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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Visiting Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) for the first time, their Vietnam War museums reminded me of the consequence of a tactical advantage (like air superiority) in the context of a failed strategy (like invading without a good reason).

You lose wars.

The life and business on the streets there reminded me what happens when you don't invade for no reasons.

Capitalism flourishes.

At least from what you see on the street level, capitalism is doing better there than in the bailout-laden U.S.

Did I oversimplify? Of course. But until the U.S. shows some strategic intelligence like "don't invade countries without a reason" its tactical choices will always fail too.

By the way, they call it the American War there.

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The holocaust in Cambodia committed by the Khmer communists was one direct result of our failure in Vietnam. And it took the fall of the Berlin Wall and the broad collapse of communist ideology in the 1990s before Vietnam began to liberalize.

Some blame the American bombings, which started with Operation Menu in 1969, for giving Pol Pot the popular support he needed.

I do not know enough of Cambodian history to tell if it is true, but at least it sounds like a plausible scenario.

Correlation is not causation. One could just as easily argue that it was the intervention of western powers (France and the US) in Southeast Asia that gave the communists legitimacy which then lead to the holocaust in Cambodia. Liberalization in Vietnam had more to do with changes in China and improved relations with the United States, than the Berlin Wall.

The US was an ally of South Vietnam at their government's invitation, and never did actually invade North Vietnam. If they did, maybe the war would have gone differently.

> The US was an ally of South Vietnam at their government's invitation

Oh come on. South Vietnam was an American client state from the word go. American advisors helped run Ngo Dinh Diem's campaign in the 1955 referendum that set up the South Vietnamese government. When Diem didn't turn out to be the man the U.S. government had hoped he would, American money helped finance the 1963 coup that killed him.

> and never did actually invade North Vietnam

No, we just bombed the holy hell out of them: see Operation Rolling Thunder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder) and Operation Linebacker II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II) for examples.

And North Vietnam was a Soviet client state from the word go, that's how the Cold War worked.

There was still no invasion of Vietnam. The entire operation was hamstrung by politically imposed restrictions.

I can't believe you're not downvoted to oblivion. Your oringal response was as close to incorrect as you can be while still being factual (we installed a new regime when the old regime stopped liking us), and you response with "the soviets did it too"?

"We weren't any worse than the soviets" is not a moral defense, and given that we couldn't hold south vietnam against insurgency, you'd need a hell of a case to support the idea that we could have held north vietnam.

I mean, given that we were dropping napalm and agent orange, what kind of "politically imposed restrictions" would you say held us back from winning?

In military terms, the US did hold South Vietnam against insurgency. The problem is that the source of support for that insurgency was in North Vietnam, and it was impossible for US ground troops to advance there and eliminate that support.

The war effort was also politically micromanaged--for instance, every airstrike had to be individually approved by the White House. This led to delays and, frankly, interference in military affairs from incompetent politicians.

Fighting a counterinsurgent war on the defensive is never strategically sound; one is always better served by being on the move and taking the initiative. This was politically impossible in Vietnam, which is why it took so long.

Now, perhaps there were valid political reasons not to invade north Vietnam. In that case, the answer is not to get involved at all. You either do the job right or you don't do it at all. In either case, the mistake wasn't that the US invaded Vietnam without a good reason--there was no invasion, and there was a good reason. The mistake was that the US didn't fully commit to the objective, and that the White House didn't let the military do their job.

Well, I'm not a military scholar but I'm pretty sure everybody who is disagrees with you here. The battle was entirely political, and armchair general troop movement stuff is completely beside the point.

Here's the fact: Nobody wanted us there. South vietnamese were informing on the US and killing our troops. You think having a few airstrikes being more effective would have made a difference for that? Like if we just killed enough of the bad guys, the rest of them would have given up?

That's not the way asymmetrical warfare works. Every guy you kill has brothers and cousins who want to avenge him. Losing the political battle is losing the war. That's why we won in Iraq (Al Qaeda in Iraq were flown-in nihilists who alienated the population), and that's why we're losing in Afghanistan (the Taliban are a local movement with a local base).

You're seriously saying that had we invaded North Vietnam and bombed more stuff, it would have been fine? Like we could cut the supply of an army that was living off the land? Looks like we would've just been occupying twice as much ground with the same number of troops, unless you're advocating killing every last man, woman and child in the country.

The Viet Cong was broken by their failure in the Tet Offensive. But they would have been broken much sooner if their source of support in the north was eliminated.

And no military can be effective when it's micromanaged from the White House.

Given that we were fleeing our embassy by helicopter in 1973, I find it hard to believe that the VC were quote "broken" in 1968.

If you're living off the land, conducting guerilla warfare, you can't be broken. "Broken" is for standing armies. Guerillas just leave the field of battle and then bomb your patrols when you try to occupy.

It's easy to lose a war after you withdraw all your troops from the country. In any case, guerrillas can't and don't hold territory--it was the North Vietnamese regulars who overran Saigon in 1975.

I'd suggest reading this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%...

I wouldn't be so sure. It hasn't worked out well in Iraq or Afghanistan.

It worked out fine in Iraq, people just didn't think it was worth the cost and the occupation took longer than people expected.

Oh I see. So they installed the government in SV, propped it up and then that government officially invited us. And then we reluctantly offered our "help"?

It still doesn't constitute an invasion, any more than it constituted an invasion when China sent troops into North Korea during the Korean war.

I didn't say the people of South Vietnam democratically voted to formally request US involvement, or that the Diem regime was morally legitimate, or even that it was a good idea to get involved in the Vietnam War. Just that there was no actual invasion anywhere in the process.

LOL.

A bit of revisionist history never hurt anyone.

There's the popular history everyone believes in regardless of its factuality, and then there's what actually happened. I have no problem revising the popular history when it's wrong.

Given a time when everyone was told there was a great threat from the aggressive expansionism of the Soviet Union and China, they felt they had a good reason. They thought Vietnam would result in a domino effect across the region.

I don't think it was a great reason and most now don't, but then again I thought Afghanistan could never work, and there were very few of us who would say so. It's easy to get swept up by militaristic arguments it seems.

And Afghanistan did 'work'?

"few of us" were actually quite a majority... Of people who knew what they were talking about. And we were right: Afghanistan cannot be "conquered" or "fixed", as 10+ years of failed occupation have proven.

It's more like 70 years of failed occupation...

It is even longer than that. The first British adventure there was in mid 19th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War

How can you effect a change in culture down the barrel of a gun while claiming to be friends? That was the gist of the plan at the time. Anyway, we're probably straying too far from the point of the article...

Try 20 - the USSR has been there for 10 years, with thousands of lives lost from every state in the union...

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