Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Principles, principles, principles
From: kmitche@eis.calstate.edu (Kenneth Mitchell)
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 05:32:12 GMT
Organization: Calif State Univ/Electronic Information Services

nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle) writes:

> >You've got damned little credibility yourself, guy. We may have LOST ine
> >VietNam because of people like you, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't
> >an important cause, even a noble one. 
> 
>     Weak claim. Firstly, IMHO people like dks didn't cause us to lose in 
> Vietnam; the main reasons for our loss were the tenacity of the Viet Cong 
> and the close, difficult nature of the terrain. Jungle terrain substantially 
> reduced the effectiveness of air support and made ground combat a dicey 
> business as well. The reasons for the success of the VC were essentially the 
> same as the reasons Boer guerillas were ultimately successful in carrying 
> South Africa out of the British Commonwealth.
> 

Don't know much military history, do you? At least, not as far as Viet nam
was concerned. 

The Viet Cong were destroyed, smashed, virtually annihilated; their last
hurrah was the pyhrric "Tet Offensive" and the assault on Hue. the VC were
so thoroughly beaten that to re-inforce them, the Nort Vietnamese sent TWO
FULL REGULAR DIVISIONS of the NVN Army. 

Of course, the media painted the Tet Offensive as a major LOSS for US
forces there, a pack of crap; they saw OUR losses in the heavy figting,
but didn't see the other guys'. And later, when the B-52's began
interdiction of the supply routes from North Viet Nam (especially the 
ones through Laos and Cambodia) the peace-niks and protestors had apoplexy
on national TV. The protestors got all the press; obviously, North
VietNamese Television wasn't going to trumpet the destruction of their
troops, so the folks here at home saw only one side of the story. 



>     That the British were somewhat more effective at fighting the Boers 
> was mostly due to the ruthlesstactics adopted by Lord Kitchener. In order 
> to deny supply and support to the Boer guerillas Kitchener gathered 
> civilians from Transvaal and the Orange Free State into camps referred to 
> by the newly invented term "concentration camp" (just in case you ever 
> wondered where the term came from). In Vietnam since we were ostensibly 
> fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese I suppose it didn't seem 
> like a good idea to destroy their homes and crops and incarcerate them in 
> camps. We might have won that war if we had been willing to show ourselves 
> to be more ruthless and bloodthirsty than the VC; personally I'm glad that 
> we didn't go to that extreme.

Nathan, all we had to do was to cut off the invasion forces from North
Viet Nam. It is a popular misconception that it was a CIVIL war; it may
have started out that way, but after the partition of French IndoChina, it
quickly became an ordinary old war of arression on the part of NVN. 

 > 
> >To attack the Viet Nam war as somehow wrong or immoral is to APPROVE of
> >the Khmer Rouge murders and the Viet Namese "re-education" camps. 
> 
>     What incredible bovine fecal matter. I opposed the Vietnam war as 
> "wrong" because we didn't have the political will to *really* crush the 
> people. Under the circumstances our soldiers in the field were in about 
> the same boat as the marines in Beirut. We were there for a noble cause, 
> but unfortunately the primary thing that we did in support of that cause 
> was to sit entrenched behind barbed wire and present attractive targets.

The problem in Beirut was that the Marines were sent in with no OBJECTIVE;
nobody said, "O.K., how do we know when we've won?" it was a fiasco and a
disaster. In VN, the war protestors here at home successfully prevented
the government from doing those things we already knew we needed to do to
achieve victory. The "fecal matter" in your post was the stuff about
crushing the PEOPLE; damned few of the PEOPLE cared one way or another. It
was the INVADING NVN REGULAR ARMY TROOPS that we needed to "crush", and it
would have been easier to do that at the source. 

Yes, the Viet Nam war was badly mismanaged at EVERY level, and there's
more than enough blame to go around. The Army was mis-managed and badly
led; the politicians manipulated the data, and military commanders were
dragged into the politics. Protestors here at home successfully prevented
popular support from being expressed or reported, and exagerated the
scale of inevitable losses.

And worst of all, the military was willing to continue to fight even after
the political leaders had forbidden them to take the actions needed to
win; i.e., attacking the North, whence came all the supplies and materiel
for the enemy. When it became obvious that we WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO WIN,
the military should have pulled out completely. There was a lot of support
in the military at the time for a philosophy of "either get OUT or get IN;
this halfway stuff is KILLING us!" 


>     Many of the crimes committed by the Vietnamese or Cambodians against 
> their own people were heinous in the extreme. 

And were never EVER criticised by the Hollywood Left and the anti-war
activists in the U.S. I take that back; Joan Baez, long an anti-war
protestor, protested the NVN atrocities after the fall of Saigon, and was
shunned by her former fellow protestors. Jane Fonda was quoted as saying
that she would NEVER criticise NVN, no matter WHAT they did. 

> Cambodians today remember 
> the "Pol Pot Time" as a blur of misery and suffering. Unfortunately many 
> of those Cambodians today view the Vietnamese as their saviors rather than 
> the US. For some reason they view our effort on their behalf as a half-
> hearted and somewhat bungled attempt which was abandoned as soon as we 
> found out that we'd gotten into more than we bargained for.

And whose responsibility was that? I can assure you that the vast majority
of military folks were SICK about the way we abandoned those poeple. 


>  That part of 
> the war effort is very difficult to portray in a positive light no matter 
> what our intentions were. If you think that makes me a Khmer Rouge supporter 
> then I guess we just have to agree to disagree.


I don't; I just figure that when the consequences of an action are BAD
that we have to be ready to accept that it doesn't make any difference
WHAT our intentions were. 

But look at the bright side. Thailand DID NOT fall to the communists.
Neither did Malaysia. And while Indonesia took it's own bizzare detour
through "fascism" under Sukarno, it is now a relatively (sort-of) free
country. I choose to believe that our efforts and our sacrifices there mad
a positive effect, since I have NO doubt that all those nations would have
succumbed without the time we bought for them. 

But I take great exception to statements that the war was wrong and evil,
and it always was, and that nothing good could EVER have come from it.
Because those are damned lies. 

Ken Mitchell
kmitche@eis.calstate.edu