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This is sure to be confusing to many, as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress.

This is sure to be confusing to many, as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress. The VC won fair and square against the occupying and invading forces, and despite all the doom predictions of the time, they appear to still be a functioning state.

cageface 11y ago
This was also my perspective on the war before I moved to Vietnam. However, after living here for five years and talking to people all over the country my opinion is much more nuanced. To this day many, or even most, southern Vietnamese view the northern Vietnamese as the invaders and occupiers, not the USA. It's a difficult war to understand because it was not only a struggle to end colonialism in Vietnam but also a land and power grab by the northern communists.
paganel 11y ago
The only war which has been strategically won by the US after WW2 was the Cold War, and possible a tie in the Korean War. It's a f.ucking huge win, don't get me wrong, but this puts into perspective the huge US military budget which has been consumed in countless other wars with almost nothing to show for it. And, as an anecdote, as a guy how grew up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s things like Michael Jackson's music or Coca Cola bottles had a lot more lasting effect on "winning" the Cold War for the US then the nuclear warheads from North Dakota or the Nimitz-class carriers. Too bad that know-how has not been translated into trying to "win" over the hearts and minds of the Arab people.
- rottyguy 11y ago
  How many wars have there been since ww2 for the US?
  - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
    22, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... Interestingly, none of them on their home territory.
    - pluma 11y ago
      The US never had a full war on their home territory in recent history (even including both world wars). The closest anyone's been able to point out to me are Pearl Harbor (which -- though striking -- was just a single attack) and some practically uninhabited islands Japan took over for a while. The last time foreign soldiers invaded the US proper was when Canada marched into Washington.
      - classicsnoot 11y ago
        German UBoats operated with near impunity up and down the East Coast as well as in the Caribbean. Many indigenous tribes that fell under the purview of the US suffered under Japanese attacks and incursions in the Aleutians. I find that many Europeans wish to posses the World Wars above others. Though the governments in Europe share the largest responsibility for starting the War (I) and allowing the War (II), and they also have the most collective casualties, suffering is suffering regardless of degree. Side note: a few Canadians marched into Washington with their British overlords. I have never understood why Canadians always seem to reference 1812 and never mention Dieppe when they talk about Hosers on the warpath.
        ascorbic 11y ago
        Suffering is suffering, but there is still a huge difference between having U Boats off the coast, and having entire cities flattened and thousands of civilians killed, which was the case in most of Europe and south east Asia. It also meant that as the war ended, the US was the only one of the belligerents that wasn't effectively bankrupt, but was on the contrary booming.
        pluma 11y ago
        There's one hell of a difference between having submarines patrol your coast lines and having soldiers on your ground and bombers in your skies. There are worlds between having soldiers die and having civilians die, en masse. You're talking about indigenous tribes. I'm talking about people the man in the (US) street would recognize as "American" (yes, it's discriminatory, but such is society). Sure, war is hell. But a war at home is an entirely different category of horror than a war overseas or off the coast. Its effects on the collective psyche are entirely different.
- 67726e 11y ago
  I might also throw in the Gulf War to that list.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    You could, if you determined that "getting Iraq out of Kuwait" was the primary goal of that war. Such a goal would have been wiser than the confusing mishmash of motives revealed by actual USA actions.
- GunboatDiplomat 11y ago
  That's a rather bizarre and frankly foolish look at US foreign policy since 1945.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    GP is certainly more informative and convincing than a single unsupported "this is bizarre and foolish" statement.
- Donzo 11y ago
  I mean, the US "lost" in the sense that they failed to accomplish whatever vague political goal that they had in mind when they went to war, but if you look at the body count, it's like 10 to 1. Same with all of the other "wars." The advantage in weaponry is staggering, and this weaponry has been bought with unprecedented military spending. So, there are some kinks in the ideological goals and imposing those on others, but the killing machine seems to be fully optimized.
  - RodericDay 11y ago
    Why do you put "lost" and "wars" in quotation marks? It seems to imply that because of the higher body count, we should consider the US the winner?
  - kiiski 11y ago
    You have a really strange way of deciding who won a war. Most people would consider those "vague political goals" the whole point of going to war, and the people killed undesirable casualties. But if USA really did go to war just for the sake of killing people, I guess they have indeed been pretty victorious. Much like Germans in WW2. I mean, they might have failed to accomplish whatever vague political goals Hitler had in mind, but they definitely killed a lot more people than they lost.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      There is no peaceful war so obviously headcount is also a measure of superiority. Ever heard of Pyrrhic victory?
      - mercurial 11y ago
        But it's largely a pointless measurement, unless your goal is the extermination of a population. Soviet losses on the Eastern Front were much higher than German losses, which didn't prevent the German from losing on that front. Or take WWI, where the collapse of the government was the death knell for the German military effort.
- notahacker 11y ago
  To be fair, whilst I can see the case for arguing that the Gulf War and other MENA victories were pretty hollow from a strategic point of view, and intervention in the Balkans was too late to prevent genocide, I can't see how US intervention in (eg) Panama or Grenada can be classed as anything other than a strategic victory. Just because US involvement was unpopular with the UN doesn't mean they didn't achieve what they wanted in the short and long term at relatively little cost.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    I'd disagree with "prevent genocide". That was some pro US intervention rationale; but in the end it was "the enemy", the Serbian/Montenegrins of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that got ethnically cleansed. The US was involved. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm The New York Times reported the US Air Force did the AWACs on this particular job and other sources report that the administration used mercenary contractors and supplied the invaders. Check out Serb population in Kosovo, too.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Prevent genocide was the ostensible reason for US/UN participation in the conflict. It's pretty difficult to see a logical reason for the US secondary goals (stabilising the area, securing territories for certain groups, [indirectly] effecting regime change in Serbia) which they actually achieved outside the context of "people are appealing to us to stop this genocide". The US doesn't get much strategic benefit from being on relatively good terms with the Kosovars.
- js8 11y ago
  > war which has been strategically won by the US after WW2 was the Cold War I am not sure I agree. According to what I heard, the western leaders didn't know what was going on when Gorbachev let the Berlin wall to fall. Sure the U.S. built lot of weapons, but calling it a strategic victory.. you could then call peace a military victory as well.
- Theodores 11y ago
  You are missing the point of war, it is not to win!!! The aim is to perpetuate war and the profits made by the war-mongers, as paid for by the domestic tax payer. WW1 poets - Sassoon et al - noticed this and nothing has changed since. So, from that perspective, when Gorby 'took the enemy away' that was a serious loss for our overlords in the likes of Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems etc.
tyingq 11y ago
>>as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress Do you have a source for this? I don't personally know anyone that thinks either of those things.
- arethuza 11y ago
  I have seen references to a "stab in the back" myth/belief for Vietnam e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-syndrome https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-synd... [NB I'm not in the US so I have no idea how popular these beliefs are - I suspect they aren't that common and perhaps quite understandable given the impact Vietnam had on the US].
  - tyingq 11y ago
    It just seems odd to me. Most people I know in the US would be familiar with the term "Fall of Saigon", which would strongly imply the first option "We Won" isn't correct. Even the pop culture doesn't seem to put out a vibe that suggests the US won. Most of the popular movies about Vietnam tend to highlight the horrors of war in general and not some romantic notion of victory, patriotism, glory, etc. Almost all of them feature scenes with the US soldiers talking about how misguided and poorly run the war was. At best, there may be some people that think "we could have won" had the war been waged in a different way, but I don't even hear that often. In fact, the quagmire of Vietnam was used repeatedly as an argument against the war in Iraq.
  - ashark 11y ago
    Can confirm: quite common in the midwest. Wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a more common view, in this region, than that we simply lost. Typical complaint is that Congress wouldn't let them do enough bombing, and/or placed too many restrictions on it, in addition to choosing to withdraw rather than keep fighting.
- dalke 11y ago
  I don't believe the majority believe we won in Vietnam. I certainly don't. There are definitely some who believe 'were forced to declare defeat by Congress'. I have heard a Vietnam Vet say the military won the war, but the government forced them to pull out. Here's a video explaining that thesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk - which places the blame squarely on the Democratic Party for the US losing the war. You'll see that some in the comments also believe this to be true. FWIW, 'Prager University' gives an American conservative perspective, and was set up to 'combat liberal bias and teach Judeo-Christian values'.
lorenzhs 11y ago
I had never heard of this before (but then again I'm not from the US). It immediately reminded me of the "Dolchstoßlegende" though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth
jawngee 11y ago
> they appear to still be a functioning state As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part. As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting. The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out. Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways. I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.
- toyg 11y ago
  Vietnam was the first modern asymmetric war. Overwhelming military superiority simply did not translate into victory, and short of total genocide it could have never been otherwise. It is a shame that all those lessons were so easily "unlearnt" after a single successful campaign (Kuwait), resulting in the mess that were (and are) Iraq and Afghanistan today. It's weird: on one side, killing more people than your adversaries is not as important as it once was, but this means that conflicts are now harder to solve on the battlefield, so they tend to be longer and more bloody than before.
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- fensipens 11y ago
  the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 This ratio makes no sense and would imply almost 8 million dead NVA/Vietcong combatants by the end of the war.
walshemj 11y ago
The NVA won the war not the VC who where frozen out post the final victory
winestock 11y ago
Here are some reasons why people believe those things. First off, in the context of the Vietnam War, VC stands for Viet Cong. I think that you mean North Vietnam, instead, because the Viet Cong were spent as a fighting force after the Tet Offensive. Thereafter, the Vietnam War was mostly a fight between regular armies. In 1969, Richard Nixon began a modest pull-out of US troops from Vietnam. In 1972, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam with 150,000 troops. They had support from the Soviet Union in the form of tanks. Lots of tanks. Zhukov would've been proud of that force. South Vietnam defended themselves with help from the United States in the form of air support. Result: Fewer than 50,000 North Vietnamese soldiers made it back North. American KIA: 650. Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks improved for a while before breaking down in mid-December 1972. Nixon then ordered North Vietnamese cities to be bombed for eleven days (the "Christmas Bombings"). Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks resumed. On January 27, 1973, both sides agreed to a cease fire, America would withdraw all of its forces, all POWs would be released, and South Vietnam would remain independent (of the North). By the end of 1973, all US troops were gone. Being a bunch of communists, the North Vietnamese lied about their end of the deal. How's that for fair and square? They kept fighting to subjugate South Vietnam with the full support of the Soviet Union. South Vietnam fought on with aid from the United States... until August 1974 (thanks, Congress!). So, strictly speaking, America didn't lose the Vietnam War in much the same way that tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. See? History can be complicated. As for "doom predictions of the time," well, North Vietnam proceeded to aid communists elsewhere in Indo-China, just as the war hawks predicted (cf., Domino Theory: http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ ) By 1975, Cambodia and Laos had fallen to communist insurgents. In all of these places, they instituted revolutionary socialist reforms to overturn the legacy of foreign colonialist occupiers. These reforms so impressed the locals that more than a million of them took to the high seas in hand-made boats in order to return to those self-same "occupiers." Here, in America, we have a number of Vietnamese neighborhoods made up of those people and their progeny. The grey hairs among them would take issue with your evaluation of modern Vietnam as "a functioning state." http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/50_years_communist_crimes.html http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/50_years_communist_crimes.html
- kafkaesq 11y ago

cageface 11y ago

This was also my perspective on the war before I moved to Vietnam. However, after living here for five years and talking to people all over the country my opinion is much more nuanced. To this day many, or even most, southern Vietnamese view the northern Vietnamese as the invaders and occupiers, not the USA. It's a difficult war to understand because it was not only a struggle to end colonialism in Vietnam but also a land and power grab by the northern communists.

paganel 11y ago

The only war which has been strategically won by the US after WW2 was the Cold War, and possible a tie in the Korean War. It's a f.ucking huge win, don't get me wrong, but this puts into perspective the huge US military budget which has been consumed in countless other wars with almost nothing to show for it. And, as an anecdote, as a guy how grew up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s things like Michael Jackson's music or Coca Cola bottles had a lot more lasting effect on "winning" the Cold War for the US then the nuclear warheads from North Dakota or the Nimitz-class carriers. Too bad that know-how has not been translated into trying to "win" over the hearts and minds of the Arab people.

rottyguy 11y ago
How many wars have there been since ww2 for the US?
- Ao7bei3s 11y ago
  22, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... Interestingly, none of them on their home territory.
  - pluma 11y ago
    The US never had a full war on their home territory in recent history (even including both world wars). The closest anyone's been able to point out to me are Pearl Harbor (which -- though striking -- was just a single attack) and some practically uninhabited islands Japan took over for a while. The last time foreign soldiers invaded the US proper was when Canada marched into Washington.
    - classicsnoot 11y ago
      German UBoats operated with near impunity up and down the East Coast as well as in the Caribbean. Many indigenous tribes that fell under the purview of the US suffered under Japanese attacks and incursions in the Aleutians. I find that many Europeans wish to posses the World Wars above others. Though the governments in Europe share the largest responsibility for starting the War (I) and allowing the War (II), and they also have the most collective casualties, suffering is suffering regardless of degree. Side note: a few Canadians marched into Washington with their British overlords. I have never understood why Canadians always seem to reference 1812 and never mention Dieppe when they talk about Hosers on the warpath.
      - ascorbic 11y ago
        Suffering is suffering, but there is still a huge difference between having U Boats off the coast, and having entire cities flattened and thousands of civilians killed, which was the case in most of Europe and south east Asia. It also meant that as the war ended, the US was the only one of the belligerents that wasn't effectively bankrupt, but was on the contrary booming.
      - pluma 11y ago
        There's one hell of a difference between having submarines patrol your coast lines and having soldiers on your ground and bombers in your skies. There are worlds between having soldiers die and having civilians die, en masse. You're talking about indigenous tribes. I'm talking about people the man in the (US) street would recognize as "American" (yes, it's discriminatory, but such is society). Sure, war is hell. But a war at home is an entirely different category of horror than a war overseas or off the coast. Its effects on the collective psyche are entirely different.
67726e 11y ago
I might also throw in the Gulf War to that list.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  You could, if you determined that "getting Iraq out of Kuwait" was the primary goal of that war. Such a goal would have been wiser than the confusing mishmash of motives revealed by actual USA actions.
GunboatDiplomat 11y ago
That's a rather bizarre and frankly foolish look at US foreign policy since 1945.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  GP is certainly more informative and convincing than a single unsupported "this is bizarre and foolish" statement.
Donzo 11y ago
I mean, the US "lost" in the sense that they failed to accomplish whatever vague political goal that they had in mind when they went to war, but if you look at the body count, it's like 10 to 1. Same with all of the other "wars." The advantage in weaponry is staggering, and this weaponry has been bought with unprecedented military spending. So, there are some kinks in the ideological goals and imposing those on others, but the killing machine seems to be fully optimized.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  Why do you put "lost" and "wars" in quotation marks? It seems to imply that because of the higher body count, we should consider the US the winner?
- kiiski 11y ago
  You have a really strange way of deciding who won a war. Most people would consider those "vague political goals" the whole point of going to war, and the people killed undesirable casualties. But if USA really did go to war just for the sake of killing people, I guess they have indeed been pretty victorious. Much like Germans in WW2. I mean, they might have failed to accomplish whatever vague political goals Hitler had in mind, but they definitely killed a lot more people than they lost.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    There is no peaceful war so obviously headcount is also a measure of superiority. Ever heard of Pyrrhic victory?
    - mercurial 11y ago
      But it's largely a pointless measurement, unless your goal is the extermination of a population. Soviet losses on the Eastern Front were much higher than German losses, which didn't prevent the German from losing on that front. Or take WWI, where the collapse of the government was the death knell for the German military effort.
notahacker 11y ago
To be fair, whilst I can see the case for arguing that the Gulf War and other MENA victories were pretty hollow from a strategic point of view, and intervention in the Balkans was too late to prevent genocide, I can't see how US intervention in (eg) Panama or Grenada can be classed as anything other than a strategic victory. Just because US involvement was unpopular with the UN doesn't mean they didn't achieve what they wanted in the short and long term at relatively little cost.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  I'd disagree with "prevent genocide". That was some pro US intervention rationale; but in the end it was "the enemy", the Serbian/Montenegrins of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that got ethnically cleansed. The US was involved. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm The New York Times reported the US Air Force did the AWACs on this particular job and other sources report that the administration used mercenary contractors and supplied the invaders. Check out Serb population in Kosovo, too.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Prevent genocide was the ostensible reason for US/UN participation in the conflict. It's pretty difficult to see a logical reason for the US secondary goals (stabilising the area, securing territories for certain groups, [indirectly] effecting regime change in Serbia) which they actually achieved outside the context of "people are appealing to us to stop this genocide". The US doesn't get much strategic benefit from being on relatively good terms with the Kosovars.
js8 11y ago
> war which has been strategically won by the US after WW2 was the Cold War I am not sure I agree. According to what I heard, the western leaders didn't know what was going on when Gorbachev let the Berlin wall to fall. Sure the U.S. built lot of weapons, but calling it a strategic victory.. you could then call peace a military victory as well.
Theodores 11y ago
You are missing the point of war, it is not to win!!! The aim is to perpetuate war and the profits made by the war-mongers, as paid for by the domestic tax payer. WW1 poets - Sassoon et al - noticed this and nothing has changed since. So, from that perspective, when Gorby 'took the enemy away' that was a serious loss for our overlords in the likes of Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems etc.

tyingq 11y ago

>>as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress Do you have a source for this? I don't personally know anyone that thinks either of those things.

arethuza 11y ago
I have seen references to a "stab in the back" myth/belief for Vietnam e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-syndrome https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-synd... [NB I'm not in the US so I have no idea how popular these beliefs are - I suspect they aren't that common and perhaps quite understandable given the impact Vietnam had on the US].
- tyingq 11y ago
  It just seems odd to me. Most people I know in the US would be familiar with the term "Fall of Saigon", which would strongly imply the first option "We Won" isn't correct. Even the pop culture doesn't seem to put out a vibe that suggests the US won. Most of the popular movies about Vietnam tend to highlight the horrors of war in general and not some romantic notion of victory, patriotism, glory, etc. Almost all of them feature scenes with the US soldiers talking about how misguided and poorly run the war was. At best, there may be some people that think "we could have won" had the war been waged in a different way, but I don't even hear that often. In fact, the quagmire of Vietnam was used repeatedly as an argument against the war in Iraq.
- ashark 11y ago
  Can confirm: quite common in the midwest. Wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a more common view, in this region, than that we simply lost. Typical complaint is that Congress wouldn't let them do enough bombing, and/or placed too many restrictions on it, in addition to choosing to withdraw rather than keep fighting.
dalke 11y ago
I don't believe the majority believe we won in Vietnam. I certainly don't. There are definitely some who believe 'were forced to declare defeat by Congress'. I have heard a Vietnam Vet say the military won the war, but the government forced them to pull out. Here's a video explaining that thesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk - which places the blame squarely on the Democratic Party for the US losing the war. You'll see that some in the comments also believe this to be true. FWIW, 'Prager University' gives an American conservative perspective, and was set up to 'combat liberal bias and teach Judeo-Christian values'.

lorenzhs 11y ago

I had never heard of this before (but then again I'm not from the US). It immediately reminded me of the "Dolchstoßlegende" though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

jawngee 11y ago

> they appear to still be a functioning state As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part. As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting. The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out. Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways. I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.

toyg 11y ago
Vietnam was the first modern asymmetric war. Overwhelming military superiority simply did not translate into victory, and short of total genocide it could have never been otherwise. It is a shame that all those lessons were so easily "unlearnt" after a single successful campaign (Kuwait), resulting in the mess that were (and are) Iraq and Afghanistan today. It's weird: on one side, killing more people than your adversaries is not as important as it once was, but this means that conflicts are now harder to solve on the battlefield, so they tend to be longer and more bloody than before.
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fensipens 11y ago
the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 This ratio makes no sense and would imply almost 8 million dead NVA/Vietcong combatants by the end of the war.

walshemj 11y ago

The NVA won the war not the VC who where frozen out post the final victory

winestock 11y ago

Here are some reasons why people believe those things. First off, in the context of the Vietnam War, VC stands for Viet Cong. I think that you mean North Vietnam, instead, because the Viet Cong were spent as a fighting force after the Tet Offensive. Thereafter, the Vietnam War was mostly a fight between regular armies. In 1969, Richard Nixon began a modest pull-out of US troops from Vietnam. In 1972, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam with 150,000 troops. They had support from the Soviet Union in the form of tanks. Lots of tanks. Zhukov would've been proud of that force. South Vietnam defended themselves with help from the United States in the form of air support. Result: Fewer than 50,000 North Vietnamese soldiers made it back North. American KIA: 650. Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks improved for a while before breaking down in mid-December 1972. Nixon then ordered North Vietnamese cities to be bombed for eleven days (the "Christmas Bombings"). Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks resumed. On January 27, 1973, both sides agreed to a cease fire, America would withdraw all of its forces, all POWs would be released, and South Vietnam would remain independent (of the North). By the end of 1973, all US troops were gone. Being a bunch of communists, the North Vietnamese lied about their end of the deal. How's that for fair and square? They kept fighting to subjugate South Vietnam with the full support of the Soviet Union. South Vietnam fought on with aid from the United States... until August 1974 (thanks, Congress!). So, strictly speaking, America didn't lose the Vietnam War in much the same way that tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. See? History can be complicated. As for "doom predictions of the time," well, North Vietnam proceeded to aid communists elsewhere in Indo-China, just as the war hawks predicted (cf., Domino Theory: http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ ) By 1975, Cambodia and Laos had fallen to communist insurgents. In all of these places, they instituted revolutionary socialist reforms to overturn the legacy of foreign colonialist occupiers. These reforms so impressed the locals that more than a million of them took to the high seas in hand-made boats in order to return to those self-same "occupiers." Here, in America, we have a number of Vietnamese neighborhoods made up of those people and their progeny. The grey hairs among them would take issue with your evaluation of modern Vietnam as "a functioning state." http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/50_years_communist_crimes.html http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/50_years_communist_crimes.html

kafkaesq 11y ago