Did you know that the North was ready to sue for peace after Tet ‘68, and then changed their mind when they saw how the press and anti-war folks treated it?

Bastards.

Check out wintersoldier.com for lots of info on Kerry. Don’t expect to hear much of this in the news.

I read an interview with a former VC woman who is now a dissenter and she contends that the only hope for Vietnam is a democratic form of government.
Mel Wahl, Billings, MT.

We won the war militarily and politically in South Vietnam. However, when congress cut off funding and supplies for the South, while the USSR continued funding and supplies for the North, the North was able to conquer the south.

So we won the war and then Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, betraying the South Vietnamese.

So ultimately, we lost the war. But we lost it after winning it. It was lost in the United States due to the loss of power of the presidency due to Watergate, and the Congress’ shameful refusal to allow our already promised support to South Vietnam.

“Watergate, along with the anti-war movement, destroyed Republican political power and led to a Congress which betrayed South Vietnam, which is why we lost the war.”

I thought you said earlier that we didn’t lose the Vietnam conflict. Please explain.

To list the differences would take a week.

The only similarity is that the press and the left in the United States do not approve of the war and are trying to cause our defeat in the war and to defeat the president.

The main difference is that during Vietnam, John Kerry met with the enemy, came back to the U.S. and spread their propaganda far and wide, and then rode the publicity into office.

So far, we have no John Kerry in this war, just the same old left-wing pompous press corps.

Name is John. I run this blog. Welcome aboard.

Those pictures should never have been released. They were real, they were classified as part of an investigation, and the press releasing them was damaging to us.

See this for my analysis of the pictures issue.

On your other issues:

1) Watergate was a buglary of the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building. One of the purposes was, ironically, to find out if John Kerry was tied in to the Democratic party.

Things like Watergate had happened many times before, but were ignored. But since the Democrats controlled congress, and Nixon was hated by them, and they hated the war, they went after him on this. There was somebody (or somebodys) called “Deep Throat” who kep the flow of damaging information to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The result was a continuously increasing flood of damaging information. Ultimately Nixon was forced to resign from office as a result of this scandal.

Had the political circumstance been different, and Nixon not as secretive by nature, he would have remained president.

Watergate, along with the anti-war movement, destroyed Republican political power and led to a Congress which betrayed South Vietnam, which is why we lost the war.

Watergate also led to our current media culture in which scandals are created and manipulated. The pictures from the prison are being used for the same purpose, even though their release is damaging to the country and will get Americans killed.

2) There were a number of irregularities in the 1960 election, but this had nothing to do with Nixon’s character. Nixon was who he was. He felt (properly) that the nation was involved in and winning an important war against communism. He also felt (correctly) that there were many forces within the country that were trying to cause us to lose the war (John Kerry being a prominent one). I don’t know how much that was a factor in Watergate, but there is an odd thing about Watergate: Nixon was going to win the election. He didn’t need to do Watergate in order to win. So the question remains hanging – why did he do it. Charlse Colson testified that it was to see if Kerry (who was a subversive who had met with and aided our enemy) was connected to the Democrats. See this for a short posting on Kerry’s behavior and this to see an analysis Kerry’s actions for the enemy in front of the U.S. Congress.

From Boston.com:

And after the Watergate break-in, James McCord, one of the burglars, testified before Congress that the government was investigating whether the Democratic National Committee was working with the VVAW in a plot to commit violence at the Republican National Convention. ”I felt the Watergate operation might produce some leads in answering some of those questions, and I had been advised that the operation had the sanction of the White House,” McCord testified.

Christianity aside, I have a few questions for you regarding Watergate.
1. Didn’t the Watergate scandal arise after something similar happening before and,
2. Is there proof JFK somehow rigged that election, which led to Nixon’s inferiority complex, which led to Watergate?

I know it’s thin, but I’ve been hearing it here for the past few days.

P.S. – I’m from Massachusetts, and no, I won’t vote John Kerry. Any man who says SUVs are bad for the environment and yet owns four of them cannot be trusted.

You are a classic “Useful Idiot.”

Most people can put together an argument that doesn’t put “fascist” and “hitler” in the first two lines.

You haven’t any idea of what my idea of free speech is.

And you probably have no idea of the meaning of the word fascist.

And you can’t even spell Hitler.

My guess – you are a young person with sexual issues.

Deal with them.

Well, I will by God defend my right to call Kerry’s actions treason, and it’s backed up by others far more qualified than me and you – such as Admiral/Senator/POW Jeremiah Denton.

There is a big difference between Free Speech, and:

1)Meeting with the enemy

2)Testifying before the Senate in a speech which is clearly propaganda aimed at deligitimatizing the war by lies, lies which corresponded to the enemy’s propaganda, lies which made the country look bad in the eyes of the world, lies which made all of us who took place in that war out to be psychologically damaged monsters, a speech which made no attempt at balance, lying about America while never once mentioning the many intentional atrocities committed by the enemy as a part of their policy, lies which could not be substantiated by investigators. This is perjury under oath, it is acting as an enemy agent of influence.

3) Urging surrender on the enemy’s terms and actually representing the enemy in granting safe conduct out of the country.

Those three items constitute aiding and abetting. It is treason, or close enough that only a court could sort it out. To say that I disgrace my oath is offensive and incorrect.

I keep a copy of the constitution next to my computer. I know what it says about treason and the first amendment does NOT trump the treason clause and it doesn’t trump the 14th Amendment section three.

So don’t accuse me of abusing the constitution. I take that seriously, and I no longer take YOU seriously. You are a rude visitor who, without understanding my analysis, nevertheless twice accuse me of violating my oath to protect the constituiton.

Sir, I served my country defending this constitution and I damned well know what it says. I also know what it doesn’t say.

I have rarely been so offended in an online discussion and I have been doing this for 25 years. I guess you can take pride in slandering a Vietnam Veteran who is still fighting the enemies of my country.

I agree with your premise that the Vietnam War as characterized by the popular press is not the Vietnam War that actually existed. But then you disgrace the oath you took to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States by saying that exercising the rights guaranteed by said Constitution is treason. No, I do not agree with what Mr. Kerry said in 1971. But I will by god defend to the death his right to say such things, because I, sir, am an American, and unlike slavering ideologues I believe the Constitution is more than just toilet paper to wipe my bum with. I believe that the Constitution and the nation it defines are worth defending against any and all enemies, external or internal. It saddens me that, in your prior post, you appear to have departed from that oath and that principle. The Constitution and the rights it defines are – must be – above the considerations of partisan politics. Exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution must be protected regardless of whether you or I agree with the opinions of the person exercising said rights. Any other answer must be called by the only name that fits: Treason.

- BadTux the Libertarian Penguin

Reasoning from the Japanese and French situation just doesn’t work. The whole country was united in a fight for independence. That ended in 1954. After that, the South did not want a revolution or a war. There was some instability, but it wasn’t anywhere like the Viet Minh actions. The people would have been satisfied with the autocratic regime, because it was not very oppressive in comparison to the communists, and they knew it.

Democracy was not a real goal. That was propaganda, in my opinion. We probably would have pushed the country towards it over time, once it was stabilized, but the goal was to stop communist expansion into South Vietnam in order to protect Thailand and the Phillipines, and to deny the Russians warm water ports.

I disagree that Vietnamizaiton was a natural failure. It was very expensive in resources for the north to support a soldier in the South, once Vietnamization took hold, and if had interdicted the trail. Hence a much larger population didn’t mean they could field a much larger army. Furthermore, it was costing Russia a lot and would have continued to, and we could always win that game.

In 1972, there were problems with leadership, but I see no problem with a few Americans in leadership positions. That would still have represented victory. Plus Theiu, according to my reading, was not as bad as you think – by that time. Abrams forced a lot of improvement in ARVN leadership, and one could have expected that improvement to continue.

In other words, victory didn’t mean just letting South Vietnam go. It meant getting it to a point of requiring fewer resources and less frequent air support.

I don’t think we would have had to do Linebacker’s very often, and frankly, if we were willing to inflict enough damage, the North would have stopped inviting them. They may have been communists, but they weren’t crazy. They also weren’t invincible (1968 was catastrophic to them and it was their own fauld – Giap was demoted for it). Their morale wasn’t as good as one might think, because their government was very repressive.

So once again, winning the war did not require ending it (although we COULD have ended it). If we had been willing to inflict enough damage on the North, they would have stopped. And we did have the air power to do so, without using nukes. We could have destroyed the dike system and cut off all shipping. With the deal with the Chinese (and remember, that came late in the war), we could have effectively blockaded the North – kept the Soviets from resupply which could only have been by sea – and crunched them.

Also, with over 1,000,000 in the village militias, the NVA/faux VC had lost the ability to get either food or replacements from the south. That meant that everything had to come down the trail. That wasn’t the case through most of the war. So we really had a lot of options to win, we just didn’t use them.

I( reject the idea that it would have been carnage in a stalemate. It doesn’t require 100% interdiction to weaken the enemy forces to where they are unable to inflict significant casualties even against village militias.

Remember, the North was doing an invasion. That naturally puts them at a major disadvantage. The defender, if he has the people with them, and the South Vietnamese government did, has a big force multiplier – especially when the enemy has long and difficult supply lines, which could be cut at any time.

What we needed was the willingness to declare Laos and Cambodia as legitimate theaters of warfare, so that we could properly deploy permanent forces there, build bases, and destroy the trail. Failure to do that made it harder, but again, it is just not as one-sided as you paint it.

We certainly could have arranged to kill millions of more Vietnamese, but almost all would not have been in South Vietnam. That would have been unnecessary.

As to the costs of the Vietnam War, once we pulled out except for advisors and an occasional punitive air attack, we would have been in the same position as the Soviets – fighting a proxy war. And we had a vastly more powerful economy to do it with. I think a continuing war fought that way might have brought the soviets down sooner, but more likely they would have reduced aid to the North and given up on the war.

The technological revolution was not being hampered by the war. Far from it – it was being driven largely by that war and the cold war, along with the natural Moore’s law progression. The Soviets had no chance of keeping up. Furthermore, if we had the will, we could have not put in the “guns and butter” programs (which did little good anyway) and really gone to town.

I think you paint a starkly gloomier picture than what I have seen. You presume that millions would be killed in an extended war. The North could not have sustained large casualties. Just Linebacker damaged them enough that it took a couple of years before they could go on the offensive again. And our ability to do damage was increasing – the next time we went in we would have been using laser guided bombs (which we had just started using) and our air power would have had at least a 10x multiplier as a result. Furthermore, we could have given that to the South Vietnamese.

I agree that the possibility of victory is debatable. I disagree with your negative take on it, though. I think the probability was high, except for the political side in the US (where the problem was almost all before 1969). Giap and other North Vietnamese believe the same thing. I think it was Bui Dinh (sp?) who said that after Tet ‘68 they were ready to give up until they saw the political reaction in the US, and that political reaction was entirely due to press malfeasance.

So the real question is not whether we could have won, but whether we could have won after Johnson screwed up the politics of it. And the answer to that is: no, unless the press reversed their by-then solid committment to getting us out of Vietnam.

You keep asserting we weren’t going to get the North to stop fighting. That is an assertion without adequate support. We were not the Japanese or the French. China was moved around in the equation. The incoming supply line form Russia was interdicted by naval means (mines).

I think we could have arranged for China to invade the North. They did it on their own a few years later anyway.

I think you are going way out there in your assumptions.

I disagree with them.

I am aware of the other arguments, but I think they were taken from a position of attempting to justify the actions of the defeatists.

But, let’s say that the war was unwinnable, because I am far more interested in stopping Kerry than arguing forever about a subject lots of people have been arguing forever about.

You ask if Kerry was wrong in 1971. Yes, Kerry was wrong, because Kerry didn’t just say victory was impossible (a judgement WAY above his paygrade, for which he had far too little information to judge – hell, 4 months on a river doesn’t make you a master strategist). Kerry’s arguments were based on the old way the war was fought. Furthermore his statements were loaded with propaganda which reflected poorly on his country and on the soldiers. Even if Kerry was correct in asserting that the war was unwinnable, he had no way of knowing it then. He recommended that we withdraw without any guarantee that we would get the POWs back. He recommended an unconditional surrender (not his words, but his clear meaning). He accused America of many things which were false.

So if you are creating this argument to justify Kerry, you can forget it. If that’s your goal, just to save time I’ll outline the indictment against Kerry/

Have you read his “fisked” transcript of Kerry’s testimony on this site? There is no way to defend that testimony. None. Have you read of his other activities?

A number of POWs have already sent out statements calling for Kerry’s defeat, with the most senior of all POWs, and a Senate colleague of Kerry’s, Admiral Jeremiah Denton, using the words that mean treason: “giving aid and comfort to the North Vietnamese and Soviet enemies.” Those POWs were taunted by Kerry’s speeches, played to them to break their will.

That is why the special forces association is organizing to defeat Kerry.

That is why many other veterans are planning on marching against him in Washington.. I’m going to be in Washington in September protesting the son of a bitch.

John Kerry, while a sworn officer of the Regular Reserve, defamed his country with a fabric of lies which became standard communist propaganda and are still being used by the left.

John Kerry defamed me and every other Vietnam Veteran.

John Kerry carried water for the communists – he met with them and he fed their line to the Senate.

John Kerry used made up atrocities reported by individuals who were imposters or were lying about their location.

John Kerry claimed that we used weapons on “oriental persons” that we would never use on Europeans (the communists always tried to paint this as a racist war).

John Kerry was so ignorant of the laws of war that he claimed the use of .50 cal machine guns was a war crime. This guy isn’t too bright and if he didn’t even get that fact right, why should one believe the stuff he asserted about high military strategy?

John Kerry intentionally conflated minor violations of the laws of war with the concept of atrocities.

John Kerry lied about the reaction to My Lai.

John Kerry lied about the racial makeup of our forces.

John Kerry never once mentioned the policy of atrocities against village chiefs that the Viet Cong adopted, killing tens of thousands of village chiefs and their family members in just one summer.

John Kerry claimed that we destroyed villages in order to save them (a good sound bite, but a lie).

John Kerry claimed it was arrogant to Vietnamize the Vietnamese, totally mischaracterizing the entire effort.

John Kerry urged the United States to pay reparation to the Vietnamese.

John Kerry lied about, and tried to conceal, his participation in a meeting where (contrary to his current position) discussions were held about killing Senators – the meeting was moved because of the sensitivity of the topic. He had tried to hide the fact that he was present, and that he was even in the VVAW at the time of this meeting, but that has been proven false. John Kerry is still a liar.

John Kerry lied about George Bush’s service, and made the absurd assertion, especially for a party that had previously praised Bill Clinton, that combat service was the mark of who should be a president. John Kerry’s statements about National Guard service smeared my former best friend, who was killed doing what Bush was doing around the same time: flying a century series fighter in the Air Guard (New Mexico TACOS). I take that very personally.

John Kerry said that atrocities were daily occurrences in vietnam and known (implying approved) at all levels of command – a very serious and false charge.Not one of the charges he made of atrocities was ever sustained, but many of those who testified to them were proven to be imposters or liars about that subject.

John Kerry to this day is dishonest, engaging in coverups within the last week – covering up his attempts to show that he was not a sworn officer in the Regular Reserves when he visited the communists and when he made his perjurious and traitorous testimony to the Senate (see the later articles on this blog where I uncovered this coverup).

This is all from memory. There is a lot more.

John Kerry isn’t suitable to shine the shoes of the poorest Hmong tribesman now in the United States.

JOHN KERRY SHOULD HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED FOR TREASON WHILE BEING A SWORN OFFICER

DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?

- BadTux the Libertarian Penguin

I see that you are defining victory as something other than “a peaceful and democratic South VIetnam”. I suppose the word “victory” is an interesting word, that can be defined in a number of ways. It is clear that nothing we could have done would have resulted in the surrender of the Viet Minh. Neither the Japanese nor the French succeeded at that, despite being much more bloody-minded than we were ever likely to be. As long as the Viet Minh were around, the borders of South Vietnam were too long to secure, and there would have always been infiltration and attrition. And the North Vietnamese had a much higher population to attrit. Vietnamization was a recipe for defeat no matter how much we bombed, unless we slaughtered millions of North Vietnamese to even out the demographics. Not to mention that it’s uncertain how well the ARVN could have handled the NVA even with air support. While you mention the 1972 invasion and the ARVN repulsing the NVA, that was primarily because, after early disasters, the American advisors took control of entire ARVN divisions from the company level on up. The quality of ARVN leadership was atrocious, and started at the top, with General “President” Thieu who handed out military promotions and assignments based upon how big a bribe he was given rather than based upon competence, and thus was basically unfixable without doing a Diem to Thieu. But we had no replacement in the wings for Thieu who would have been any better. While we propped up the ARVN in 1973 with massive bombing, it’s unclear we could have continued propping them up forever, given the leadership vacuum at the top, no matter how much bombing we did.

Also note that we had attrition problems with the B-52 too. Linebacker II killed 4% of the active duty B-52 force. It also killed the North Vietnamese air defense system, but the Soviets replaced the destroyed aircraft and SAM’s with more modern ones (e.g. MiG-21’s to replace the woefully obsolete MiG-19’s that had been destroyed). So Linebacker III would have likely been even more bloody. And while Nixon authorized the B-1 program in 1969 (That Bastard Macnamara actually thought the FB-111 could take the place of a B-52?!), it takes approximately 10 years to develop and deploy a heavy bomber — it took that long for the B-17, it took that long for the B-52, it took that long for the B-1 (which was not ready for real combat until the mid 90’s after being acquired in the mid 80’s thus why it did not participate in Desert Storm), it took that long for the B-2. We would have run out of B-52’s long before we got to Linebacker IX.

Michael Lind’s book pretty much demolishes the right wingnut contention that invading North Vietnam would have allowed us to win. The Chinese would have intervened. He has the documents to prove it. Now, there’s the argument that blocking the Ho Chih Mihn Trail would have led to victory in South Vietnam. The problem is that the manpower to do this would have been enormous, because the North Vietnamese would have just kept moving outwards, and it is unlikely we could have blocked infiltration and resupply of the NVA in South Vietnam no matter how many soldiers we had. Korea proved that destroying roads, bridges, and railroads would not have stopped resupplying of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. We bombed the crap out of North Korea for four years, not a bridge, railroad, or road left intact, and the Chinese still managed to get supplies to their troops thru the simple expedient of lining up coolies and dispatching them on every trail, path, and trace to haul the ammo and etc. on foot. While the NVA driving entire tank battalions down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail could have been stopped, that would not have ended the war — just reduced its intensity. Only destroying the VIet Minh would have ended the war. And we did not have that in our power.

The best we could have managed in Vietnam was a stalemate similar to what we managed in Korea, but unlike Korea, Vietnam is not a peninsula so it’s impossible to 100% intradict it. So there would have been no peace, just continued blood and carnage. The cost would have been high — millions more Vietnamese dead on both sides, tens of thousands more American soldiers dead if we’d tried to interdict the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, the destruction of most of our heavy bomber force before the B-1 came online — but that much could probably have been managed.

The problem is whether the cost would have been worth the results. The Communists have killed far fewer Vietnamese since 1975 than the war did prior to 1975. Capitalism is now coming to Vietnam, and political liberalism (i.e., liberal democracy, in the classical sense) is sure to come in the future as a more affluent populance becomes better educated and demands it. That could not have happened in a war-torn Vietnam. All Vietnamese have a chance of becoming free within the next twenty years, much as their counterparts in Eastern Europe did.

Furthermore, it is unclear whether the fall of the Soviet Union would have happened if we’d continued the stalemate in Vietnam. The costs of the Vietnam War were enormous, and would have interfered with our developing the modern technological economy . The current situation, where we have the luxury of basically waiting out the few Communist leaders currently extant (Cuba and North Korea being the only real Communist states nowdays, with the economic liberalization of Vietnam and China well underway and a transition to liberal democracy there inevitable), is because the techological revolution drove our economy into overdrive and swamped the creaking Soviet Communist system. Economics doomed Communism — Communism is incompatible with a modern high-tech economy, and once the technological revolution hit the United States the Soviet Union would have fell no matter who was President because any attempt to impose a modern high tech economy on top of the creaky Communist system was doomed.

It may well be that we could have continued the stalemate in Vietnam, but lost the war against Communism if the costs of continuing the war killed the high tech economy that allowed Reagan to spend the Soviets under the table.

In any event, I think it should be clear now that to any thinking military man, it is quite debatable whether there could have been a real victory in Vietnam. We won every battle in Vietnam, and that would have always been true no matter how many battles we fought. But that would not have won the war. That would have only continued the stalemate into perpetuity. And a stalemate at the price of losing the war against Communism would have been no victory. It was economics, not guns, that destroyed Communism — economics that likely wouldn’t have happened if we’d continued the Vietnam War with its enormous costs into perpetuity.

Was Kerry wrong in 1971 to say that victory in Vietnam was impossible? At the very least, you must admit that, by that point, any reasonable definition of “victory” was pretty much out of the question. We weren’t going to get the North Vietnamese to stop fighting even if we’d adopted Abrams’s tactics in totality, and as long as the Viet Minh were around in the North, there was no victory possible. And short of turning North Vietnam into a scorched desert, there was no way to get rid of the Viet Minh. I suppose that the 20,000,000 or so North Vietnamese we would have killed that way would have been liberated, but it’s probably not a liberation they would have welcomed, or wished for. I’m sure their grandchildren, who have grown up in a peaceful country whose economy has taken off over the past ten years, probably prefer their situation today to living in a perpetual war zone — especially since they have a real chance for true freedom within the next 20 years.

BTW, Dr. Record’s paper (that I referenced previously) has an enormous number of sources cited for information that I mention here, such as the adaptability of North Vietnamese tactics in the face of changing American tactics (such as pulling back from direct operations and going guerilla when American firepower was too much for them, then going back conventional once American firepower was withdrawn). Dr. Record is most famous for his book in 1993 which said we should have continued on to Baghdad and deposed Saddam Hussein then. He is no peacenik. The question of “was Vietnam a winnable war” is one that is as easy to answer today as it was for John Kerry in 1971, and that answer is “No.” Not even Michael Lind, as big a supporter of the Vietnam War as he is, ever came up with any scenario for a real victory in Vietnam, the best scenario he can come up with is continued bloody stalemate, possibly for decades. Jeffery Record’s final paragraph in the referred Army War College paper – The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price — cannot be blithely dismissed.

- BadTux the Military Historian Penguin

Read “A Better War” for a detailed examination of the issue. I would never pay attention to Hackworth, as his analyses from Vietnam to the present remain with the field of view of a combat colonel – which is to say tactical rather than strategic.

The link you left makes a common mistake. 95% of it’s analysis is pre-Abrams, as is the author’s experience. The war changed radically when Abrams took over (as he alludes to). Abrams believed he had the war effectively won military in both 1970 and 1972.

There were two ways to win the war. According to none other than Giap himself, we could have won at any time by invading Laos and blocking the “Ho Chi Minh” trail. The other was Abrams strategy.

As far as not blaming the press, one has to recognize that the reason Tet was a turning point was exactly due to the press reporting the opposite of reality – as detailed by Arnaud de Borchgave.

I would argue that the war was lost due primarily to Johnson’s idiocy (and character defects) which caused a lot of lying (especially because of the way Johnson rewarded or punished the military) by the government and MACV. The draft system, as implemented, likewise was a political mistake, because it directly fed the anti-war movement.

What the author seems to miss is Nixon’s real definition of victory: South Vietnam doing all ground fighting, and the US only intervening with strategic air and, in the case of major invasion, tac air.

That would not have been hugely expensive, and as demonstrated by the Christmas bombings of 1972 and the mining of Haiphong, was very effective. Furthermore, the U.S. had split China from Russia, resulting in China being actively against North Vietnam (to the point of invading them in the later 70’s – no time to dig up the year). As long as North Vietnam did not contain American forces, the Chinese weren’t going to intervene because it represented a buffer. Meanwhile we were working with the Chinese against the Russians, who were the real threat to China (remember, there were quiet but significant wars fought along their border too).

Now, consider a strategy where North Vietnam has a very inefficient supply line, due to occasional (and random and unpredictable) mining of their harbor and their inability to count on Russia, the success of Vietnamization in stabilizing 95% of the countryside of the South, and a persistent US strategic threat to gravely damage the north (like we did in 1972), and you have a recipe for a victory – similar to South Korea. Toss in continued US non-military actions to improve the southern command structure (removing corruption and favoritism) and to improve the regime, and it is even rosier.

Finally, the absolution of the anti-war movement and the press is, in my opinion, ludicrous. Both of those parts of society had a dramatic effect on the american populace. The press hammered home the message that you couldn’t trust the military, because Tet put a lie to it. They were wrong in two accounts and could have easily discovered it (see de Borchgrave’s report). Tet was the tipping point because it tipped the press into a view (regardless of their sympathies) that the war was hopeless.

Since in those days most people got their news from the major network evening news, Walter Cronkit in particular was extremely effective in turning U.S. opinion. Likewise, Kerry’s activities were very significant, because he became the face of the Veteran (and he was actually not even close – see this).

I don’t know what your age and experience is. I was a boomer (1947), a volunteer enlisted man in the US Navy, a non-combat Vietnam Veteran, and went to a couple of anti-war demostrations after the war and knew some of the leaders.

Vietnam could have been won. If Johnson (and MacNamara) hadn’t been such fools, and the Nixon’s and Abrams strategy adopted from the start, it could probably have been won by 1968, or held in statis with a much lower casualty count until the Chinese finished their internal chaos and were able to once again deal with the outside world, and hence Kissinger.

It would not have been a walk-away victory, but neither were World War II or Korea. And we would have had to fight occasionally. But by fighting with massive, but short lived aerial bombatdment against the north or massed NVA troops during invasions, we could have won with few of our own casualties.

I have not updated this history since I read “A Better War” or it would make the point more clearly.

Obviously nobody can prove that we won. However, it is easy to prove that John Kerry intended for us to lose and did his best to make it happen. It is easy to prove that the mainstream press corps adopted that attitude after 1968 Tet, giving Nixon very little Wiggle Room. It is true that if Nixon hadn’t allowed Watergate (which is not as simple a story as you might think – in the Watergate hearings Colson testified that they were searching for connections to John Kerry, remarkably enough), he might have been able to fight congress a little more.

But in reality, the war was lost in Congress. It was a loss of will of the elites of America, and a propaganda victory against the rest of the country (which is being tried again).

After Tet, as de Borchgrave tells, the North was considering suing for peace until they saw the US press reactions and the behavior of the anti-war movement and Johnson!

The biggest cost of Vietnam are:

1) The rise to power of the leftist elite who were promininent in man (not all) of the anti-war movement, or were draft-dodging (by staying in graduate school), and as a result ended up in positions of influence (especially humanities professorships in colleges and preacher posts in many churches).

2) The subsequent losses to communism in the ’70s, which were reversed by Reagan against the will of the by-now leftist U.S. congress.

3) The perception that the U.S. will not fight a serious war unless it is traditional, which was a major factor in the rise of Islamofascist challenges to us – in the terms of terrorism.

4) The loss of third world allies when they realized they could not trust us to stick with them when the going got rough.

Mistakes were made by many. The military pre-Abrams was really, really stupid in some areas and in other areas, severely hampered by Johnson who, for example, personally had to approve every bombing target in the North. Laotian neutrality (from an agreement in Kennedy’s time) prevented us from interdictint the supply line (the DMZ could have been fortified like Korea, of course). Without just that that silly agreement, ignored by our opponents and sort of ignored by us (we fought there but couldn’t bring in main force units), or if we had simply broken it like the enemy did, we would have won quickly, as Giap himself pointed out.

I could go on, but have to get back to work.

So: Key points:

1) China could be finessed and was by Kissinger (China has long been an enemy of Vietnam)

2) The war was essentially lost politically as a result of Johnson and his military leaders, and the subsequent serious misbehavior of the press, the power of the left in the antiwar movements, and the ultimate takeover of the house (in 1974) by hard leftists who prohibited all aid to Vietnam.

3) The war probably could have been won even in spite of Johnson’s many disastrous policies if it hadn’t been for the press’s misrepresentations and actions of members of the elite (opinion forming) such as the traitor John Kerry.