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Comment by jalapenos | Hacker News Reader

It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.

Whether they should have bothered in the first place though, given how corrupt and dysfunctional the regime in the south was, is an open moral question.

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> It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.

Yes, that's called "losing a war," and no serious strategist pretends that politics is not one of the key theaters (if not the key theater) of conflict.

Yes, that's literally how essentially every war ends; some combination of factors causes one side to stop fighting rather than continuing the pay the price in blood and treasure that fighting demands.

There's probably a few somewhere that end because the losing side doesn't give up but fights to the last person, but that's very much not the norm.

There are plenty of examples from history where the winners simply wiped out the losers. In ancient times the usual practice was to kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, and destroy all the cultural artifacts. Probably thousands of societies or cultures worldwide were utterly erased in that way, maybe leaving only some shards of pottery. We are perhaps a little more civilized about such things now, and show restraint for political or moral purposes rather than setting out to commit genocide.

That is really, really distilling the entire decades-long indochina conflict into one weekend, wow lol.

One weekend, 7 years and Nixon's entire presidency before we actually withdrew.

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