Fears of a 'Tet offensive' in Iraq grow

You guys need to do more research before discussing VN. Many of the views are one-sided, limited and/or factually wrong .
About a Tet offensive in Iraq ... I think the comparison is more symbolic than realistic. I don't think the Iraqui insurgents are going to come out with tanks and battalions to face American. What they might do is more of the same but in a more co-ordinated fashion and wider scale just to show the World that American have failed to keep the peace in Iraq. In that sense, they are very capable of pulling it off.

 

I'm reading through the thread and will respond to your points more thoroughly later but wanted to respond to this.

I might be mistaken but when did the US have a battle or war that had more casualties than the Civil War? 20K Americans died at Gettysburg alone and several battles were nearly as bloody and in many of those battles the Union side lost more men than the Confederates even though they still won the battles.

 

Sam's being a bit harsh, as he is occasionally prone to, but I see his point. My understanding of the Vietnam war is that the US poured more bombs on North Vietnam than the Allies did in all of WWII. I don't see how the US didn't try to bomb supply lines and weapons depots.

My own understanding was that the NVA had dug a lot of tunnels to protect them from aerial bombardment so while the US was trying to attack them they were hidden enough to weather those.

 

They were relatively formidable but they, VC, could never go toe to toe with the US in an open engagement. The VC or NVA wasn't a force that could wipe out the US military in Vietnam but that was never the goal of them. It was always the goal to cause enough pain to the US to convince them that fighting in a distant land wasn't worth it.

This is what I think you are missing is that the political dimension is far more important than the military dimension and paraphrase Von Clauswitz the military dimension is really only a subset of the political.

You are right to an extent that the SK government wasn't that popular but from my own recollection of what I've read they weren't nearly as unpopular as the ARVN. I don't recall during the Korean war protests by South Koreans against their government or US led forces unlike Vietnam.

Also while the UN initially entered to protect SK they went along with the invasion of the North even prior to the PRC entries. Remember that US / UN forces had almost pushed to the Yalu river before the PRC entered. Anyway the point of mentioning the UN is to point out the importance of broad based international support, even token support, as it reinforces the political view that this war is right. That didn't happen in Vietnam and its not happening in Iraq.

Again though this is why the context of the comparison is important. We expect to be able to contain AIDS and comparisons to the Plague are off because the context is so different. While we might be consider AIDS won in North America we don't relax our efforts and take if for granted that we are doing a job and recognize there is not huge problems in other parts of the World.

Under your analogy in regard to historical comparisons we should quit griping about the situation with AIDS since compared to historical plagues things are so much better. Things are but the context is different.

To bring this back to Iraq, yes our casualties are much less but then again our technology is so much better that we presume casualties will be so much less. In practically every sector of human health we Americans are dying from things at a far lesser scale than people did decades ago yet we still see people getting alarmed from one case of drug resistant TB when it wasn't that long ago that thousands of people in the US died yearly of TB.

As I said I may be mistaken but I'm not aware of a war or battle where US suffered more casualties than in the Civil War.

In WWI there were 100,000 KIA but there were more than that in the Civil War. Remember there were 20K KIA in a single battle alone. Anyway thought that Americans were willing to absorb that many casualties you first have to consider the context. Our culture was far different then and technology has made huge changes. For that matter the places we were fighting at had much closer cultural and political ties to us and many of the US troops fighting in Europe had come from Europe not that long ago.

 

Part of the ability to absorb the shock of casualties comes from the level of awareness of them. News media were censored up until the VietNam war. The horror of war was not in the face of the home folk.

Conventional warfare is probably over for the US. The future is asymetric and indigenous. North VietNam exposed the way to win against the US (though not Tet). You just have to be willing to sacrifice your civilians.

 

That bombing figure is from Laos, but anyway the point remains the same - it is hard to disrupt a supply line when your supply line consists of a guy wheeling a bicycle through the jungle loaded with rice.

 

Sishir,
This is a little distorted view about the popularity of the South VN government. They were not popular but the protests for the most part were staged by Communists sympathizers and the Viet Cong who infiltrated the cities, not by the general populace.
The common person could not care less about one side or the other( except in cases where they have a relative in one army or the other), their upmost concern was food on the table and safety for their families.

 

^ You are probably correct that there wasn't a vast amount of protestors against the South Vietnamese government but I would say that the fact that that many communists sympathizers and Viet Cong could infiltrate into South Vietnam, even the major population centers, shows that there was a fair amont of underlying support among the general populace. If there wasn't then most of those people would've been turned in.

 

It's fine to say there is a "fair" amount of support for the VN communists but to jump from that to this is just plain wrong.

 

Except your own statement indicates that the ARVN didn't have much support.

"Could not care less" doesn't sound to me like they supported the South Vietnamese government and were just as willing to support the North if they got a better deal. As for corruption and ineffectualness of the ARVN is well documented.

[Edit] Just to add this info from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
"The quality of the South Vietnamese military, however, remained poor. Bad leadership, corruption and political interference all played a part in emasculating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). The frequency of guerrilla attacks rose, as the insurgency gathered steam. Hanoi's support for the NLF played a significant role. But South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis."

 

Actually we are both wrong it was Cambodia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

"President Nixon took the opportunity to launch a massive secret bombing campaign, called Operation Menu, against their sanctuaries along the border. This violated a long succession of pronouncements from Washington supporting Cambodian neutrality. Richard Nixon wrote to Prince Sihanouk in April, 1969, assuring him that the United States respected "the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Cambodia …"[86] Over 14 months, however, approximately 2,750,000 tons of bombs were dropped, more than the total dropped by the Allies in World War II."

 

1) Support
Where did I say the ARVN didn't have much support?
Are you using my quote now to claim as fact?
"Could not care less" means they do not support either side.
What you said and still cling to is that "most" South VNmese supported the communists during the war. That is absolutely not true.

To paraphase something I heard and I find very true:
"Some people may not have been communists' sympathizer to start , but after you bombed his hut, killed his buffalo, burned his rice field, they became one"
And that is also true now in Iraq.

2) Corruption of the ARVN
That was because the US put in a regime of weak men instead of the strong, uncorruptible men who did not say yes to everything the US said. Those corrupt men in turn put in their people, civilian heads, commanding generals who had less talents but more willing to go along with the bosses and look after their own interests rather than the country and the people. Many able men were sacrificed, banished, done with in many different ways.

3) Ineffectiveness of the ARVN
This is another myth.
The US had +500,000 troops, more support personnels, unlimited firepower in the air and on the sea. They did not win the war.
The ARVN had few elite troops, badly equipped, except for a few cases lead by weak officers. Did you expect them to do what the US couldn't.

Again this is parallel to Iraq. This goverment expects the Iraqui to do something the US can not.

Did anyone ever learn any history?

 

You are still wrong now.
The US bombed the supply line of the NVA, the "Ho Chi Minh trail".
The trail was not a single route, but rather a complex maze of truck routes, paths for foot and bicycle traffic, and river transportation systems leading from North VN thru Laos, Cambodia into many different places in S. VN.

 

rage you have just posted support for Sishir's claims that the ARVN were corrupt and ineffective. I'm not sure why you are calling these claims "myths" and then posting evidence to support them?

 

I think I've heard it about Laos too, at least it gets the "most bombed per capita" distinction.

 

They are myths because of these distinctions:

1) There were corruptions, at many levels of the government, but not everyone was corrupted. Some were corrupted because there was no other way they could feed their families. When people throw about the blanket statement "the S VNmese were corrupted", they usually follow with "The US was right to get out, they did not deserve our help". Don't you take that to mean the whole country/ everyone was coruppted. How else do you justify to abandon the whole country?

2) While it is true that the S VNmese was ineffective, could you expect them to do any better than the better equipped US's armies? They did not fail any worse than the US.
Can I expect to give you a knife to go fight a guy with a gun in your empty stomach, no less, and with your wife, children at home going hungry?

 

My statement wasn't that the Communists had a lot of support but that ARVN didn't have the popular support of the people. Your statement essentially agreed with that yet you said it was wrong. THere is a difference between saying that you since you support one side means you support another. Whether you support the other side or not if you don't support one side you won't help defend it.

I don't see anywere there me clinging to the idea that a lot of people supported the Communists.

I would agree but that hardly disagrees with anything that I've stated in this thread.

Again nothing that disagrees with what I've said.

I don't see how this defends the ARVN. The ARVN with little US help was routed militarily in several engagements by the NVA and NLF (Viet Cong) forces which is why the US escalated. This is an area where SM is correct that the US military militarily succeeded against the NVA and NLF. The problem was they couldn't win the political battle.

From Wikipedia
"After several attacks, it was decided that U.S. Air Force bases needed more protection. The South Vietnamese military seemed incapable of providing security. On 8 March 1965, 3,500 United States Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam. ....
The Marines' assignment was defensive. The initial deployment of 3,500 in March, increased to nearly 200,000, by December.[62] The U.S. military had long been schooled in offensive warfare. Regardless of political policies, U.S. commanders were institutionally and psychologically unsuited to a defensive mission.[62] In May, ARVN forces suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Binh Gia. They were again defeated in June, at the Battle of Dong Xoai. Desertion rates were increasing and morale plummeted. "

Unfortunately there are several parallels to Vietnam that the US hasn't learned and reading the history of it sounds eerily like reading current events. That said though there is one part that is very interesting about Vietnam is that the ARVN actually improved when the US withdrew. Without having to rely on the crutch of the US military the ARVN improved. Unfortunately then it was too little too late.

 

Crikey! Are you reading my posts or just calling me wrong out of habit now..

What you're posting doesn't disagree at all with what I had posted. THe Ho Chi Minh Trail and NVA forces where in parts of the Cambodia and the US bombed Cambodia to get at those.

 

i know how that can be