraphrase: "Sometimes the machine becomes so odious that you just can't take it anymore, and you have to throw your body down upon the parts, and upon the gears, and you have to make it stop!"

Many different kinds of bodies were thrown upon the machine, but the Vietnam War was so odious that they found an exposed and weakened gear, and the machine stopped for a couple years. It was during those couple years that the societal trajectory of women and minorities, particulary blacks, forever changed.

But the machine is not innately "conservative", as that word was meant then.

The fight against our modern machine is one against that which the youth of the sixties helped create!

The modern machine offers a life of meaningless consumption, distracted mates, and children that often just need their parents' wallets. The training aspect of the machine can handle their growth now; they will one day become good consumers, though vapid. Don't fret unnecessarily: there will soon be a pill for vapidness.

The modern machine causes a vast and shallow emptyness; it causes obesity; it causes living a life that the inner conciousness feels no compelling attachment towards, a life not worth living, but a life worth getting through to the final goal, if you are disposed towards that sort of belief...

To my view, it seems the fuel of the modern machine is a concoction of equal parts reason and satiation. Dogmatic religious folks perfectly personify an absolutely direct attack upon the modern machine. Whether it is the homeschooled child, safely insulated from the rational arguments of a reasoning society, and instead raised upon fables thousands of years old, or the young jihadist, having never felt the bliss of wine or the softness of a woman, with even the tranquil sound of flowing water being declared a sin, their rejection of the modern machine is successful and inspiring.

But to my view, they are just looking to an even older machine to save them, and that machine has very sharp teeth. Where the modern machine is a path so beaten by an unfathomable number of feet that to rise out of its steep trench almost requires being rejected by the flow, the old machines were paths with fences that often wouldn't allow a necessary new path to be forged.

So what would the world be like without the Vietnam War? For me, it would be one in which the machine was not identified as something abstract and as something alterable. And besides all this funny talk, a world without Sgt. Hartman is one lacking in some the most colorful insults known to Man.

OK, done. And having reread, I think it is about time I start considering moving to that commune or possibly buying that cabin in Montana. Can anyone relate to what I have wrote, or has my rocker gone full tilt?

 

That war went far astray. Apart from all KIA and MIA and all soldiers wounded or killed, cities and houses damaged or destroyed, there was quite a lot of murder, torture and rape not only on the communist side. If it weren't for that, perhaps it would have been better for a country to survive a "casual" war than a couple of decades of commie rule. Commies beat war to destruction if they apply themselves at it.

 

Come on. This is REALLY old news. VADM Stockdale's book 'In Love and War' documented this extremely well in the 1980's. He spoke out about it in the 70's after his release from the Hanoa Hilton. And neither incident was an act of war (read the accounts by Stockdale -- he was there for both).

McNamara never put two and two together. He also never acknowledged he confused intelligence reports. But what can you expect from a auto manufacturer trying to run the military when he had really no business doing so.

By the way -- the Vietnam War was a product of the Democrat war machine. It took a republican to get us out.

 

Didn't Eisenhower get us involved in the first place?

 

And betray the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by not staying the course as promised. It was also a republic that pardoned Lt. William Calley of the My Lai massacre.

 

Cu:

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)is NORTH Vietnam, not South. They were the enemy. We promised them nothing.

This article on the war's history is long, but quite interesting.

 

While AMaster is right, that there was a lot of Repulican support for the war, it was mostly a war crafted by the Democrats.

Note the date: It would be the same tragic month that Kennedy would be assassinated. Many believe that he had had enough and that the order was given to end American involvement. One of Johnson's first orders was to resend Kennedy's orders on Vietnam, hence the reason many believe that Kennedy was assassinated for this reason.

But if it was anyone's war, it was Johnson's, and he made it what it was. Nixon developed a strategy to end the war, but he is still closely connected with it, because he always believed in the basic premise of the war.

Does that sound eerily, in some ways, like another, more recent war?

http://www.vietnamwar.com/presidentnixonsrole.htm

 

Hey, I said in another post my father voted for Goldwater. I KNOW many republicans supported the war.

Eisenhower put in training forces (also often used as assassins) to help the South Vietnamese and French. The military build up occurred during subsequent admisistrations.

 

*nod*

My point was that involvement began with a republican admin. That involvement led to military intervention. Whether or not it would have led to military interventoin had a republican admin remained in power...*shrug*

 

Vietnam is a dicey subject -- many people feel that the U.S. should not have been there, including many Americans and a large number of servicemen who actually WERE there and saw firsthand the mess that was occuring.

However, just as we cannot know the future, we also cannot know "what might have been" in terms of how history would have unfolded had the Americans kept their troops home. Perhaps the whole "domino effect" theory was tripe -- or perhaps it wasn't, and we'd all be standing in a line for borsht and saluting pictures of Lenin and Stalin today if the U.S. had not shown that it was willing to put military muscle behind it's efforts to check the spread of Communism.

Whatever reasons that were given for the start of the war (spurious or not) the general effort to stop the domino effect from consuming Southeast Asia was the underlying motivation for the war.

 

Yes, we do know what happened, LKD. The US left Vietnam. The North took over the South. And today the Russians are eating McDonalds. So much for the dominoes...

 

The domino effect theory was a reasonable theory for it's time -- it just wasn't true. The time it came out was during the height of the communist scare. This was the same time we added 'under God' to our pledge to seperate us from 'the Godless communists.'

Had we not shown we were willing to fight the world might be different today. But Afganistan still happened and all we did was boycott the Moscow olympics.

 

JFK proved that we were willing to fight during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Missile Crisis proved, when presented with a direct threat, that we were prepared to defend ourselves. I don't think we needed to fight in Vietnam to prove that point.

 

And losing* probably didn't help very much, either.

*Yes, I'm well aware that it wasn't a military loss. Nonetheless, we failed to achieve our goals, which counts as losing in my book.

 

Korea was even before the Cuban missile crisis. It is one thing to defend your home (Cuban missile crisis), it take different motivation to defend an ideal (Korea and Viet Nam).

 

How so? Are you saying that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was justified?

It was not illegal for Cuba to host the missiles as the US already had their own set up in Europe and Turkey

 

Read your history. The Cuban missile crisis is not the same as the Bay of Pigs. Two different events. The Cuban missile crisis happened a year and a half after the Bay of Pigs (bringing in the missiles was perhaps a response to the Bay of Pigs).

As far as what was legal -- who cares. The US was in position to defend Europe at the cessation of the war. They brought in missiles to deter the Soviet aggression (a real thing, by the way). The USSR was not strong enough to stop the US. Too bad.

The US was capable of stopping missiles from being put just off our coast. The Soviets backed down. Once again, too bad for the Soviets.