Date: Sat, 13 Aug 94 10:37 CDT
From: Andy Daitsman <ADAITS-AT-macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: I don't know what this has to do with Marxism...


so I've avoided the Vietnam discussion up until now.  But Samuel does raise
some interesting questions, and I think they actually have answers.
 
>I get into debates about this subject all the time.  Nobody has yet to
>explain to my satisfaction WHAT WOULD HAVE COUNTED  AS "WINNING THE WAR" for
>the US.  Was there a realistically-expectable state of affairs that the
>Commander-in-Chief or anyone within his web of secrecy COULD HAVE counted as
>"winning the Vietnam conflict"?  Does anyone here want to discuss, for
>instance, the purpose of spending all those lives and dollars defending the
>northwest corner of Quang Tri province?  Huh?  The deeper any of you get into
>this, the more you will discover the meandering nature of the "purpose" of
>the war.  The slippery slope provided by the lack of a stable notion of
>"winning the war" provided an ideological context which helped Nixon justify
>Vietnamization policy and the Paris Peace Accords.  Now wasn't that "winning
>the war"?  If you say "no," then JUSTIFY YOUR POSITION WITH FACTUAL EVIDENCE.
>-Samuel Day Fassbinder
>
 
I think that "winning the war" can be very easily defined in military terms:
destroying the enemy's capacity to carry out effective attacks against you.
In Vietnam, that would have meant eliminating the "foreign" sources of
materiel resupply for the southern guerrillas, disrupting the southerners'
capacity to recruit and train new fighters, and preventing the north from
sending batallion-size units to the south to reinforce the indigenous
fighters, among other things.
 
By the late sixties, the US had effectively disarticulated the Viet Minh from
their popular base in strategic areas in the South.  Jeffrey Race, _War Comes
to Long An_, gives a good account of the process in one key province.  The
south became increasingly dependent on the North not just for arms and materiel,
but also for troops *and for their leadership.*  US assasination programs like
the Phoenix project were extremely successful in identifying and eliminating
southern cadres; the existing leadership was being killed off faster than they
could be replaced organically.  If I remember right, Fitzgerald provides
excellent evidence of the southerners' increasing dependence on the North.
 
The only thing preventing the total disarticulation of the guerrillas from
their base was the Ho Chi Minh trail.  The US *did* try massively to identify
the precise location of the trail and to disrupt the traffic on it, but the
North Vietnamese ingeniously stayed one step ahead of the B-52s.  By the early
seventies, it had become quite clear that the only real way to cut the trail
would have been to eliminate its source.
 
Nixon's strategy was to force the North Vietnamese to capitulate, through a
massive bombing campaign and the mining of the harbors.  This strategy proved
ineffective.  Instead of stepping up the ante, an option that *was militarily
available* to the US, Nixon backed down.  The Paris Talks went into high gear,
and Vietnamization was also stepped up.
 
Why didn't Nixon invade the North, or even credibly threaten the use of nuclear
weapons against it?  I think the peace movement in the US is the reason.  We
had brought the war home in very real ways.  Those of you who remember the
militant rejection of the invasion of Cambodia (Kent and Jackson State were the
tip of the iceberg) can easily imagine what would have happened if US troops
had escalated to the north (in my best approximation of Nixonspeech).  By the
early 70s millions of Americans actively believed that the US had no business
getting involved in someone else's civil war; a good portion of us were
also firmly convinced that the US was backing the wrong side.  We created the
conditions that prevented further escalation.
 
The Vietnamese won the war.  We gave them an important helping hand.
 
See ya,
Andy
 
 
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Andy Daitsman                     +  "Without complete freedom of the press
Department of History             +   there can be neither liberty nor
University of Wisconsin, Madison  +   progress.  But with it one can barely
adaits-AT-macc.wisc.edu              +   maintain public order."
                                  + Domingo Sarmiento -- El Mercurio, 1841
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