What If Nixon Hadn't Halted the Bombing 38 Year Ago Today?

[John317]

Today in History

1972 Nixon halts bombing of North Vietnam and announces peace talks.

I've read that the North Vietnamese were on the verge of calling a halt to combat against the South and would have done so if Nixon had continued the bombing of the North even one more week. It appears now that the U.S. and its allies came within days of winning that war.

During the early 1970s, after my discharge from the army, I helped organize and participated in anti-war demonstrations. My thoughts today are that we shouldn't have gotten into that war to begin with, but considering all the French, American, Korean, and Australian blood spilled for it, we should have won it. As it is, the North Vietnamese communists took over the South and killed thousands of people and sent about a million to "re-education camp," where they were indoctrinated with Marxist, atheistic lies.

Here is what the wikipedia says about the events following the American withdrawal from Vietnam:

Quote:

The North did not abide by the terms of the 1973 Paris Agreement, which officially settled the war by calling for free elections in the South and peaceful reunification. Two years after the withdrawal of the last U.S. forces in 1973, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the communists, and on April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese army surrendered. In 1976 the government of united Vietnam renamed Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City, in honor of the wartime communist leader who died in September 1969. The Vietnamese estimate that they lost nearly 3 million lives and suffered more than 4 million injuries during the U.S. involvement in the war.

[edit] Socialism after 1975Main article: Socialist Republic of Vietnam

In the post-1975 period, it was immediately apparent that the popularity and effectiveness of Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) policies did not necessarily extend to the party's peacetime nation-building plans. Having unified North and South politically, the VCP still had to integrate them socially and economically. In this task, VCP policy makers were confronted with the South’s resistance to communist transformation, as well as traditional animosities arising from cultural and historical differences between North and South. More than a million Southerners, including about 560,000 “boat people,” fled the country soon after the communist takeover, fearing persecution and seizure of their land and businesses. About a million Vietnamese were relocated to previously uncultivated land called “new economic zones” for reeducation.

The harsh postwar crackdown on remnants of capitalism in the South led to the collapse of the economy during the 1980s. With the economy in shambles, Vietnam’s government altered its course and adopted consensus policies that bridged the divergent views of pragmatists and communist traditionalists. In 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, who was elevated to VCP general secretary the following year, launched a campaign for political and economic renewal (Doi Moi). His policies were characterized by political and economic experimentation that was similar to simultaneous reform agenda undertaken in the Soviet Union. Reflecting the spirit of political compromise, Vietnam phased out its reeducation effort. The government also stopped promoting agricultural and industrial cooperatives. Farmers were permitted to till private plots alongside state-owned land, and in 1990 the government passed a law encouraging the establishment of private businesses.

Compounding economic difficulties were new military challenges. In the late 1970s, two countries—Cambodia and China—posed threats to Vietnam. Clashes between Vietnamese and Cambodian communists on their common border began almost immediately after Vietnam’s reunification in 1975. To neutralize the threat, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and overran Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, driving out the incumbent Khmer Rouge communist regime and initiating a prolonged military occupation of the country.

On Australia's part in the war, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Australia_during_the_Vietnam_War

[doug yowell]

Yes,this is something I read in an interview with Gen.Giap many years ago. How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.One of the great lies about the Viet Nam War was that we lost to a determined enemy. The fact is that we never tried to win the war in the first place. We merely tried to convince the NVA that they couldn't win. This they admitted at the Paris Treaty. Then they just waited for the US to get out before they broke the terms of the treaty. Those honorable Communists!! Ho Chi Minh!Ho Chi Minh! So then to our historical disgrace the US reneged on their promise to step in again if the North Vietnamese broke their end of the deal and attacked the South again. This is the legacy that our love and peace generation left to their South Vietnamese friends and the rest of the onlooking world.

[John317]

All true. And what's more, a lot of people don't realize that the US won practically every battle, and the Tet Offensive by the VC was a disaster for them, but they won finally and mostly because the civilians back home didn't have the heart to pursue it seriously. It was really lost in the streets of American cities and in the homes of Americans who were sickened by the sight on their TV screens around the dinner table of their sons being hauled around in body bags.

Most wars are won by the side that is prepared to see as many of their sons (and now, daughters) killed in order to win it.

[phkrause]

I saw a documentary on Vietnam, and if it wasn't for LBJ we would've won it much earlier. His General's had told him that if he cut off the supply, the HoChiMing trail, than they would be able to stop them. But no he wouldn't allow them to bomb the harbor where all the food, ammo, etc. was going to the North. He eventually did bomb it was was much to late. And Nixon had to backup his campaign promises, luckily, or not, he had backing from the congress, and of course the people who were doing all the complaining. Just as when it got to get to long in Iraq.

[John317]

Yes, I remember when that happened. It's just another very good example of how if the president is going to fight a war, he needs to do everything he can to bring to a victorious end, becasue the longer it drags out, the more people are killed. You don't help anyone-- and certainly not our soldiers-- by beating around the bush.

Johnson should have done what his generals were saying he'd have to do to win it. But he was afraid of the reactions of other nations, especially China-- and what the anti-war movement would do-- if he bombed Hanoi harbor. As it turned out, his decision not to do it only prolonged the war, resulting in the killing of more people on both sides, and in the loss of everything all those millions of lives had already been sacrificed for.

[phkrause]

Yes, I remember when that happened. It's just another very good example of how if the president is going to fight a war, he needs to do everything he can to bring to a victorious end, becasue the longer it drags out, the more people are killed. You don't help anyone-- and certainly not our soldiers-- by beating around the bush.

Johnson should have done what his generals were saying he'd have to do to win it. But he was afraid of the reactions of other nations, especially China-- and what the anti-war movement would do-- if he bombed Hanoi harbor. As it turned out, his decision not to do it only prolonged the war, resulting in the killing of more people on both sides, and in the loss of everything all those millions of lives had already been sacrificed for.

[fccool]

I always love the talks of "We'd be speaking German today"... and I believe this is one of such talks. It ignores the natural progression of historical examples that did not need intervention. There are plenty of things that went to the same end by means of natural progression... such as abolition of slavery worldwide, women rights, marginalization of religious extremism... etc.... etc... These things don't need military solution IMO. There is no winner in wars, and solution can be achieved without firing a shot. With vast economic resources that US had, it could buy Vietnam for the price of that war.

Today Vietnam has GDP of 90 billion, back then it was laughable.

[John317]

The only thing laughable is to say that wars aren't sometimes necessary. Tell the Jews it wasn't necessary to go to war against the Nazis. Tell the Chinese that there was no need to go to war against the Japanese.

Sure, slavery would eventually have ended in the South, but there's no reason to believe it would have ended any time soon without the civil war.