Was the Vietnam War a mistake?

Was the Vietnam War a mistake?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

In hindsight I would say so but at the time I'm sure it could be justified, beating the commies and all that

Never a mistake to kill communists, only mistake made was to stop killing commies

The part where Johnson moved it from 16,000 advisers and 50 people killed in the past four years to 500,000 soldiers and 30,000 killed in the past four years was a mistake.

Giving up when the war was won certainly was.

>Never a mistake to kill communists

Lol yes the war was won haahahha

forcing young men to fight a war they don't think is necessary is generally a mistake. They might start off with the desire to win for god and country but reality quickly sets in.

There were several mistakes during it.

1. Setting unrealistic goals. They wanted to create a static defence line like they've did in Korea, except VC/NVA could just circumvent through Laos and Cambodia, attack there and retreat before Americans or ARVN could react.
2. Retarded rules given to their leadership. Don't mine harbours, don't bomb factories, stay away from bombing Hanoi, don't perform raids into Cambodia and Laos to catch NV militias here etc. Fight war but don't try to win it. Of course this was enough to make public angry and together with the next point it contributed to withdrawal(for no reason).
3. Media coverage. When Americans burned some village the media screamed out loud about it for the next 10 years, even after people responsible for it faced court martial. When the battle for Hue city started, none of them wanted to cover NV massacres there, let alone the fact that nobody was held responsible for it. Later they admitted that they felt that it was bad to talk about itit(aka they sided with NV). In early stages of Tet offensive they've showed one burning building in Saigon and said that this is how whole city looks like that. When John Wayne released the Green Berets it showed real, documented VC war crime and everybody in the media was raving all day long about how he made propaganda movie and lied about VC performing war crimes. Russians bombed the last hospital in Aleppo less often than Americans carpet-bombed Hanoi to the ground if you'd trust the media(and as I've said before - US military avoided bombing Hanoi because they feared that killing foreign advisers that were sure to be here would lead to escalation, but media lied about it anyway). 100% dishonest biased coverage, at least partially coordinated with communists("Hanoi" Jane Fonda wasn't the only one who went to there, probably for "training"), aimed only to cause disorder in America.

Rubbish. The US military had years of the media churning out pro-USA propaganda until the media finally turned from roughly the Tet Offensive onwards.

There was a constant bombardment of pro Vietnam War propaganda. The problem was is that it rang incredibly hollow amid what was actually being done there.

Sure the NVA were monsters, but the South were also horrible and we enabled them to be that way. If the only choice is between two evils what difference does it make?

Yes.
t. Veteran

Media was pro-Vietnam until 68 senpai

For example, Cronkike

War is a mistake itself.

Like earthquakes?

No. A lot of people got rich off it which was the point.

Mistakes were made, but on the whole the goal was noble. Defending against Marxist communism wherever it crops up should be the goal of civilization.

>stay away from bombing Hanoi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II
pic translation: Bạch Mai Hospital
Bombing hospitals seems like a tradition in the USAF

Not him, but you realize that Hanoi and Haiphong were both hands off until Pocket Money and Linebacker II, yes?

Hanoi suffered the bombing since Gulf of Tonkin, like in operation Rolling Thunder

Between March 1965 and November 1968, aircraft of the U.S. Air Force had flown 153,784 attack sorties against North Vietnam, while the Navy and Marine Corps had added another 152,399.(wiki operation Rolling thuder)

Thompson, Wayne (2002). To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973 (PDF). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 9781560988779.

We didn't really beat them.

Wow, Bernie Sanders nails it again!

>Vietnam is now a solid ally of the US
>The country failed to actually implement Communism
>South Vietnam is in beautiful shape, and modernizing very quickly

Mistakes were obviously made, but there's a totally valid argument that the war was beneficial in the long run.

What?

Vietnam completely fell to communism and became almost Stalinist causing millions of economic migrants to flee. It's still run by the communist party today even though like China it appears to be moving towards capitalism. It's also fairly close to Russia in terms of alliances (as a hangover from the Cold War when it was a client of the USSR) and while not unfriendly with the USA is not in any way a "solid ally".

And none of the improvements either with its relationship with the US or its shift towards capitalism are the result of anything that was achieved in the war.

America could have simply flattened North Vietnam with air power.

Bombed the whole province back to the Stone Age ala Dresden or Hiroshima.

They didn't, so they lost...because they didn't try their hardest.

Their hardest would have won easily: Bomb the whole fucking back to the Stone Age.

But:

>waa
>boo hoo
>we can't do that we're the good guys
>so we'll just lose a war instead of winning because we're tying our own hands behind our backs

If you're going to be a fucking Empire, be a fucking Empire and kick some fucking ass.

Vietnam learned its mistakes during the 1979 incident when choosing only 1 ally between China and Soviet, now its allies compose of China, US, Russia and Japan
Full blown Communism will result in being another Soviet Union (we're not that ruthless in executing rebels and insurgency

I mean, stopping the spread of """Communism""" was worthy but killing millions for it? Not worth it in that way IMO. The """Communism""" wouldn't have worked in that day and age anyway, that's one reason why I would at least support them trying to not let it spread - millions probably would've had shit living conditions due to it - not any better than their living environments before. Capitalism would've helped - correctly regulated.

Not giving up when the war was won, rather. That part was mostly Nixon fucking things up though.

Wars are won with politics, If you are content with just killing the enemy, then that makes you no different from a terrorist.

More like
>We can't do that because China and possibly the USSR will rape us

They already tried that in Korea, and it didn't work then. It wasn't going to work later.

No, because Vietnam is a cheap source for the creation of American goods and services. Consider it a blessing.

That's in no thanks to the US' humiliating failure in the Second Indochina War.

Americans will always give excuses for the shit they do. They don't care about other humans, they are number 1, they are an empire, a nation under the god of war that has suppressed any intellectuals they had in favor of guns.

Killing american soldiers is not a bad thing, it's what every single human on Earth should be doing for the good of the world.

The US is the enemy of the planet. May the Kingdom of Crime fall soon due to it's own stupidity.

Notice how when you talk with americans, they feel disconnected from you? They refer to the planet as "them" (you can even see this in VICE).

For them, nothing that isn't their own comfort, matters.

I'm not particularly anti-American. I actually really like the USA, but I notice this trait a lot talking to Americans online. It's like many of them grasp the rest of the world exists on some sort of level but don't really understand that the whole world isn't exactly the same as Bumfuck County in Texas or wherever.

>empires don't fall due to revolts
your post

Reminder that neither the USSR or China was in any position to intervene in Vietnam any more than they were. It was a fear, but it wasn't a legitimate fear.

Glad you learned something useful here.

We're #1, you're not.

Now listen closely
Here's a little lesson in trickery
This is going down in history
If you wanna be a Villain Number One
You have to chase a superhero on the run
Just follow my moves, and sneak around
Be careful not to make a sound

Holy shit It does describes the US perfectly.

[Multiple Citations Needed]

That's not what I meant, I meant that the reason we got into Vietnam and stayed there was to fight the commies.

It was an utter disaster based on the flawed reasoning of the Domino Theory. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a communist second. He was more than willing to work cooperatively with the US. Instead the US propped up a puppet government that hardly anybody supported and got millions of people killed for little reason at all, but at least the defense contractors made a lot of money.

Today communist Vietnam enjoys warm relations with the US so you have to ask yourself what was the point of the war in the first place?

To show the Reds we would fight in their back yards to contain their poison.

And to rid the world of 3,500,000 gooks.

It prevented LBJ from implementing a full national health program, do if that was the goal... Probably!

>on the flawed reasoning of the Domino Theory
I'm always curious as to how liberal realists can claim that Domino Theory is false when SEA fell almost entirely. Dominoes literally fell.

If the dominios fell to no great disaster to American hegemonic interests, then what good was intervention in the first place?

I'm guessing the superhero is either NatSoc Germany or NatSoviet (aka based Stalinist) Russia.

They didn't fall entirely. Malaysia, Thailand, Phillippines, Indonesia etc.

Ok then the Domino Theory was bunk.

Dominoes fell, but not all the dominoes fell. Domino theory is not bunk and containment proved correct.

Until you can prove a casual link between the intervention in Vietnam and the success of those others countries from falling to communism the theory is bunk.

Fucking hell that picture used to be my profile pic on this shitty site that emos and teens used.
Anyway,
Yes, I think it was a mistake.
It probably would've been a Civil War if the Americans would've left the VCs alone, and would result in less Americans dying and the Americans having to explain that they basically got fucked by some gooks in the jungle with shitty Chinese AKs.
The Vietnam War was a mistake for anyone who wasn't Vietnamese to get involved in. For America it just seemed like another opportunity to fight the Commies.
I know this was mainly me complaining about why the US should've stayed out of the Vietnam War, but that's my 2 cents and no matter what, 2 cents is 2 fucking cents.

Obviously the willingness of the US forces to fight to stop it is the link.

I could just as easily say "the domino theory was flawed from the start and those countries were in little danger from turning red"

Yup. You can be as dumb as you want to be online.

You didn't prove anything you made a claim. I'm open to being proved wrong if you can actually substantiate your claim.

your understanding of what american troops accomplished is based off shittiy hollywood movies I see

you should be embarrassed

The reason the US went to war in French Indochina was to show the USSR and Red China that we would not allow them to spread their filth over the entire continent without a fight.

Mission Accomplished.

3,500,000 dead gooks didn't "win" anything.

And many small countries were saved from the communist yoke. The ones that were not, like Cambodia, turned around and killed millions of their own citizens.

So, basically, go fuck yourself. Then read a book. Then go fuck yourself again.

Let's say USA nuked its way onto Vietnam. Not only China and USSR would have intervened, but they would have with the help of most of the world.

They also happened to have a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, US nuking some country would have set a precedent, and paved the way to a full scale thermonuclear war leading to a nuclear winter and no more humans.

You don't realize it but there were ignorant people full of themselves like you in the US (and USSR) administration at the time, and it went very close to humanity extinction several times. We are lucky to be here shitposting on the internet today.

>The reason the US went to war in French Indochina was to show the USSR and Red China that we would not allow them to spread their filth over the entire continent without a fight.
You're restating your claim. What I'm asking you is to prove how this was instrumental in keeping communism out of Indonesia, Thailand, the Phillippines & Malaysia.

America could have conceivably supported anti-communist efforts in those countries where it was more viable from the beginning WITHOUT escalating the conflict in Vietnam, yes?

Yes, after Diem refused to host the unification vote South Vietnam's continued existence was illegal and a violation of the agreements already made with France, and thus it was headed by an illegitimate in every sense of word I might add, government. North had every right to support the Viet Cong who claimed to be the true Southern government, since they had just as much legitimacy as the Republic of Vietnam.