Chat

[JWFrogen]

Sigh. . .the OSS knew leaders that could have created a free, non-communist Viet Nam. Uncle Sam didn't listen and so Ho took over.

No, the OSS called to back Ho because no unified state could be created without taking him on, he had the most powerful force in the country. They also bought into his democratic rhetoric.

[Jovial Monk]

Wrong.

[JWFrogen]

Intel agency activity is always complex and murky, that is it's nature, the OSS could indentify no other group who they believed could run the country and certainly not establish a democracy and thought the French and British empires finished. (They were of course right about the latter.) They had no democratic alternatives to support against Ho and Ho played them for propaganda and support.

http://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-and-the-oss.htm/6

"Was America, through the OSS, responsible for the rise of Ho Chi Minh and his subsequent war against the United States? No, but neither was it completely free of such responsibility. Ho manipulated the inexperienced leader of the Deer Team (OSS) as well as U.S. diplomatic officials in Kunming to serve his unstated needs. Having a personal photo of Chennault or having OSS agents stand by his side demonstrated his international standing among the Vietnamese. Also, the failure to identify Ho Chi Minh as Soviet-trained and a Communist ideologue was a major American intelligence shortcoming that smoothed the way for Ho’s emergence as a national leader and in the end, an enemy of the United States.

In later years when asked by journalists or historians about his relationship with Ho, Thomas was defensive: “I was friendly with him and why shouldn’t I be? After all, we were both there for the same purpose, fighting the Japanese…it wasn’t my job to find out whether he was a Communist or not.”

Ultimately, out of the chaotic and momentous conclusion of World War II—almost imperceptibly—the die was cast for the coming storm that over the next three decades would pit the world’s greatest superpower against an indigenous movement led by men who, at its birth, sought the friendship and support of the United States."

[Jovial Monk]

Ho studied and became a commo in Paris, France.

Your ref is not what I remember: I will have to dig the book out I am basing my opinion on, Can't even think which one that is, "From Yalta to Viet Nam" I think.

Nevertheless, 50,000 yank, 400 Aussi and fuck knows how many french & Vietnamese did not have to die. Fuck the french!

[JWFrogen]

Listen, I will concede that different historians have a different take on just what Ho was proposing to the OSS (this is the nature of communist propaganda, cultivated by Ho himself) however the OSS did not indentify any other movement in the country they thought could establish a democracy and Ho's subsequent behavior when he did take power in the North revealed he was never interested in the concept. (Ho also studied for a time in the Soviet Union.)

Now one could make the claim that to not back the French and let Ho just take the place would have been a wise strategic concession (this is wisdom after the fact) but I argue it would have had all sorts of unintended consequences such as the probable collapse of the French right and a victory of the French communists who were at that time still ideologically aligned to the Soviet Union, more agressive communist insurgencies in South East Asia as they would have believed the US had no comitment to anti communist governments or forces in the region.

I also contend that by the early 70s South Vietnam could have been saved and become democratic, that the North had suffered some severe strategic damage but the US press itself was winning the propaganda war for them.

[Jovial Monk]

The French though Dien Bien Phu was impregnable too. . .Giap fucked them tho.

It was all such a fucking miserable, bloody fuckup!

[JWFrogen]

While there are many false statements attributed to Giap this is what he said in a 1989 interview with Morley Safer, as excerpted in The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations by Howard Langer (Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 318):

"We paid a high price [during the Tet offensive] but so did you [Americans]... not only in lives and materiel.... Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. ... The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory....

The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion."

He wanted a de-escaltion of the boming in the North as it was taking a heavy toll and at Tet itself the North took such heavy losses that it had to rebuild it's insurgency but as he states it was brought into "the living rooms of the American people" and so started the intense political pressure that saw US stop the very strategy that was starting to take a huge toll on the Communists. (Indeed an invasion of the North might at that point have knocked them out.)

Even latter Gernal Abram's new strategy of clear and hold combined with the weakened insurgency in the South still recovering from Tet was starting to work and a democracy was starting to form in the South, and had this new strategy been maintained and comitments made to the South honoured there is a high possibility the South would have survived.

[Jovial Monk]

Even if Abrams had been successful, Viet Nam would still be a country divided. There was a country, you may have heard of it, fought a war in the 1860s not to be a divided country.

I doubt VN will be under communist rule forever. (Won't say the same about China tho.)

[JWFrogen]

In 1865 America the side who wanted to end slavery won, in 1975 Vietnam the side who would impose it writ large won.

[Jovial Monk]

Still, it is one country that is independent of any imperial power, and becoming more prosperous.