Getting back to the original point that led to much of this diversion Hanoi wasn't a safe haven and was bombed. Again from Wikipedia "To show his support for South Vietnam and force Hanoi back to the negotiating table, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, a massive bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The offensive destroyed much of the remaining economic and industrial capacity of North Vietnam. "
I said you were wrong because you made a statement/conclusion and used wrong premises and facts to support your claim.
Back on topic ... Iraq vs Vietnam. I do think there are more and more similarities as time goes by. The US hasn't learned the past and it is repeating the same mistakes.
Really back on topic... Does anyone else feel that some sort of massive organized attack in Iraq is imminent?
I've thought for awhile that the event that will tip the scales on a troop pull out is a major attack in the Green Zone. I would not be surprised to see that in the next 1-2 months.
I completely agree -- this will be the next big move the insurgents/ al Qaeda/ etc. fighters in Iraq make on US troops.
I truthfully think this would not have much impact. People against the war already don't think any part of Iraq is safe (including the Green Zone), while those for the war will say it is impossible to always provide perfect protection. Unless I am mistaken, public opinion really didn't change when the guy blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament, which is in the Green Zone.
The US lost more men in WWII than either the Union or the Confederacy did in the Civil War. Also, I mentioned our allies, and the Soviet Union is an excellent example of more deaths than the Civil War. In WWII, the Soviet Union had military deaths numbering over 10 million, compared to about 600,000 combined deaths by the Union and Confederate troops. In WWI, the Brits lost over 300,000 men in just the Battle of the Somme, more than 19,000 on the first day. In WWII, the United States had 29,000 KIA at the Battle of Normandy. This kind of proves the point. Nixon (who was the third president to spend a number of years overseeing the war) ordered a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong in late December of 1972. During many parts of the war for long periods of time, bombing was heavily restricted and many targets such as Hanoi were off limits. Sam feels that there apparently were no targets worth bombing, but that doesn't change the fact that Hanoi was a safe haven.
A safe haven for nothing. You are dumb if you think blowing up office space in Hanoi wins the vietnam war. VIetnamese soldiers had will because they were dirt poor and had nothing to lose and had been fighting invaders for years. That is why the only equipemnt they had was a gun and a pair of slippers and some rice. This is regular vietnamese army I am talking about. You cannot bomb them out. It doesn't work. It didn't work in Laos. It didn't work in Cambodia. It didn't work in Vietnam.
A) It was not a safe Haven for nothing, it was a safe haven for things like anti-aircraft weapons, fighters, helicopters, tanks, and storehouses of things like rice and guns. B) I never said bombing Hanoi would have won the Vietnam War. I said it would have been helpful to the war effort. Winning the war would have likely required nearly wiping out the entire NVA. Interestingly, unrestricted bombing of Hanoi did bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table to sue for peace, leading to an accord that on paper had the Vietnam War ending much like the Korean war, in a stalemate. Of course, that was a bit of a sham, because they resumed their attacks on the south (with tanks and planes and stuff) after the US left. C) The NVA was more well equipped than you seem to think. They had hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles, hundreds of artillery pieces, fixed and rotary aircraft, mortars, boats, trucks, storehouses, depots, and air defense systems. The VC were more as the people you described, and of course the NVA had infantry units that were armed with rifles and uniforms and rations just like any other army. That does not make bombs a useless weapon against them. It is hard to say how many of the over 1 million casualties suffered by the communist armies in Vietnam were caused by bombing, but I would guess the number is not insignificant. Just using bombs is never going to work of course, but air power is an important tool in modern warfare.
Wrong again. You're simply making things up now based on assumptions that were proven invalid 40 years ago. I don't know what to say to that. I stopped reading after this because you simply don't seem to know that much, which seems to be deliberate. Darn you field marshal stupid.
How about you come up with a link to prove that the NVA didn't have anti-aircraft weapons, tanks, or fighters, or that they never used the bombing restrictions to protect them. Here is an article in the Air Force magazine that specifically talks about SAM storage sites in restricted areas, fighter bases in restricted areas and industrial targets in restricted areas as background information to discuss one mission.
If you think that the war in vietnam was lost because we didn't destroy enough North Vietnamese tanks, anti-aircraft weapons, and fighters planes - you are dumb. Let me tell you something about surface to air missiles. Since you are of the type who likes to take casualty figures and minimize them, I don't need to explain to you that the total number of airplanes shot down was absolutely inconsequential to the USAF or the conflict as a whole.
I can sort of vouch for this in a second hand way. My dad did two tours of Vietnam with RED HORSE (Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineer) they built run ways and bases. H has said many times that it was a marvel how the USAF could build and maintain areas with impunity during the war. hey Sam, did you get my email?
I don't know if I have enough time to explain to you in details. What I can tell you is what you think you know about VN is limited, data out of dated, some were applicable to a certain point in time but not others, some were true to some parts of the countries and not others, some were true with parts of the government, armies, people and not others. You kept throwing blanketed statements on the whole thing and that was wrong. It was much more complicated than that. If you want to know in details, you can look it up, I can only point out a few of the little things that you got wrong which lead you to have a distorted view of that war.
Go back and read section B) of my above post. The war was lost politically, not militarily (hmm, that sounds somehow familiar). The bombing restrictions just made the military and political parts more difficult. Following Operation Linebacker II, the North Vietnamese leaders immediately came to the peace table to sign the Paris Peace Accords, so they obviously felt that the unrestricted bombing was more significant than you do. The effectiveness of Surface-to-Air missiles was not so much in shooting down aircraft as it was in denying areas of operation to certain types of aircraft. If the SAMs were meaningless, the Air Force wouldn't have flown Wild Weasel missions to destroy them.
Yes it sounds like the samefamiliar artificial distinction you are trying to draw in an intellectually dishonest way that is purposefully ignorant of context - but useful for making lame political argments on a BBS.
