Viet Nam.. What is your opinion?

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onetimeposter said:
There was a Vietnam Draft. You haven’t answered my question. 17 year olds can join the armed forces with parental consent.

I’m not playing games.

The question is simple. If you don’t want to answer, that’s your prerogative.

It’s fine to talk of how America could have won the conflict…but at whose children’s expense?
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Yes, you are playing games.

The draft had already been abolished in 1973.

When parents give their approval for their children to join the military they do not specify that they must go to Vietnam or any other assignment.

Yes, I would have signed to allow my children to enter the military branch of their choice.

But, yes, you are playing games.

Do some reading and get your facts straight.
 
Al_Masetti said:
Yes, I would have signed to allow my children to enter the military branch of their choice.
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You would allow your children into such a conflict like Vietnam…I would do everything in my power to keep my children out of such a conflict.
 
Al_Masetti said:
So what is the purpose of your question?
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Get people to think.

It’s easy to say, ’ send in 50,000 more USA troops…but not so easy if your kids among them and not so easy if no one even knows why the troops are there in the first place.
 
onetimeposter said:
Get people to think.

It’s easy to say, ’ send in 50,000 more USA troops…but not so easy if your kids among them and not so easy if no one even knows why the troops are there in the first place.
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Then choose your words more carefully and do some homework.
 
onetimeposter said:
You would allow your children into such a conflict like Vietnam…I would do everything in my power to keep my children out of such a conflict.
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WHY???

Communism was on the march.

Everyone knew someone who had been imprisoned or killed or been forced to flee.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

The Catholic Church was actively persecuted.

The Soviets took over eastern Europe.

There were Communist takeover efforts in Italy, Greece, France.

There was the Berlin blockade. The Korean War. Quemoy & Matsu.

Castro took Cuba and we experienced weakness when we fumbled the Bay of Pigs invasion.

That led directly to the Berlin Wall.

The Cuban missile crisis.

Crises in the middle East. Egypt. Libya. Africa. Latin America.

The Vietnam War was only part of the conflict in SouthEast Asia. The French, even with their colonial baggage, had been fighting the Communists for years.

Tibet. Do you remember the Communist Chinese government invading and annexing Tibet?

Do you remember how the Indian government supported the Tibetans and were fighting the Chinese. Pakistan was allied with the U.S. (The U.S. has had a long and positive relationship with Pakistan … even with all the business of their nuclear weapons program … in part because India was getting aid from the Soviet Union. And Pakistan had a connection with China, which the U.S. exploited. And the U.S. played off the conflict between the USSR and China. )

There were continuous revelations of Soviet agents working actively within the U.S. government betraying important information and influencing important decisions. This had been going on since the 1920’s.

books.google.com/books?id=dIsmm_ZLHcIC&dq=venona&pg=PP1&ots=M_d9DPvYoL&sig=ehUmGAwr6UvtW6Amzx4VvwcZE-A&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

For goodness sake, do some reading if you are too young to have been there and lived through all this terrible stuff.

amazon.com/Major-Jordans-diaries-Americanist-library/dp/B0007EDYQQ

Also available directly on-line.

It may seem very obscure today, but it was serious stuff back in the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

There was nothing theoretical or hypothetical about it.

Read about some of the Catholic heros of the time … Cardinal Mindszenty was a religious and political hero in Hungary.

mindszenty.org/

Pope John Paul II threatened to resign the papacy and take the fight to Poland. For that the Holy Father was shot by an assassin.

This was real life as we lived it.

And while there was a draft, there were a huge number of volunteers.
 
In view of the geopolitics of the time, there is not one U.S. president from Kennedy forward, who would not have pursued a course of fighting proxy wars against communism in Indochina.

It has been mentioned before, but the death toll exacted by communist dictatorships during the 20th century is horrendous, and seldom mentioned by leftist academics.

The failure of nerve in Vietnam had the effect of energizing communist movements around the world and extending the duration of the cold war, which was eventually won through the geopolitical efforts of the Polish Solidarity Union, the Pope, and President Reagan.

JFK came into office with little foreign policy experience and was perceived as weak by the Soviets, especially after the Bay of Pigs. This led to their stunning decision to place IRBM’s in Cuba—a decision which, if allowed to stand, would have changed the geopolitical balance drastically and undermined U.S. and world security. Kennedy managed to prevail in the Cuban Missile Crisis by throwing a blockade around Cuba (which is an act of war) but called it a ‘quarantine’ instead of a blockade. Further, he had Robert Kennedy summon the Soviet Ambassador and directly threaten him with nuclear war if the missiles were not removed. This threat was credible because the USSR knew that the U.S. had recently deployed Minuteman ICBM’s.

Weakness costs lives.
 
onetimeposter said:
Then the ultimate question.

Would you have volunteered your own children to fight for the cause as an infantry soldier in Vietnam after 1974?
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Would you have volunteered your own children for a communist death camp? Some were certainly willing to do that for the children of others.
 
Al_Masetti said:
What finally caused the loss of South Vietnam was that the U.S. Congress pulled all the funding to South Vietnam. With no money to buy ammunition, fuel, parts and other necessary supplies, and with the North Vietnamese having unlimited funding from the Soviet Union and China, the South had no chance.
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This idea that the US was protecting the South against the North does not stand up to the facts. The heaviest bombing was in the south, all the use of Agent Orange was in the south. There was tremendous support for the communists in the south. The US wasn’t protecting one from the other. We invaded south Vietnam. The gov. we tried to set up there was a joke. The millions that died may not have died if it were not for our exacerbation of the problems in the region. btw, hundreds of south-east Asians are still affected every year by what we did there. Many are still maimed by unexploded cluster munitions and many believe the effects of Agent Orange are still causing major health problems in the area.
 
Ed_Rand said:
This idea that the US was protecting the South against the North does not stand up to the facts. The heaviest bombing was in the south, all the use of Agent Orange was in the south. There was tremendous support for the communists in the south. The US wasn’t protecting one from the other. We invaded south Vietnam. The gov. we tried to set up there was a joke. The millions that died may not have died if it were not for our exacerbation of the problems in the region. btw, hundreds of south-east Asians are still affected every year by what we did there. Many are still maimed by unexploded cluster munitions and many believe the effects of Agent Orange are still causing major health problems in the area.
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I like your signature Ed and I think it states everything about how to view the discussion of Vietnam or other wars.
It seems to me that the real domino effect is that war leads to future wars due to the death of loved ones on each side. Killing always leaves in its wake suffering that is associated with an enenmy that is transferred from one generation to another. What we have is a world of human beings experiencing transgenerational post traumatic stress which creates a hypervigilant state of being on guard against an enemy who has been the identified evil of the past and now the present.
We have not developed wisdom regarding the cause or ending of war. It seems that we look to the materialistic solution to end war by developing better weapons or better strategies than the enemy and the enemy does the same. This materialistic problem-solving strategy seems to symbolize an unconscious dependence on human wisdom to deal with the crisis of death and evil, that is the source of all human conflict, through the development of political and military power. History seems to indicate that this creates a never ending domino effect of fear and hatred.
The answer to the end of war is not to be found in the materialistic approach. The answer is to be found in our faith.
 
grandfather said:
That would always be an impossible thing to determine. You would not only have to be able to reasonably predict the number of dead a dictator would kill and the number of lives the war would take, which is always imposible, but have to see all of the after effects.

We know how many people within a million here or so Hitler killed in the few years he had power. How many would his regime have killed? He said his murderous regime would last a thousand years.

WWI not only caused WWII, but the peace terms made after the senseless war was over caused WWII. Not going to war with Hitler early enough without a doubt multiplied the number of dead and the scope of the war. It also caused the suffering of millions in all of eastern Europe that was seized by Stalin’s tyranny. Was Lloyd George immoral in appeasing Hitler? Was it unreasonable to avoid the confrontation as he did? History paints him a fool. His intentions, peace in our time, may have been honorable, but the outcome was a sea of blood.

If Europe stopped Hitler early what would history say of it? It was not justifiable to go to war, just because we thought Hitler might have had bad intentions. Monday morning quarterbacks are always geniuses. Many ofl the Jews in Germany may have been murdered, but an early war would have left those in Poland, France, Italy, etc. alive. No one would have seen the death that would have been stopped by an early war and there would have been a debate on whether it was just.

There truly is a domino theory or principle, but we can not see it. None of us can foresee the consequences of our actions. If Wilson knew what his peace plan would result in he would have not imposed it.

We don’t know what Sadaam would have done if he was unchecked. We know he invaded Kuwait and most certainly would have invaded all the rest of Arabia. Stalin was his idol. How many millions would he and his sons have killed? Whether one approves of the current state of affairs or not, knowing and being able to measure the outcome, or the outcomes of alternatives is impossible.

All of our actions impact the future until the end of time. There are 40,000,000 dead unborn babies in America as a result of the immoral action of a handful of judges. If another country wanted to stop that by force and had a way to do it that would kill only an estimated 4,000,000 would that make a war or a violent revolution to change America’s government just?

What was the evil that made the American Revolutionary War necessary and impossible to avoid? Taxation without representation? To force the King’s government to not look at Americans as second class citizens? To lower the price of tea? Were the Americans so terribly crushed that they had no choice other than war? What gave legitimacy to, or made just, England’s claims over its colonies and its rule imposed by force over the largest empire in history?
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I’m not going to armchair-quarterback the history of Western warfare. All I can say is that, while I agree that it is not possible to predict the number of people a given dictator will kill, leaders must weigh the information they have at hand and make a good-faith determination about whether the evil they face is worse than the evil a war would create.

Note I am not limiting “evil” to murder, and neither does the Catechism.

Peace,
Dante
 
Ed_Rand said:
This idea that the US was protecting the South against the North does not stand up to the facts. The heaviest bombing was in the south, all the use of Agent Orange was in the south. There was tremendous support for the communists in the south. The US wasn’t protecting one from the other. We invaded south Vietnam. The gov. we tried to set up there was a joke. The millions that died may not have died if it were not for our exacerbation of the problems in the region. btw, hundreds of south-east Asians are still affected every year by what we did there. Many are still maimed by unexploded cluster munitions and many believe the effects of Agent Orange are still causing major health problems in the area.
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Ah!

Still a few people who deny the Ho Chi Minh trail and the later tank invasions from the North.
 
Ronald_E said:
It seems to me that the real domino effect is that war leads to future wars due to the death of loved ones on each side. Killing always leaves in its wake suffering that is associated with an enenmy that is transferred from one generation to another.
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Yup, Yup. Many here have mentioned the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Common sense would suggest that the violence that we perpetrated there would breed more violence. There is also evidence that suggests that our bombing of Cambodia increased support for the Khmer Rouge.

From Wikipedia:
The relation between the massive carpet bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest to historians. In 1984 Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia argued that it is “untenable” to assert that the Khmer Rouge would not have won but for U.S. intervention and that while the bombing did help Khmer Rouge recruitment, they “would have won anyway.” [3] However, more recently historians have cited the U.S. intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965-1973) as a significant factor leading to increased support of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry. Historian Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen have used a combination of sophisticated satellite mapping, recently unclassified data about the extent of bombing activities, and peasant testimony, to argue that there was a strong correlation between villages targeted by U.S. bombing and recruitment of peasants by the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan and Owen argue that “Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began.” [4] In his 1996 study of Pol Pot’s rise to power, Kiernan argued that “Pol Pot’s revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia” and that the U.S. carpet bombing “was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot’s rise.” [5]
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Bottom line: Violence breeds violence. War does not = peace. We reap what we sow.
 
wjb67 said:
so you would advocate the “long way around” that involved the slaughter of MILLIONS of people and the abject misery and poverty of the past 40 years in Vietnam under communist rule?
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I would advocate that the people of that nation obtain the form of government they decide, over going to war from outside influences.

The long way around as you put it, isn’t easy, but if it were a choice between losing my children to the horrors of war brought by foreigner occupation, I would take the long way around.

The accusation that millions of Vietnamese died when the US left, is debatable, and we really don’t know the actual numbers. The South Vietnamese put up a fight that ended quickly.

I work with some Vietnamese people, who were the boat people, who fled Vietnam right after the war ended. One, who grew up during the communist take over, told me how his father was sent to the re-education camps, twice. Yet, he said, even though just being a child, he was glad that the war ended, despite the hardships under communism. He’s thankful, that he manage to get out, and it was through a Christian evangelical church that he manage to come to America.

The Cambodian issue, had nothing to do with the US leaving. Pol Pot was already on the move even while we were there, and I doubt Nixon could’ve expanded our involvement further into Cambodia, without major repercussions here at home. As it was, going into Cambodia as he did, was met with great protest. Also, remember, it was the Communist Vietnamese government, who went into Cambodia and ended the slaughter.

Jim
 
Ronald_E said:
It seems to me that the real domino effect is that war leads to future wars due to the death of loved ones on each side. Killing always leaves in its wake suffering that is associated with an enenmy that is transferred from one generation to another. What we have is a world of human beings experiencing transgenerational post traumatic stress which creates a hypervigilant state of being on guard against an enemy who has been the identified evil of the past and now the present.
/QUOTE]

Not always true. Perhaps no cause/effect relationship at all. Germany is at peace with France. Sweden no longer wars on Poland or Poland on Sweden. Norway and Sweden are not at war with each other. Nor are Spain and England, France and Austria, Italy and France. In their past conflicts they had, or believed they had, cause to do it. Presently, they have no cause to do it. Nor do Germany, Italy or Japan now feel it necessary to gain “revenge” upon the U.S. and Britain for WWII.

No one will ever know, of course, but it seems pretty likely that WWII was not a necessary consequence of WWI. It may be remembered that both Italy and Japan “changed sides” between the wars. Certainly the burden imposed by Versailles gave many Germans “cause”, they thought, to redress, in some manner, what they felt were inequities. But even then, many or most Germans certainly did not relish the thought of another war with France on the eve of WWII.

I think it takes more than a prior war to make people want to go to war. It takes the present perception of a good cause to do it for present reasons, or a dictator who wants, for reasons of his own, to do it.
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Ridgerunner said:
Not always true. Perhaps no cause/effect relationship at all. Germany is at peace with France. Sweden no longer wars on Poland or Poland on Sweden. Norway and Sweden are not at war with each other. Nor are Spain and England, France and Austria, Italy and France. In their past conflicts they had, or believed they had, cause to do it. Presently, they have no cause to do it. Nor do Germany, Italy or Japan now feel it necessary to gain “revenge” upon the U.S. and Britain for WWII.
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That war brings more war remains true when you look at all those involved in WWII. The countries you mention were devastated militarily and had no chance of retaining any semblance of superpowers. It took WWII for Europeans to realize that they are their own worst enemies. It gave them a very healthy dose of disrespect for government and flagwaving, which is severly lacking all over the rest of the world. What about the “victors” of WWII, the USSR and the USA? WWII increased the imperial ambitions of both of these nations. The military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about has only been gaining momentum ever since WWII, despite the Vietnam catastrophy. Somebody has already noted here that more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in all of WWII. How can we claim that war prevents war? WWII ended with the use of two nuclear weapons. Today, the United States has something like 10,000 nuclear warheads (and continues to produce more, I believe), Russia has something like 2,000 nukes. How many nations have developed the means to obliterate the world?

The United States was called upon to defend the world against aggressive fascist nations. Our military has ostensibly been fighting for the same concepts since then. Today, however, in the absense of any real opposition, we are now on offense, conducting aggressive war in the name of freedom and democracy. The same values that we faught for in WWII have become the raison d’etre for aggressive war today. Hardly a lesson learned.
 
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