From: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle)
Subject: Re: Principles, principles, principles
Organization: Psych Department, Indiana University
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 22:03:45 GMT

Long post here, people, press 'n' now if you're not into millitary history.

kmitche@eis.calstate.edu (Kenneth Mitchell) writes:
>nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle) writes:
>> 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. 

    I confess that my knowledge of Vietnam is not intimate.

>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. 

    Perhaps I should have said that the reasons the *North Vietnamese* were 
successful were the same as the Boer's reasons for success. 

>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'. 

    They might not have cared particularly about the other guys'. Our 
losses were their major concern.

>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.

    I guess maybe they figured that we should at least declare war on 
those two countries before attacking.

>> 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. 

    Right, I'd agree with that. Unfortunately, I'd say that your statement 
that "all we had to do was to cuff off the invasion forces" is a lot easy 
to say than to do. Over that sort of terrain air power isn't enough.

>> >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. 

    Perhaps. Would you say that there's any lesson to be drawn from that 
war concerning the wisdom of committing forces prior to 'committing' the
American people? In the absense of that commitment, should we have stayed?

>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. 

    Probably you're right. It would have been interesting to see how matters 
would have turned out if the millitary had been allowed to prosecute it as 
a quick offensive war. It's really too bad that things didn't turn out the 
way you say it would have.

>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.

    You're making it sound more like the Crimea than the Boer War. Time 
to dip into the history books again, I suppose.

>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!" 

    Right. That's exactly my position. So if that's my reason for opposing 
the war, and if there were lots of people in the millitary who felt the 
same way, then would you say that both me and the rest of them actually 
"supported the murders committed by the Khmer Rouge"?

>>     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. 

    I thought that _The_Killing_Fields_ was some pretty powerful anti-Khmer
Rouge stuff as well. 

>> 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. 

    Yes, the same way a vast number of them were outraged by our reluctance 
to take millitary action to protect the Kurds and the Shiites in the south.
Unfortunately we just can't always be the world's policeman, and *we aren't
responsible* for Khmer Rouge atrocities. It was a tragedy which our nation 
didn't have the political will to change.

>>  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. 

    Hmmm, sounds dangerously close to being a justification for further 
expanionist "adventurism", but I'm sure that's not your intention. I guess 
I'm just extra sensitive because that's the basic reason the British used 
to justify literally dozens of "little wars" from the 1830's through 1910.

>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. 

    In that case, do you think that they would have experienced a similar 
dominoe effect such as the one that has occurred in Eastern Europe? Would 
they eventually have been free of communism anyway, even without the time 
we bought with our boys' lives?

>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. 

    It's a good thing I never said anything like that, eh?

>Ken Mitchell
>kmitche@eis.calstate.edu

--
Nathan Engle                        Software Juggler
Psychology Department               Indiana University
nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu      nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu