Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[W. Niederhut]

On 9/30/2022 at 11:31 AM, James DiEugenio said:

There was no significant support for the north in South Vietnam?

Mike.  Even for you that is a startling statement.

Going all the way back to the French regime, there had always been a strong resistance to colonialism in the south.  Back then, they were called the Viet Minh.  And they were a significant force against Paris.

As time went on, they were renamed the Viet Cong.  Westmoreland tried to understate their numbers, but veteran analyst Sam Adams figured they were in the hundreds of thousands.  And he proved that at the Westmoreland/CBS trial: that Westy had kept the numbers down in order to fulfill LBJ's political agenda.  Your argument about Tet is really kind of a puzzler. The pure power and range of Tet was shocking.  As was the fact that Shackley had missed it so completely. If LBJ and Westy were right, then what the heck was going on? The estimates were that, just in the first wave, about 80,000 were involved. And they struck about 100 towns and cities: not just in the rural areas, but Saigon itself.  There was a second "mini Tet" in May and then one last one in August.

What is amazing about this is that Khe Sanh was taking place about the same time.  So you had two huge battles going on just about everywhere in South Vietnam. When Westmoreland tried to request more troops and LBJ called his Wise Men meeting at the White House, to say they had really won, Acheson told Johnson to shove Vietnam up his ass.

The point about the citizenry not supporting the Tet offensive is simply pointless.  The mass of people in South Vietnam did not support anyone. They just wanted peace after 20 years of war.  The proof of that is how quickly Saigon fell in 1975.  It was a matter of months, weeks really. South Vietnam was always a mirage, since the beginning when Lansdale created the DIem regime.

There was no there, there.  Our effort at nation building was an illusion.

BTW, I just finished reading Stephen Kinzer's book, The Brothers, and I noticed that he wrote an excellent, concise history of the critical role that John Foster Dulles (and Allen Dulles) played in orchestrating our Vietnam debacle after Dien Bien Phu in 1954.  It was a colossal foreign policy blunder.

The Dulles brothers thought they could use Lansdale's black ops and psy ops to do in Vietnam what Lansdale had done with Magsaysay in the Phillippines.

Edited October 3, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Pat Speer]

6 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

You can live in your bubble if you like, but you should really not confuse apples with oranges.

You're the one who appears to be living in a bubble, a liberal echo chamber. In a previous reply, you made the incredible claim that "nearly everyone knows" that the Vietnam War was wrong and unwinnable. What an astonishingly erroneous claim. 

No one who had done even a semblance of balanced research on the Vietnam War would make such an assertion, especially given the new information that has come to light from North Vietnamese sources over the last two decades, information that has badly embarrassed liberal scholars because it has demolished so many of their arguments.

1. While we supported the nationalists in China, we did not thrust hundreds of thousands of young American soldiers into a seemingly endless ground war. So, no, it is not the same. 

There are so many things wrong with this argument, it's hard to know where to start. Until Truman and Marshall treacherously cut off aid to the Nationalists, we were supplying the Nationalists with tons of weapons and supplies and with financial aid. We also had American pilots flying American planes that we had given to the Nationalists. We also had military officers advising Nationalist leaders. 

By 1972, we did not have "hundreds of thousands" of American soldiers in South Vietnam. For that matter, if Johnson had carried out the air operations in 1965 what Nixon carried out in 1972, the Hanoi regime would have been able to continue the war. Additionally, when the NVA launched the Easter Offensive in 1972, 99.9% of the ground fighting was done by the South Vietnamese. 

The Easter Offensive proved that if we merely provided air support and military aid, South Vietnam's army could not only match but defeat the NVA. There was no need for American ground troops after 1972. But, after the Paris Peace Accords, Congress slashed our aid to South Vietnam, refused to fulfill the Accords' provision that we could resupply South Vietnam on a one-for-one basis if hostilities resumed, and treasonably brazenly signaled to Hanoi that we would not respond to another NVA invasion. 

2. Our support for South Korea was in league with the United Nations. And, if I'm not mistaken, there was no significant support for North Korea in the South. So, no, this is also not the same. 

Oh my goodness. You can't be serious. There was no "significant support" for North Vietnam in South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive proved this in spades. The vast majority of the South's population rejected the NVA and VC calls to rise up and help them overthrow the Saigon government, even in the initial days of Tet when the Communists managed to take a number of cities. The Communists were both shocked and enraged when they realized that most South Vietnamese did not want Hanoi's version of "liberation."

The fact that the UN backed our support and defense of South Korea does not change the fact that every criticism that liberals made of South Vietnam's government could have been made against South Korea's government. Thank God that the liberals of the '60s and '70s weren't around during the Korean War  to demonize South Korea, to whitewash North Korea, and to push for betraying South Korea to the Communists.

By the way, are you aware that South Korea and Australia sent sizable forces to South Vietnam to help us battle the Communists? More than 60,000 Australian troops served in South Vietnam, and more than 300,000 South Korean troops served there.

P.S. Neither myself nor anyone in my family are or were "far-left." We were a Republican pro-Reagan, pro-Nixon household up until 1972 or so, at which time my sisters and mother became anti-war--in large part because we had Marines in our house every weekend, who accepted that they could get shipped off to die any moment..for a cause they did not understand. My sisters and mother shifted further to the left as the seventies dragged on and the women's movement and anti-nuclear movements gained momentum. But my father remained a die-hard Republican until his death, and my brother was a small government Republican until Trump took away his party. 

Well, remarkably, the Marines who visited your house every weekend must have all been part of that tiny minority of military personnel who did not support the war.

"For a cause they did not understand"??? Really??? How did those Marines who visited your house every weekend not understand that we were trying to prevent the brutal Soviet-Chinese proxy regime of North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam? What didn't those Marines understand about that? How did they not grasp that we were trying to prevent the 18 million people of South Vietnam from having to suffer under the brutality and oppression of the Hanoi regime?

By the way, after South Vietnam fell and the Communists imposed a reign of terror on the South Vietnamese, did any of those Marines ever come back to your house and say, "Gee, gosh, now we understand why we were fighting to keep South Vietnam free"?

I, myself, was a huge fan of Lincoln's as a child, and always rooted for the Republicans growing up. But that changed with Watergate, and then Reagan. And yet, even so, I've remained Independent and have never registered as a Democrat. 

"And then Reagan"??? So a mainstream, inspiring conservative such as Ronald Reagan caused you to stop rooting for Republicans??? Clearly, you were always well left of center, regardless of which party you favored. Your comments in this thread make that very clear. Many of your arguments in this thread are literally the same arguments that North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China made during the war. 

 

Wow. You're scaring me, dude. Here I was thinking of myself as a moderate, who voted for a Republican on occasion, and was glad when Biden won out over Bernie, etc. And yet all this time I've been a commie-symp reciting Russian propaganda!  

Heck, if I go only slightly further left I can apply for a job in the right-wing media, where at least I could get paid for regurgitating Russian propaganda!

But seriously, you need to get out of your bubble. The vast majority of soldiers understood that the NVA and VC were the bad guys and that they were the good guys. But a lot of them failed to understand why that was THEIR problem. I mean, you seem to take it as a given that the US is the policeman of the world, when the American people do not. 

Hmmm... I'm wondering if there's a religious element to your thinking... I mean, would you support an American military intervention in support of a communist government...if they were under attack from a brutal right-wing Christian Army backed by big oil? Or would you expect us to support the attackers? 

 

“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” —President Lyndon Johnson in a speech at Akron University on October 21, 1964, two weeks before the presidential election.

[Michael Griffith]

Let’s talk about the state of affairs in South Vietnam in 1963 and about the Buddhist protests:

-- As of May 1963, Vietcong attacks had dropped by 50 percent compared to early 1962 (Leonard M. Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, Warren Publishing, 2018, reprint of 2009 edition, p. 37). The South Vietnamese army (ARVN, read as ar-vin) made solid progress against the Vietcong in early 1962 and made even better progress from July 1962 onward (Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 166-170). 

-- North Vietnamese sources confirm that the Diem regime was conducting an effective campaign against the Vietcong (VC) in 1963, including the fact that in 1963 ARVN recaptured “practically everything” that the VC had captured, that ARVN launched successful operations deep into Communist base areas, and that the government’s strategic hamlet program was causing “enormous problems” for the VC. Dr. Mark Moyar: 

Once again, North Vietnamese documents and histories corroborate the American and other foreign reports on the Diem government’s effectiveness. One North Vietnamese account stated that in the first six months of 1963, the South Vietnamese government conducted between 1,500 and 2,000 infantry operations per month, and it noted: “Protracted and large-scale operations launched unremittingly against any given region were more numerous than in the previous year.” A top-level Communist report on this period asserted that the government strengthened the rural militias and it still possessed much stronger military forces than the Viet Cong. “Due to the results attained in the recent sweeps and due to his grinding efforts to gather in the people and establish strategic hamlets,” the report acknowledged, “the enemy seized a large number of people and constricted our liberated areas, causing us many manpower and material difficulties. It also stated that the government had launched successful operations deep into Communist base areas, destroying Communist forces and disrupting Communist lines of communication that ran from North Vietnam and Laos into South Vietnam. 

The history of the Communists’ critical Region 5 noted that during 1963, “the enemy recaptured practically everything we had captured.” The Diem government expanded the strategic hamlet program to cover most of the hamlets in the region, causing “enormous problems” for the Viet Cong. (Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 208)

-- When the Diem regime finally moved against the militant Buddhist monks who were leading the protests and who were associated with the pro-Communist Buddhist monk Tri Quang, they raided a grand total of 30 Buddhist pagodas out of the 4,766 Buddhist pagodas in the country (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, pp. 37-38; Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 232). 

-- Of the 18 ministers in Diem’s cabinet, only five were Catholics--the rest were Buddhists or Confucianists. Of the 38 provincial governors, 26 were Buddhists or Confucianists. Of the 19 top generals in ARVN, only three were Catholics. Thus, under Diem, more than 70% of leading government officials were not Catholics.

-- Far from being anti-Buddhist, Diem had proved to be a friend of the Buddhists. Diem funded the building of more Buddhist pagodas and provided funds for Buddhist schools, among other things. Dr. Moyar: 

Diem, in stark contrast to Ho Chi Minh, had actually done much to help Vietnam’s Buddhists. From the beginning, Diem had given the Buddhists permission to carry out many activities that the French had prohibited. Of South Vietnam’s 4,766 pagodas, 1,275 were built under Diem’s rule, many with funds from the government. The Diem government also provided large amounts of money for Buddhist schools, ceremonies, and other activities. (Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 215)

 -- Documents captured in 1963 revealed Communist participation in the Buddhist protest movement (Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 217). 

-- The eight Buddhists who were killed at the protest in Hue were not killed by gunfire from government troops but by the same kind of plastic bomb commonly used by the VC (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, pp. 40-41; Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 215). 

-- Seeking to capitalize on the Buddhist protests, the VC launched attacks in some cities. The VC focused their attacks on only four provinces, however, and took only one city, Ben Tuong (Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, pp. 246-247; Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 38). As noted above, ARVN had considerable success against the VC in 1963. Yet, liberal journalists portrayed South Vietnam as being on the verge of collapse shortly before Diem was killed, and liberal scholars still repeat this myth to this day.

-- LBJ later called the removal of Diem the greatest mistake of the Vietnam War. Nixon called it one of the three biggest mistakes of the war (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, p 37). 

-- The VC were thrilled with the removal of Diem, viewing it as “a gift from heaven.” Nguyen Huu Tho, the leader of the VC, said, “Americans have managed to do what we could not in nine years. It is a gift from heaven” (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 39). 

-- Dr. Moyar notes that the Buddhist protests were driven by a few militant Buddhist leaders and that Communist agents played an extensive role in the protest movement: 

Diem’s critics were wrong to believe that the Buddhist protest movement of 1963 arose from popular dissatisfaction with a government guilty of religious intolerance. It was, in truth, a power play by a few Buddhist leaders whose duplicity became clear over time as they showed themselves impervious to government attempts at reconciliation and as their charges of religious persecution were disproved. These leaders had close ties to the Communists or were themselves covert Communists, and other Communist agents participated extensively in the Buddhist movement’s protest activities. (Triumph Forsaken, p. xvi) 

-- David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and John Paul Vann misrepresented the Diem government, the state of affairs in South Vietnam, and the Buddhist protests: 

In 1963, the American journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan played pivotal roles in turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against the Diem regime. Their reporting on military events was inaccurate at times, and it regularly overemphasized the South Vietnamese government’s shortcomings. Colonel John Paul Vann, a U.S. Army adviser and the central figure in Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie, was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan ever acknowledged. Vann fed the journalists an extremely misleading version of the Battle of Ap Bac, one that the journalists transformed into the accepted version of the battle. Halberstam and Sheehan presented grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of which they unwittingly received from secret Communist agents. (Triumph Forsaken, p. xvi) 

-- Vietnam War scholar Leonard Scruggs sums up the Buddhist protest issue well: 

The facts of the Buddhist crisis of 1963 have been largely buried and distorted by the same anti-Diem journalists who reported from Saigon in those days. They were the same New York Times, Time magazine, and Associated Press reporters who became the core disseminators of distorted anti-war propaganda right through the fall of Cambodia and South Vietnam in 1975 and continue to this day to defend a left-liberal interpretation of the Vietnam War. Marguerite Higgins, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for her Korean War writing, frequently clashed with these younger male reporters in Vietnam. She derided them as “typewriter strategists who were seldom at scenes of battle” and alleged that they “would like to see us lose the war to prove that they’re right.” (Scruggs, Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 40)

[James DiEugenio]

The Buddhist crisis began in earnest in May of 1963 in the city of Hue.

On the night of May 8th, encouraged by Tri Quang and other leaders, a crowd gathered outside the government radio station in Hue. They wanted his speech from that morning carried on the station. The station refused.  The crowd became belligerent and began pressing on the doors and windows.   The dispute was caused by a disagreement in the Diem family between Ngo Dinh Canh and Ngo DInh Thuc.  Canh wanted his brother to stop allowing the Buddhists to display their flag. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 213) ARVN and civil guards were called out. Fire hoses were used and turned on the crowd.   As the security forces were called in, two powerful explosions  went off at the front of the building killing eight, including a child. Fifteen were seriously wounded.

The ARVN now used percussion grenades  to disperse what was left of the crowd because Major Dang Sy thought this was a VC attack. Which it was not.  Tri Quang blamed the violence on Dang Sy. On May 10th, the Buddhists issued a manifesto calling for equal status with catholics, display of their flag,  an end to Buddhist persecution, free speech for their clerics and compensation for the victims. (Kaiser, ibid)

 Journalist Marguerite Higgins interviewed the hospital director where the victims were taken. He said he had never seen such ugly injuries, in some cases, the victims were decapitated. Plus, there was no metal in the wounds. And there were no wounds below the chest area. Dr Quyen figured the explosives had to have been in mid air when they went off to create these kinds of gruesome injuries. Nhu imprisoned Quyen when he refused to say the injuries were caused by VC weapons. Ellen Hammer later wrote that she could find no evidence that the VC had the plastic bombs that could produce these kinds of injuries, and she concluded that is what had caused them.

Ngo Dinh Can, Diem's younger brother who ran Hue, later concluded that bombs must have been set off by an American agent. Later, a Catholic newspaper, Hoa Binh agreed with this and located the agent who had done the deed, a Captain Scott, a military advisor in the Mekong Delta.  He used a CIA plastic explosive, about the size of a matchbox, with a a timer on it.

As Jim Douglass noted in JFK and The Unspeakable, this event coincides with the SEC DEF meeting in Hawaii where McNamara is demanding the withdrawal schedules to get out all American advisors.  The episode got worse when DIem insisted the deaths were caused by a VC terrorist grenade. (FRUS Vol. 3, p. 345) Because of this, as Kaiser writes, the Buddhist crisis became " the last and most serious struggle between DIem's regime and the growing non communist opposition to it." (ibid)

Edited October 3, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

The reluctance of Diem to take any kind of responsibility for the violence or to agree to the Buddhist  demands allowed the Buddhist leaders to now plan on hunger strikes and protests.

As the protests expanded, the ARVN now used tear gas in Hue and declared martial law. There were 63 casualties, since the tear gas was a special mixture used during WW !. (Newman, p. 341)  Nhu now began to say that  the leading clerics were actually VC agents. (Kaiser, p. 215)

Diem tried to be conciliatory toward the Buddhists in early June. But this was undercut by Madame Nhu's condemnation of the Buddhists as anti-Nationalists, who were being exploited and controlled by the communists. (Ibid) Far East undersecretary Roger Hilsman advised the embassy that Diem had to renounce her statement. But now DIem said he was ruling out repeal of Decree Law 10, which gave Catholics special privileges. 

The next day, June 11th, the first Buddhist monk--Thich Quang Duc -- immolated himself in front of cameras and reporters. Madame Nhu described this as a "barbecue" and said that if the Buddhists wanted to have another, "I will be glad to supply the gasoline.  Let then burn and we shall clap our hands." (Newman, p. 343)

Great people we were supporting eh?

Edited October 3, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

This was the beginning of the State Department pushing to give DIem an ultimatum.  And they essentially did so after the first immolation.  Kennedy thought this was too extreme since it was sent without his permission. (Newman, p. 344)

But Kennedy had been taken by surprise by the televised burning and asked why he had not been informed of the crisis sooner? (p. 344). So he decided to remove Nolting.   He wanted to replace him with Edmund Gullion.  But in a fateful decision, Rusk vetoed  Gullion and they settled on Henry Cabot Lodge. (Douglass, pp. 151-52) Around this time, people in the State Department now began to recognize that they needed to look for a possible replacement for Diem, who was--to put it mildly-- too lenient with his brother and sister in law. (Newman, p. 344)

When the Embassy tried to arrange a meeting and manifesto, the persecution continued on June 15th when a demonstration was suppressed and turned into a riot. (Newman, p. 345) On July 7th, the police had an altercation with American reporters trying to cover a Buddhist protest. (Kaiser, p. 218)

On July 16 and 17, the police beat up Buddhist demonstrators and strung barbed wire in Saigon.  Nhu now told the State Department that the aid to Saigon should be like Lend Lease in WW 2, with no restrictions placed upon it. (Kaiser, ibid)

Hanoi recognized this serious problem between DIem and Washington and they now arranged for a large offensive in July. Attacks, which had been trending downward, now rose markedly upward: in some places the number of attacks even doubled in one month. And some of them were battalion strength.  What this proved to many in the military is that the VC slowed down their operations, not due to effective resistance, but when they wished to make a political effect. (Kaiser, p. 221)

What the Buddhist uprising had done was to place Vietnam much further up the national news cue and the political cue in Washington.  And in the State Department there developed a nexus point between three men: Averill Harriman, Roger Hilsman and Mike Forrestal. They had decided that if the Buddhist crisis continued, it was time for a change in government in Saigon . (Newman, p. 345)

Edited October 3, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Well, the immolations did not cease.  As Newman points out there were eight more, one of them being a nun. Hilsman now predicted to JFK that there would be coup attempts against DIem because of his lack of leadership. Kennedy rejected that option at this time (early July). (Newman, p. 346) Now the demonstrations spread to Saigon and Da Nang as well as Hue. On August 8th Madame Nhu said in the NY Times that the embassy had failed to silence her and she was asking for stronger measures against the Buddhists. (Kaiser, p. 222) Vice President Tho said on August 13th that they might prosecute the Buddhists for the May 8th incident at the radio station. (ibid, p. 223)

This vacuum of leadership due to the Buddhist crisis now encouraged people in the ARVN to approach the CIA station in Saigon and ask if they would be willing to back a coup against Diem. General Tran Von Don specifically mentioned that Diem had failed from the very beginning, back in May, to handle the crisis with any degree of fairness or objectivity and it now had become a national issue. (Newman, p. 347) Tran also promised to hold free elections after DIem was disposed of. The man he talked to was Lou Conein.   In fact Nhu himself even suggested a coup as a way of smoking out who was plotting against his brother, in order to eliminate them. (ibid, p. 348)

Nhu likely did this  because he foresaw the future getting worse. On August 5, 15 (2 that day), and 18th there were more immolations; and one more on the 21st, after huge demonstrations in Saigon.  Diem now placed Saigon under martial law. (Newman, p. 349). This from a man who already had a very bad civil rights record, according to one source, the book Trapped by Success, he was executing 135 people per month. Throughout the day of the 22nd, Nhu had the combat police carry out raids on the pagodas, arresting over 1, 400 Buddhists, with some monks being injured or killed in the process..  Diem used the cover of martial law to try and make it look like the ARVN had ordered the raids. (Newman, p. 349)

This eroding situation led to the deception of Kennedy and the sending of the Saturday Night Special, more commonly called the "coup cable".  After studying this episode at length, I have concluded this was a plot between Harriman, Hilsman and Forrestal in Washington with Lodge in Saigon. They perceived that  the Buddhist Crisis had taken so much support away from Diem that there was no way he could win the war. So they took the removal of DIem into their own hands. 

From the above, as the reader can see, I could not disagree more about Diem being an effective leader.  As Newman said, he simply could not control his brother Nhu or Nhu's wife. In my view, people like Nixon started this myth about Diem to cover up Kennedy's withdrawal plan. And with Nixon it was part of the whole blame game since he was in on appointing the Catholic Diem to run a Buddhist country. Utterly ridiculous.

 

Edited October 3, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

I’ve made the point that every criticism of the Vietnam War can be made of the Korean War, and that if the ‘60s and ‘70s liberals had been around in 1950-1953 to demonize the South Korean government, smear our war effort, and whitewash North Korea’s crimes, the entire Korean Peninsula would be ruled by North Korea’s cruel regime. I normally don’t quote Wikipedia, because its articles often contain substantial errors or omissions, but Wikipedia’s article on the Korean War is pretty good, and, among other things, it points out that the Korean War caused more civilian deaths in proportion to population size than did World War II or the Vietnam War; it also mentions some of the crimes committed by the South Korean government:

     "The Korean War was among the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger proportional civilian death toll than World War II or the Vietnam War. It incurred the destruction of virtually all of Korea's major cities, thousands of massacres by both sides, including the mass killing of tens of thousands of suspected communists by the South Korean government, and the torture and starvation of prisoners of war by the North Koreans. North Korea became among the most heavily bombed countries in history."

Nevertheless, virtually everyone agrees that it is a very good thing that we fought to prevent North Korea from conquering South Korea, and that during the war South Korea’s government was, for all its many faults, not as bad as North Korea’s government. And nobody but a hardcore communist would deny that South Korea eventually became a democratic nation and an economic miracle, whereas North Korea has remained a vicious gulag.

The tens of millions of South Koreans and the tens of thousands of surviving Korean War veterans can just thank God that the liberals of the ‘60s and ‘70s weren’t around in the early 1950s to sabotage the Korean War effort and betray South Korea the way they sabotaged the Vietnam War effort and betrayed South Vietnam.  

[Greg Doudna]

1 hour ago, Michael Griffith said:

The tens of millions of South Koreans and the tens of thousands of surviving Korean War veterans can just thank God that the liberals of the ‘60s and ‘70s weren’t around in the early 1950s to sabotage the Korean War effort and betray South Korea the way they sabotaged the Vietnam War effort and betrayed South Vietnam.  

Michael, could you comment on (a) the accuracy of the below account, (b) how do you feel about it?, (c) do you think repression of the North Korean people is worse, better off, or about the same as a result? and (d) would you support an opt-out on tax returns for any U.S. citizen to choose not to be forced against their will to pay for this? Or not?

I also have a fifth, (e), assume China and/or USSR gave a serious red line all-out nuclear attack deterrent threat if US activities in Vietnam and/or Korea did not cease and desist/withdraw, and the most credible intelligence at your disposal indicated 15% odds that they would carry through to obliteration of full nuclear war between the major powers (85% odds of calling bluff). Of course you do not know for sure that your best intelligence is correct--the true risk could be lower or higher, but assume for purposes of the question that that is your most credible and most trustworthy intelligence at your disposal that you do have, as to odds. If you were the decision-maker, would you withdraw or continue in Vietnam and/or Korea, under those circumstances?

(Thanks in advance for what I trust will be straight answers to these five?) (I am not willing to answer questions in response, just to say up front. But these are my questions for you since you have been speaking on this.)

From wikipedia article, "Bombing of North Korea".

--start excerpts--

"[On 3 November 1950] MacArthur agreed for the first time to a firebombing campaign, agreeing to Stratemeyer's request to burn the city of Kanggye and several other towns: "Burn it if you so desire. Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson to any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy." The same evening, MacArthur's chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target." Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to "destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village."^[8]

On 5 November 1950, General Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: "Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter."^[11] The same day, twenty-two B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.^[12]

In the wake of the Kanggye attack, FEAF began an intensive firebombing campaign that quickly incinerated multiple Korean cities. Three weeks after the attacks began, the air force assessed the damage as follows:^[8][12]

• Ch'osan - 85%
• Hoeryong (Hoeryŏng)- 90%
• Huich'on (Hŭich'ŏn)- 75%
• Kanggye - 75%
• Kointong - 90%
• Manp'ochin - 95%
• Namsi - 90%
• Sakchu - 75%
• Sinuichu - 60%
• Uichu - 20%

On 17 November 1950, General MacArthur told U.S. Ambassador to Korea John J. Muccio, "Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert." By "this area" MacArthur meant the entire area between "our present positions and the border".^[13]

On 25 June 1951, General O'Donnell, commander of the Far Eastern Air Force Bomber Command, testified in answer to a question from Senator John C. Stennis ("North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn't it?): "Oh, yes; ... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name ... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea."^[14]

In June 1952, as part of a strategy to maintain "air pressure" during armistice negotiations, FEAF's Fifth Air Force selected seventy-eight villages for destruction by B-26 light bombers.^[15]

At the conclusion of the war, the Air Force assessed the destruction of twenty-two major cities as follows:^[16] (. . .)

The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea.^[17][18] The war's highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean,^[19] reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland.^[20][21] Dean Rusk, the U.S. State Department official who headed East Asian affairs, concluded that America had bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another".^[22]

North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground.^[2] In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.^[23]

In an interview with U.S. Air Force Historians in 1988, USAF General Curtis LeMay, who was also head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, commented on efforts to win the war as a whole, including the strategic bombing campaign, saying “Right at the start of the war, unofficially, I slipped a message in "under the carpet" in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC lose with some incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn't do anything like that. We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too......Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can't seem to stomach that.”^[24][25]

Pyongyang, which saw 75 percent of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets.^[26][27] By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.^[28]

In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, "The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages."^[15]

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill privately criticized the American use of napalm, writing that it was "very cruel", as US forces were "splashing it all over the civilian population", "tortur[ing] great masses of people". He conveyed these sentiments to U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, who "never published the statement". Publicly, Churchill allowed Bradley "to issue a statement that confirmed U.K. support for U.S. napalm attacks".^[29]

In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy stated that he had witnessed "a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital". He said that there were "no more cities in North Korea". He added, "My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation—every city was a collection of chimneys."^[13] (. . .)

After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.^[30] The generating facilities of hydroelectric dams had been targeted previously in a series of mass air attacks starting in June 1952. 

On 13 May 1953, 20 F-84s of the 58th Fighter Bomber Wing attacked the Toksan Dam, producing a flood that destroyed seven hundred buildings in Pyongyang and thousands of acres of rice. On 15–16 May, two groups of F-84s attacked the Chasan Dam.^[31] The flood from the destruction of the Toksan dam "scooped clean" 27 miles (43 km) of river valley. The attacks were followed by the bombing of the Kuwonga Dam, the Namsi Dam and the Taechon Dam.^[32][33] The bombing of these five dams and ensuing floods threatened several million North Koreans with starvation; according to Charles K. Armstrong, "only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine."^[2] (. . .)

In the eyes of North Koreans as well as some observers, the U.S.' deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure which resulted in the destruction of cities and high civilian death count, was a war crime.^[2][30][37] Historian Bruce Cumings has likened the American bombing to genocide.^[38]

[Matthew Koch]

A little over ten years ago. Texas Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives about how she thought Vietnam was worse off...
She also seemed to not know that there was only one Vietnam at the time, LOL! 

[Greg Doudna]

20 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

I’ve made the point that every criticism of the Vietnam War can be made of the Korean War, and that if the ‘60s and ‘70s liberals had been around in 1950-1953 to demonize the South Korean government, smear our war effort . . .

Another minor point, I grimace every time I hear you use that pronoun "our" in what LeMay blithely calls "Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody . . ."

My God. "Our". What is the mechanism for that not being mine.

And now the Ukraine situation which could go nuclear. 

It is indescribably sad. What could be in the world if there were not stupidity and craven behavior on large scales. 

On nuclear war there is no good solution until the major powers of the world come together in a constitutional convention and hammer out a unified military command, a federal world government with due process and redress of grievances through courts not war, and wired-in bills of rights and checks and balances as best as can be done to inoculate against totalitarianism ... the same issues with the American Republic experiment but writ large on a world scale. 

The written or legal framework for such is already in place if it were recognized. It is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the best human documents in all of history AND it already NOW has been signed by practically all of the world's nations. So it is not a matter of there is no baseline standard upon which there is no agreement; there is. The problem is rather that the signatories are high numbers of corrupted states who abuse human rights, not abiding in reality to that which is practically universally assented now as what should be. 

But what do I know, so insignificant.

And what can average people do--can link up with a good religious community. Doesn't matter so much the belief-system, one can always metaphorize it to reconcile it with science, if the heart and mindfulness is there, that is what matters. That is the power of religion in the good sense, heart and community. Not being isolated. The analogy of how black churches have been the center of African-American experience for so long, kept things together through rough times. So that when bad things happen, there are losses and mourning but still a better day beyond that.

Edited October 5, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Michael Griffith]

Here is more information on the devastating effectiveness of Operations Linebacker I and Linebacker II, as well as on the effectiveness of the naval operations that immediately preceded them. This information comes from an article titled “Operation Linebacker: The Sea-Power Factor,” by Edward Marolda, published two months ago (August 2022) on the U.S. Naval Institute’s website. Among other things, Marolda politely notes that the Linebacker attacks should have been done in 1965.

It is worth repeating over and over that Linebacker II alone refutes the claim that the war was unwinnable. In just 11 days, we brought North Vietnam to the verge of collapse and made them desperate to resume peace talks in order to get Nixon to stop the bombing. We know from North Vietnamese sources that Linebacker II inflicted enormous, unprecedented damage. The closing of Haiphong Harbor alone was a severe blow because 85% of North Vietnam’s imports came through Haiphong. During Linebacker I and II, imports from China dropped by a staggering 82%, dropping from 160,000 tons per month to 30,000 tons per month. Here’s the information from Marolda’s article:

Nixon concluded that because of Hanoi’s brazen aggression [i.e., the Easter Offensive], President Lyndon B. Johnson’s October 1968 prohibition against U.S. combat operations in North Vietnam was now moot. On 5 April, in Operation Freedom Train, Nixon unleashed U.S. air and naval power against targets in the North Vietnamese panhandle south of the 19th parallel. As they had in South Vietnam, Seventh Fleet cruisers and destroyers operating along the North Vietnamese coast bombarded enemy surface-to-air and antiaircraft sites, road traffic, bridges, and “WIBLICs” (waterborne logistics craft) trying to move supplies southward along the coast.

On 14 April, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, authorized the Navy’s cruisers and destroyers to bombard military targets north of the 20th parallel. President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had severely limited the ability of the fleet’s surface warships to strike targets afloat and ashore, and then only those far from Haiphong. Moorer, however, knew that Nixon had decided to “take out the whole Haiphong dock area, foreign ships or no ships.”

On the 16th, the USS Oklahoma City (CLG-5) and four destroyers, in conjunction with carrier squadrons, hit petroleum storage targets and coastal and antiaircraft defenses in and around Haiphong. According to one Vietnamese account, the U.S. warships could operate well beyond the range of coastal defense guns. As a result, “these shelling attacks inflicted serious losses on us without receiving any punishment whatsoever.”

By October, Seventh Fleet warships had bombarded sites around Haiphong five times and by then had fired more than 111,000 rounds that destroyed enemy shore batteries, logistic traffic, and 200 coastal vessels all along the coast.

In addition to carrier air attack and surface ship bombardment, the Seventh Fleet hit North Vietnam with another of its offensive assets—mine warfare. Between 0859 and 0901 on 9 May, six Navy A-7 Corsairs and three Marine A-6 Intruders flying from the Coral Sea seeded the approaches to Haiphong with 36 Mk-52 magnetic sea mines. This brilliantly conceived and expertly run operation shut down this major port, through which passed 85 percent of Hanoi’s imports, for the rest of the war. No longer would Soviet freighters brazenly steam through the Seventh Fleet area of operations loaded with military hardware for North Vietnam. Hence, in only a few minutes and without cost, the Navy completed an essential mission that Washington had failed to order since 1965.

In the following days and months, as part of Operation Pocket Money, fleet aircraft sowed 11,700 more Mk-52 and Mk-36 Destructors in North Vietnam’s other ports, key river mouths, and coastal areas. Seventh Fleet units, including Marine helicopter gunships, frustrated North Vietnamese efforts to use small vessels to lighter cargo ashore from ships beyond the mined waters. The mining offensive severely impacted Hanoi’s supply situation, especially limiting the import of SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, and put heavy pressure on the rail and road routes from China. Exports from China to North Vietnam during Linebacker fell from 160,000 tons a month to just 30,000 tons. . . .

The fleet unleashed even more devastating firepower on 10 May, the first day of the Linebacker I campaign, the object of which was to limit Hanoi’s ability to wage war. . .

North Vietnam’s leaders were so concerned about these attacks in their nation’s heartland that they dispatched their MiG force to meet the American squadrons. That action would cost them dearly. Between 1300 and 1306, Navy F-4 Phantoms shot down six of the 11 North Vietnamese MiGs that Navy and Air Force fighters would claim that day. One author with access to North Vietnamese records has observed that for the 923rd Fighter Squadron that operated MiG-17s, “May 1972 proved to be the worst month of the entire war.”

The Linebacker campaign reached a peak for the Seventh Fleet in late summer 1972, when Task Force 77 aircraft were executing as many as 4,700 attack sorties a month. Negotiations to end the war, however, broke down at the end of October. Nixon then decided to up the ante with a massive B-52 bomber and tactical air assault on North Vietnam. He told Moorer that “this is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.” Energized by this call to action, the Joint Chiefs chairman designed a campaign to inflict maximum damage on the enemy’s war-making capability and convince the leaders and population of North Vietnam that Nixon meant business.

Beginning on 18 December, as waves of B-52s hit targets in and around Hanoi, Seventh Fleet forces added their power to the Linebacker II campaign. The USS Midway (CVA-41), America (CVA-66), and Ranger (CVA-61) attack squadrons focused their strikes on Haiphong as Seventh Fleet surface cruisers and destroyers pummeled military targets in 24-hour operations all along the coast and inland. On 28 December, after a “maximum effort” B-52 bombing raid on Hanoi, the North Vietnamese finally agreed to meet to end the war. That gathering produced the Paris Agreement of 27 January 1973. . . .

The U.S. Navy and Air Force bombing campaigns were essential to defeat of the Nguyen Hue offensive [the Easter Offensive] in South Vietnam; they seriously degraded North Vietnam’s air and coastal defenses; and put heavy military and psychological pressure on Hanoi to negotiate an end to the fighting. (https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/august/operation-linebacker-sea-power-factor)

Marolda also notes that the U.S. Navy task force “eliminated” the threat from North Vietnam’s navy:

Through the sinking of enemy P-4 and P-6 torpedo boats and other combatants at sea, along the coast, and in port, the Task Force 77 carrier squadrons and surface warships eliminated the enemy’s maritime threat to the fleet.

Thus, Hanoi was powerless to challenge the U.S. Navy task force except via air attacks. But whenever the North Vietnamese sent fighters to attack the task force, they suffered heavy losses and did little or no damage. In short, North Vietnam was essentially defenseless against U.S. naval bombardment, since the task force ships could shell the coastal area while staying beyond the range of Hanoi’s coastal batteries.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Linebacker I and II disproved all the dire predictions that mining Haiphong Harbor and doing massive bombing north of the 20th parallel would cause Soviet and/or Chinese intervention. Intelligence Community and senior military experts advised LBJ repeatedly that it was unlikely that Russia and/or China would intervene in response to closing Haiphong Harbor and heavy bombing north of the 20th parallel, but he listened to his liberal advisors instead of his intelligence and military experts.

[Greg Doudna]

44 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

Here is more information on the devastating effectiveness of Operations Linebacker I and Linebacker II, as well as on the effectiveness of the naval operations that immediately preceded them. This information comes from an article titled “Operation Linebacker: The Sea-Power Factor,” by Edward Marolda, published two months ago (August 2022) on the U.S. Naval Institute’s website. Among other things, Marolda politely notes that the Linebacker attacks should have been done in 1965.

It is worth repeating over and over that Linebacker II alone refutes the claim that the war was unwinnable. In just 11 days, we brought North Vietnam to the verge of collapse and made them desperate to resume peace

What exactly was the war objective? Regime change in North Vietnam? 

Ho Chi Minh was their George Washington, right? You topple Ho Chi Minh and install a US puppet regime in North Vietnam, or let the existing communist regime remain but with someone other than George Washington running it, how do you prevent the same guerilla war and partisans in South Vietnam all over again? 

Would this be a permanent military presence/occupation in the Vietnams analogous to the Koreas? That is the best-case endgame? 

I did business with a Vietnam vet who ran a computer repair shop in Anacortes, Washington (he's moved to Florida and retired now). He told me he enlisted with six of his high school buddies, seven in all, very tight. Five killed, only two came home, him and one other. He said the very night he landed in Vietnam he knew it was a mistake but what could he do? He said he couldn't very well desert, you just keep going because of your friends and hope to get through it. He carried lifelong fury against wealthy persons in power who profit from wars and send people like him and his high school friends as cannon fodder. He was a decent quiet man who treated people decently but it broke him. 

Is this something to be proud of? "How U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam unleashed an enduring disaster", https://phys.org/news/2017-10-chemical-warfare-vietnam-unleashed-disaster.html. "More than 10 years of U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam exposed an estimated 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese people to Agent Orange. More than 40 years on, the impact on their health has been staggering. This dispersion of Agent Orange over a vast area of central and south Vietnam poisoned the soil, river systems, lakes and rice paddies of Vietnam, enabling toxic chemicals to enter the food chain."

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks for that Matthew, man those kinds of politicians are scarce.

The following backs up what Greg's witness was saying.  In spades.

Donald Duncan was a special forces officer who was a firm anti communist before he went to Vietnam.  What he saw there horrified him.  This included, for starters, torture and murder of POW's. His story in Ramparts in 1966  created a sensation since he was there and part of it.  And recall how early this was in relative terms.   But that is how bad it got just by 1965 under LBJ.   Forget the horror show under Nixon in Cambodia and Laos.

Duncan was a quiet hero who died in obscurity. He helped America understand why it should have never been in Indochina.

https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2016-2-page-100.htm

Edited October 7, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

On 8/27/2022 at 2:30 PM, Pat Speer said:

As I recall, Ho Chi Minh actually liked the U.S., and would almost certainly have been a pro-U.S. communist.

This is one of the inexcusable myths that some liberals continue to repeat, even though it has been thoroughly debunked--so much so that even some liberals have abandoned it.

Yes, we supported Ho during WW II, because we were willing to support just about anyone who was anti-German and anti-Japanese (which is why we also supported Stalin and Mao during WW II); and, yes, Ho initially tried to appear pro-American after WW II. However, a veritable mountain of evidence, some of it from North Vietnamese and Soviet sources, has long since proved that Ho was anti-American/anti-Western and that he was a devout, fanatical Communist who was trained and supported by the Soviet Union and Red China, not to mention that he was a ruthless killer and dictator (although Le Duan and Truong Chinh were even worse).

When McNamara began privately telling LBJ and others the lie that the war was unwinnable, he was like a basketball coach who had refused to play his best players for 45 minutes of every game and then privately complained to the ownership that his team could not win.

It is a basic, long-recognized principle of war that you must hit the enemy's supply chain at its collection point and not wait until the supplies have been dispersed to forces in the field, because, obviously, it's much harder to hit dozens of supply convoys than it is to hit the central collection point from which the supplies are dispersed. Even the most civilized rules of war recognize a combatant's right to do this, partly because it is an essential element of the natural right of a nation to protect its troops. 

The Joint Chiefs and other senior officers repeatedly explained this to McNamara and his ignorant "whiz kids," but they would not listen. Thus, McNamara refused to recommend that Haiphong Harbor be mined and that key overland supply routes from China be shut down. The Hanoi regime simply would have been unable to sustain their war effort if we had taken this crucial, essential step of warfare.

When Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor and hit some key overland supply routes above the 20th and 22nd parallels in Operations Linebacker I and II, from 9 May to 23 October and from 18 to 29 December 1973, North Vietnam's incoming supplies were cut by over 80%. During the last four days of Linebacker II, Hanoi's air defenses were forced to fight with only a fraction of their usual supply of SAMs (some air-defense units had none, while other units had far fewer than normal). This is not to mention all the damage that was done to North Vietnam's POL, energy, and transportation infrastructure, another action entirely authorized by the long-recognized rules of war.

Our air losses in Linebacker I and II were relatively light, contrary to North Vietnamese propaganda, but if we had done a similar operation for six months in 1965, before the Soviets helped North Vietnam build a formidable air-defense system, our losses would have been microscopic and North Vietnam would have been rendered impotent to wage war and most likely would have sued for a genuine peace rather than risk implosion and collapse.