What was the US actually trying to accomplish in Vietnam?

The vietnamese have always hated the eternal sino

To preserve the state of South Vietnam a.k.a. Republic of Vietnam.

From a Clausewitzian perspective - "war is the continuation of politics" - it is absolutely certain that the United States of America lost the Vietnam War and that all discussions of military victory are irrelevant in that they failed to accomplish this one goal.

that's just her, think of the whole god damn complex

Stopping communism from raping another nice nation you thick tankie.

An internal DoD memo said it was 5% saving South Vietnam, 20% containing China, and 75% avoiding an embarrassing retreat from a US ally.

Johnson figured that if he pulled out on Diem, the next thing tomorrow morning, 20 different countries would call and ask how the US is planning on protecting them.

He figured that maintaining US credibility was key to holding onto Japan, West Germany, and other states near the communist world.

>stopping

Vietnam was never declared.

It was NOT a war.

Therefore, America didn't lose the "Vietnam War" because no such thing ever existed.

I'll take the bait. If it's not a war, then what was it?

Stop communism but the Americans chimped out and acted like savages

The US was probably the most civilized, law abiding combatant in the war.

Note that this is an extremely low bar.

An excuse for a good time!

>Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners (quoted in Blakely)

>The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission.

>The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.

Americans are fucking subhumans

Project Phoenix was Vietnamese run though.

In order of brutality, it goes

>North Vietnamese
>South Vietnamese
>US

And I'm too lazy to place the South Koreans or Australians.

The VC attacked village marketplaces with flamethrowers as punishment for cooperating with the allies.

They'd mine the roads in government held areas when they knew a bus was about to come through, purely to make sure that the civilian populace never felt safe.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_PAVN_strategy,_organization_and_structure#VC.2FNVA_use_of_terror

Note that all three of these factions committed extensive atrocities.

Mess with Russia's economy and get drug money.

All wrong.

That said our men in 'Nam weren't perpetrators as hippies portray, but victims, along with the NVA and civilians.
US soldiers were lied to about communism to get them to earn politicians big fat pay checks. They are victims, believing they were fighting communism despite the US funding the Khmer Rogue.

The war was a tragedy, there were no good or bad guys, with the exception for the US politicians being the straight up villains.

>he fell for the black and white meme

>He fell for the black and white meme by saying nobody was good or bad except for the instigators who were bad
Are you a fucking retard or something

>huh, the US weren't the 100% stars and stripes good guys
>well, then I guess the Vietnamese were
>what, the Vietnamese did bad things
>I guess everyone was the victim and a small handful of people were responsible for everything

-u

>Let me just state an opinion that isn't black and white at all
>See, clearly it's black and white, dumbass
>Also, the sky is blue, that's why it's purple
-u

>men in 'Nam weren't perpetrators as hippies portray, but victims
Case by case basis. War often exposes the true pieces of shit amongst our countrymen.

Otherwise I 100% agree. Wars like this and Iraq 2.0 have severely weakened our credibility.

>THIS IS A POLICE ACTION YOU GUYS? GET IT RIGHT. POLICE. ACTION. NOW START STACKING GOOKS.

I believe their strategy was something along the lines of Keep Killing Them Until They Quit.

I'm wondering if we've read the same material (other than Clausewitz). It's important to remember that the Vietnamese were emulating Mao militarily. That is to say that they intended to fight a protracted, political war. These are not wars to be countered with firepower, but to be won through careful local political manoeuvring and wars of information. The US did neither of these and failed to adapt in any significant way.
JFK saw through the bullshit and tried to fix it, but army leadership was uncooperative.

>JFK saw through the bullshit and tried to fix it, but army leadership was uncooperative
JFK gave absolutely zero fucks about Vietnam as he was focused entirely on Cuba. It was Johnson that absolutely discarded any advice, including military, on the subject and completely fucked it up.

Police action

>The VC attacked village marketplaces with flamethrowers.
You expect me to believe that.
The author of your "sources"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guenter_Lewy
>He has been labelled a genocide denier by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

>Literally nobody mentions that it was about defending French colonial rule

hehe, historical plebs indeed.

>that was to contain communism

Fighting Soviet imperialism was a good thing. Backing the Khmer Rouge later on, not so much.

Defending French colonial rule against Communists, is still defending French colonial rule.

wrong
The war wasn't fraught to be won.

South Koreans were on par with the Viet Cong for brutality. The atrocities committed down there will reverberate through Vietnam for another fifty years.

Against communist.

>want stop chinese communist influence expanding in SEA
>start a lengthy war in vietnam that would otherwise not have happened or just been short
>lose 58000 young men in the process and kill of 14% of the vietnamese population
>make a huge ass of yourself and completely ruin your good image you got in WW2
>fail to contain the conflict so bad that khmer rouge takes over cambodia
>which are actual chinese communist puppets
>in the process of failing in vietnam create a communist vietnam strong and determined enough to fend off chinese communist expansion themselves and eventually also clean up the communist mess in cambodia
>so you accidently halted chinese communist expansion by failing to halt chinese communist expansion

Kissinger with the keikaku.

The initial, overarching goal of the Vietnam War was to contain communism (Truman doctrine). The reason a lot of people say the US lost the war is the fact they pulled out, only for the North to take over the South in 2 years.

Show the USSR and Red China that we would fight communism in their backyard as many times as necessary. Successful containment strategy is successful.

3,500,000 dead gooks is just gravy.

This is the official story,

however, it is much more reasonable to say that it was mainly cover for the CIA to become an independent entity from the US by selling opium.

This happened in the 80s but with cocaine. The problem with coke in the US was facilitated by the CIA. Several crashed CIA planes had an assload of coke in them for one example.

To provide a brutal show of force for the Third World, showing them what America will do if their nations decide to seize control over their destinies..

American bungling ironically only empowered radical movements, contributing to communist insurrection in Nicaragua, South Yemen, Peru, India, and Portuguese Africa.

Because the French would pull out of NATO if the US didn't give Vietnam back to the French.

Police weren't involved.

Kind of wonder what people think of the idea that the neocon fetish of using our military to impose a soft empire of client states and resource ownership is bunk and that our military actions since World War II have been largely unsuccessful, ineffective and pointless compared to our use of the military up to World War II which was effective and successful.

Afghanistan, for example, where the Taliban is in no danger of being eliminated even if it's no longer in power while Chinese companies come in and gobble up all of the mineral extraction instead of the United States logically having that role.

/thread
9 out of 10 times money is the reason.

imo, the only reason US didnt like communism was because soviet aid and influence always followed after this ideology, and if soviet aid and influence is present, that means less allies and more enemies

Let me correct you. This whole thing about French colonisation ended in 1953 (The Indochina war). Vietnam war was mostly done to minimize the chances of soviet influence in Asia (which was present in China and Korea)

The causes of the Vietnam war were pretty forward, Pres. Johnson declared war after a fake attack on US ships (See Bush and 9/11 for example)

>Merely pretending

Reminder that Oliver North is still free because he was set up to take the fall for crimes committed higher up

and yet you don't post the source, how convenient

>ruin your good image you got in WW2

Not really

Fight encroaching communism throughout the world just like we did in Korea.

youtu.be/0XxYwWg7F8I

Fighting so the Vietnamese could drink pepsi and eat a bigmac.

Most people become sub humans during war, user
Asians however are the most subhuman

And yet another retard doesn't know how to use google.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

Does Veeky Forums have any recs for books on the Vietnam War?

Sucks because it was a war that we had no hope of winning the more you look into it, despite numerous tactical victories it was all for nothing we couldn't win the strategic victories to actually winning the war. Charlie was always one step ahead despite the bombings, search and destroy missions and Hearts and Minds operations that may have succeeded on a strictly tactical level.

Add the unpopularity of the war at home, ARVN needing their hand held all the time and politicians being shitheads (like signing a treaty that said they'd back up South Vietnam if the North didn't honor the deal and not holding their end of the deal)

That being said, I guess you can say our guys kicked some gook ass most of the time, shit even the Aussies hopped in to waste some gookers

there was no nefarious plans, they went in to counter the domino effect losing vietnam would have started, as france could no longer be the western power doing so in the region. America could never dedicate to the level of brutality needed to pacify Vietnam as it would be way too costly politically, and the VC knew it, just like the iraqi partisans knew it and the taliban knew it and just bided their time and bled the americans. ironically vietnam helped america somewhat by being fought over by china and the ussr after the sino soviet split, and being a factor in the split itself.

in order for America to have enough resources to win, they had to weaken their forces elsewhere, principally Western Europe
stepping out of Europe means that the Warsaw Pact could swooce right in just as the Americans was caught pants down in Asia

>as it would be way too costly politically, and the VC knew it

That's not really true, the VC and NVA HC thought they could win the war by popular uprising in South Vietnam, supported by the regular NVA, hence the Tet-offensive. The American population/youth turning so hard was a happy mistake for them.

>"In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective, which was to spur uprisings throughout the South. Still, we inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans and their puppets, and this was a big gain for us. As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention—but it turned out to be a fortunate result" -General Tran Do

What an idiotic meme. Do you really thing its better to take money, spent part of it for producing of weapon and loss weapon in war instead of just take money?

Not that poster but please elaborate on your statement.

Kill Anything That Moves

>Fund Pol Pot
>Heh nothing personal Victor Charlie

>destroyed Khmer Rouge
>invade Thailand to kills the remnants
Your move, creep

Hot take:
Kill off young working age men in the war, keeping the military industrial complex chugging, and then having an excuse for mass migration to replace the dead soldiers all to win votes for the democrats.