Vietnam...
- Thread starter s_lone
- Start date
they took over the war from the french....i think the french were there for rubber....
And THAT's an appropriate moral reason for having tried to seize control of Vietnam?
No.
In fact, Ho Chi Minh was trained and armed by the USA to fight the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam.......he was the only leader dependable and effective enough that they would support. Ho and the OSS man that was his contact became good friends, and the United States was represented at the small post-war ceremony when Ho declared Vietnamese independence.......Vietnam and the USA could have been very friendly nations.
Then things went very bad on a number of fronts......Roosevelt had been extremely anti-colonial, with no intention of allowing the old Empires to re-emerge post-war, but FDR died in April, 1945. Truman was much more concerned with supporting DeGAulle and protecting US ties to France, to forestall the
powerful communist movement there. The Americans, double-crossed by Stalin in Europe, became exceptionally fearful of anything that smacked of communism, and Ho had spent time in Moscow......... therefore Truman lent support both political and material to a French return to Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese President, was gobsmacked at what he saw as a betrayal........And it got worse. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the United Nations supported a move for national elections over all of divided Vietnam. The Americans at first agreed, but it became clear Ho and the communists would win by hook or by crook, so the elections never happened, and the USA began extensive military support to the south......
Vietnam was a series of misjudgements made because of what was seen at the moment as political necessity. The Americans just couldn't get around Ho's ideology, although the state department knew Ho was friendly, and knew his solialism played second fiddle to his nationalism. AND European concerns were paramount.
In short, NO GOOD REASON.
BTW, did a thesis in University on this subject...........
Just one of the list
Would be interesting to have a list of places in the world and situations where the USA interferred in a countries sovereignty and right to self determination. Then another list where USA cried foul when the results came back to bite.
Would be interesting to have a list of places in the world and situations where the USA interferred in a countries sovereignty and right to self determination. Then another list where USA cried foul when the results came back to bite.
You know very well that everything the US does is based on paranoid conspiracy theories. They invented the idea that a king was ruling them and this led to a rebellion in 1776 and it went downhill from there.
In my opinion, US goals and interests in Iraq were honourable, if misguided. Unlike Vietnam, where their actions were both dishonourable and misguided.
Saddam was a complete monster. American support for him has been blown all out of proportion...........US military support for him in the war against Iran was miniscule, and they simply DID NOT (can I say that again?) DID NOT have ANYTHING to do with his development of chemical weapons or nuclear capability. The responsibility for that rests with China, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of France, and those wonderful designers of Zyklon B, the Germans (who you would think would know better.) Saddam had used WMDs, and the conventional wisdom was that he had more. He used them extensively against the Kurds. Mind you, GW was undoubted influenced by the fact Saddam sent assasination squads to hunt his daddy, George Sr. That would piss anyone off.
In short, the USA became involved in Vietnam to prevent democracy, they became involved in Iraq to (naively) create a democracy.
Baloney
The Vietnam war crippled the US economy.......it took them a decade or more to recover after 72, I remember when the Canadian dollar was worth $1.10 US. The Iraq War is having the same result......burgeoning deficits, a crashing US dollar, and economic trobles galore.
You obviously missed the point about Vietnam.....Ho, although a socialist, thought Vietnam and the USA would be great friends............the constitution Ho wrote for his new country was almost a copy of the US document.........
Vietnam, as we know it today, is a much larger nation than it originally was. Essentially, a civil war between north (old Vietnam) and south Vietnam (the conquered nations) waged - silently and not so silently - for over five hunderd years. The south, by virtue of its better location on trade routes, grew wealths unheard of in the north. Naturally, there was jealousy. That rivallry was only made stronger when Vietnam was a colony under French control.
Ho Chi Minh arrived on the scene with visions of making his nation one again. During the Japanese occupation, this nationalist movement became a means to undermine Japanese power with minimal Allied losses. At the end of WW2, All of Vietnam south of the 17th parallel surrendered to Great Britain - who promptly set her free along with Siam and Burma. France assumed the rest of Indochina (North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) would be French possessions again - whether the people wanted it or not.
American support for Ho Chi Minh's movement to rejoin the people of North and South Vietnams (Viet Minh) continued well after WW 2 ended. France wanted to reclaim it's colonies in Indochina. US support for Ho only ended when Mao Tse Tung's communists won their victory in China and communist support for North Vietnam - and Ho's movement - came from Red China (China was Vietnam's natural enemy) and the Soviet Union.
Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's President, saw his opportunity to defeat the North and its popular Ho Chi Minh. His anti-communist stance gave Uncle Sam a foothold in Southeast Asia. Fear of Communist domination did the rest.
(palgerized from my "He Called me BABY KILLER!" - Author: ME!)
Wolf
Ho Chi Minh arrived on the scene with visions of making his nation one again. During the Japanese occupation, this nationalist movement became a means to undermine Japanese power with minimal Allied losses. At the end of WW2, All of Vietnam south of the 17th parallel surrendered to Great Britain - who promptly set her free along with Siam and Burma. France assumed the rest of Indochina (North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) would be French possessions again - whether the people wanted it or not.
American support for Ho Chi Minh's movement to rejoin the people of North and South Vietnams (Viet Minh) continued well after WW 2 ended. France wanted to reclaim it's colonies in Indochina. US support for Ho only ended when Mao Tse Tung's communists won their victory in China and communist support for North Vietnam - and Ho's movement - came from Red China (China was Vietnam's natural enemy) and the Soviet Union.
Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's President, saw his opportunity to defeat the North and its popular Ho Chi Minh. His anti-communist stance gave Uncle Sam a foothold in Southeast Asia. Fear of Communist domination did the rest.
(palgerized from my "He Called me BABY KILLER!" - Author: ME!)
Wolf
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Unfortunately, this contains a number of mistakes of history..........Vietnam was not divided politically until the "temporary" division advised by the UN in 1954, as a measure to insure peace until the planned elections of 1956.........that never happened.
Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of ALL Vietnam on September 2, 1945.............a ceremony that representatives of the US gov't attended.
US support for Ho ended when they aided the French return to Vietnam in 1946................three years before the communist victory in China.
Vietnamese history goes back a thousand years. US is only the most recent of nations who have been drawn into its civil war.
Note: I'm not disputing a thing you say. There are things being hidden all the time as the "new management" settles in and new things being brought to light. Neither of us can ever know it all - especially in complexities like Vietnam. Have 7 pages I'll share - mainly because I cut it from my book.
Wolf
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Colpy
Thank you for your participation on this topic - which had its own reasons for birth.
I hate to see you get drawn into things like this when you can give such information with open and knowledgable words - while trying to deflect the obvious flaming.
I have yet to see any back and forth on opposing sides come to any agreements or concessions - it is a black moment in the history of he U.S. is it not? Or were they again expected to do the military work of the United Nations...
I have stacks of e-mails and letters from my uncle who is a Canadian and who in a wild immature moment signed on and left his leg in Vietnam as a memory for him and the rest of his life. I always call it 'my uncle's war'....but every time I read another's opinion I get to add more to the things I have tried to understand.
Some day I'm gonna make special trip with him to Nelson B.C. - to have a listen and see what justification the cowards are telling themselves these days.
CO has always meant COWARD OUT to me.
Thank you for your participation on this topic - which had its own reasons for birth.
I hate to see you get drawn into things like this when you can give such information with open and knowledgable words - while trying to deflect the obvious flaming.
I have yet to see any back and forth on opposing sides come to any agreements or concessions - it is a black moment in the history of he U.S. is it not? Or were they again expected to do the military work of the United Nations...
I have stacks of e-mails and letters from my uncle who is a Canadian and who in a wild immature moment signed on and left his leg in Vietnam as a memory for him and the rest of his life. I always call it 'my uncle's war'....but every time I read another's opinion I get to add more to the things I have tried to understand.
Some day I'm gonna make special trip with him to Nelson B.C. - to have a listen and see what justification the cowards are telling themselves these days.
CO has always meant COWARD OUT to me.
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I found this video on youtube last night while browsing around...
It's a 40 minute video explaining the Vietnam war... but it's presented as a kiddy show... It nonetheless attempts to ''objectively'' lay out the fundamental issues to understand what happened. I don't know how accurate it is and it definitely triggered my interest for learning more about Vietnam.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5LctoUV-tag&mode=related&search=
The video's overall conclusion is not supportive at all of any moral justifications that could be used to defend the US government's action in this part of history. I was born in 1981 and I want to know what others think about Vietnam, especially older minds...
*IF* you project some form of anti-Americanism on me because of the threads I start (I also started the recent Hiroshima-Nagasaki) thread, please do not. I am curious and like to see some serious discussions going on in this forum. I'm not much into the chit-chat thing and I come here to see ideas being confronted.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for the USA nation. But your government being one of the most influential and powerful institutions on the planet does push me to be more suspicious and critical.
I make a huge difference between a nation and its government.
Thank you for asking my reasons.
Good video. Very informative. Kid voice may encourage some of the more closed-minded adults to give it a listen too....
Wolf
Wolf