The Vietnam War: pro or con?

[Minstrel Boy]

Unfortunately I think this needs asking, given the number of people here calling Ho Chi Minh a "beast," a "fascist," and a "thug," even though Eisenhower himself admitted Ho could have won 80% support if the US had permitted the Vietnamese to hold their internationally-mandated election in 1956.

[Spinoza]

1. The American usage

of a fascistic draft to force virtual "slave" armies to fight in wars they had no desire to fight was wrong, vicious, evil during Vietnam. It would be wrong,vicious and evil if was brought back today.

[New Democrat]

2. War is almost always wrong.

[punpirate]

3. The majority of the people...

... involved in it would now probably say that it was one giant, seventeen-year-long clusterfuck.

Ho Chi Minh wasn't a beast (and, by definition, wasn't a fascist). He was the leader of a country with which we had chosen to go to war, and there was a strong propagandistic need to demonize him and all those in the north of Vietnam. He spurred his people on to fight the French, the Japanese, then the French again, and later, us.

Few people know of his history, and how strongly he believed in the independence of Vietnam, nor do they know how easy it would have been to have made an ally of him--if more sense had prevailed in Washington. Few know that Ho Chi Minh announced the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in August, 1945, while preparations were being made for Japan's surrender, and that document was almost word for word our own Declaration of Independence.

[Sandpiper]

4. Fewer people know

That Ho Chi Minh sought the support of the United States in establishing an independent Vietnam, but was spurned by the Americans, who thought it should remain under French control.

[punpirate]

5. I recall reading...

... that at the end of WWII, there were only three people on the State Dept.'s SE Asia desk, and none of them could read or write Vietnamese.

My guess is that all that anyone knew of Ho was that he was a communist and was trying to take over the country from the French. That would have been the mindset at the time.

There was a deliberate decision at Yalta, and later, at Potsdam, to return control of all allies' possessions to those allies, and that included Vietnam to the French. What's less well-known is that the US covertly interfered with the internationally-accepted 1956 elections, which were to come about as part of agreements after the French were routed at Dien Bien Phu. The DMZ between north and south was to be a temporary measure until those elections, which were intended to unify the country.

[John Q. Citizen]

11. Yep, that's right. He asked the US for help in getting the

imperialist/colonialist French to leave. He was actually naive enough back then to think the US actually believed what they wrote in our declaration of Independence and our constitution. Instead we took up where the French left off and an amazing opportunity was missed.

Think of how much more reasonable the whole situation would have been if we had started reconciliation/reunification talks at the onset of the French withdrawal. Even from a cold war hawk perspective we would have come out better dealing with Ho Chi Mihn as the obvious legitimate leader. He was a Western Educated nationalist who wanted an independent country free of foreign occupation.

Who knows how things would have turned out in that case but it doesn't seem like it would have been any worse than what happened.

Sometimes i wonder what would have happened if the North and the portion of the people in the South who supported expelling the invaders had lost, what the outcome would have been? OK, so the US and it's puppets in the South win the country like in Korea, and we have even more troops stationed along another demarcation line? Or what?

Stepping in as the occupier wasn't exactly peace inducing, and it exacerbated a lot of stuff regionally, like Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. It sure fueled the heroin trade here. Vietnam sucked our country dry financially, emotionally and spiritually. It wasn't worth it, even if we had won it.

[bobthedrummer]

6. Tragically wrong and still being fought over here in America-we won

every battle and lost the war. It is beyond comprehension to label Ho Chi Minh a fascist and to equate Stalinism to fascism on a liberal/progressive political website, but it did happen here this morning.

Revisionism is on the march with freedom.

[Warpy]

7. I was against it in 1962

thanks to a chance meeting with a Vietnamese student at a university. I pointed out I was a kid, I'd never seen her before and I would likely never see her again, and what was the deal, anyway? She looked around to make sure nobody was listening and then told me that the thing most people wanted was for all the foreigners to stop trying to run their country and to go home. I've been grateful for her honesty since then, and I never did see her again.

I may have been a dumb little kid, but I recognized an anticolonial war when I saw one, and that's what she showed me.

We were lied into that war by a bunch of Pentagon ideologues who had no clue about how the region actually worked or what the people actually wanted.

Just like Iraq. I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends.

[Sympleesmshn]

8. Other, I don't think we can judge....

Everyone should have to read McNamara's book, "In Retrospect". The war was something we got forced into because we were there. While I think we disproved the "domino effect", I think that we had some good reasons to be there... As I said read the book, it shows a side that not many people care to admit exists...

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Indochina's holocaust perpetrated by America.

Millions of dead, torture, war crimes and atrocities, carpet bombing, assasinations, repression, forced evacuations, "resettlement", illegal invasions of Cambodia and Laos, mass exections, coverups, lies, murder of American civilians by American troops, mass arrests of Americans, imprisonment of dissenters, intimidation, etc, etc.

All under the banner of "saving" Vietnam from the "horrors of Communism". Just like Hitler was saving the world from the "horrors of Bolshevism".

[seemslikeadream]

10. Wrong then, wrong now