The Two Vietnam Wars
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/the_two_vietnam_wars.html
By Jim Guirard
May 03, 2010
On Friday of last week, much of the establishment media reminded us
of the awful 35th anniversary of the so-called "End of the Vietnam
War" -- on April 30, 1975. This is only partly true, and now we need
to know what the late commentator Paul Harvey would correctly call
"the rest of the story."
On Friday and throughout the weekend, familiar pictures were shown of
American helicopters lifting people off the roof of the U.S. Embassy
in Saigon as the South Vietnamese government was collapsing to the
invading Communists from the North -- and this was dutifully labeled
again as the "first war ever lost by America."
Since this snapshot of so-called "history" is highly misleading, it
becomes vital that the entire story of Vietnam and its Cold War
aftermath be clearly understood -- so that today's partisan
politicians, media commentators and far-Left "Progressives" cannot
scam the American public with a variety of false "lessons" of that
long-ago conflict and its far-reaching consequences.
Unfortunately, we live in an age when far too little attention is
paid to history -- real history. What actually happened back then is
often rewritten to satisfy political or ideological appetites of
"Scamalot" revisionists -- who may be journalists, or academics, or
deceitful governments, or religious zealots, or even occupants of
high political office.
Evidence of this deceit can be found in America's failure three
months ago to memorialize the actual late-January 1973 end of the
Vietnam War -- or, more correctly, the end of "Vietnam One," in which
American armed forces fought. That was the twelve-year war which was
fought largely by U.S. combat forces and which officially ended with
the Paris Peace Accords of January 27, 1973.
But sadly, back in January, we saw not a single historically correct
commentary about the end of "Vietnam One" in any major U.S.
newspaper. Nor was there any detailed mention by any TV network
"talking head" of the historical truth of a badly defeated North
Vietnam's exodus from the South. That was the imperfect but largely
victorious and now-forgotten end of Vietnam One.
Remembered and loudly acclaimed, instead, is the infamous anniversary
date more than two years later of the tragic end of "Vietnam Two" -- which
(a) began in January 1975,
(b) involved no U.S. combat forces at all, and
(c) came to a tragic end on April 30, 1975.
That was when South Vietnam's capital city of Saigon fell to
rampaging Soviet-supplied North Vietnamese armies -- and when
televised pictures of helicopters rescuing American diplomatic
personnel, Marine guards, and friendly South Vietnamese from the U.S.
Embassy roof were first burned into our memories.
The deceitful tactic: Loudly and relentlessly propagandize a
first-ever "Defeat of America" when, in fact, all American combat
units had departed the scene more than two years earlier.
Two Sharply Different Wars
The many differences between these "two Vietnam Wars" -- and their
"lessons learned," if any, for the ongoing battles for peace,
stability, and democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan -- should be
searched for in the following historical sub-texts. While an entire
book could be written about each of these under- and falsely reported
items, a brief paragraph about each might help to avoid their being
completely ignored or wrongly described in the context of today's
Vietnam/Iraq comparisons.
1) Beginning in 1961, all significant increases in U.S. combat forces
in South Vietnam occurred during the administrations of John Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson (to a peak of 543,400 in late 1968) -- while all
significant reductions (down to only 20,000 in late 1972 and to
virtually zero by mid-1973) occurred in the administration of Richard Nixon.
These large reductions were made possible both by the steady
weakening of North Vietnamese and by significant strengthening of
South Vietnamese forces, especially during and following the widely
and cynically misinterpreted Tet Offensive of 1968 -- which was an
unmitigated disaster for the North.
2) During their dozen years in South Vietnam, U.S. combat forces did
not lose a single major battle, despite the marginally insane (i.e.,
politically correct) rules of engagement to which they were subjected
by Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and their
"best and brightest" entourage -- and then by a similar, but less
intrusive, micro-management by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Clearly, U.S. combat forces did not "lose" the military war, as
contrasted to the political and psychological losses they suffered in
the McGovernite Congress, in the left-leaning media, among the
radicalized academia and foreign policy elite, and in American public opinion.
3) The biggest and longest battle of the entire Vietnam War -- the
Tet Offensive of early 1968 -- was the biggest victory for U.S. and
South Vietnamese forces and the most devastating defeat for the Viet
Cong and the North Vietnamese. But a combination of mainline media
lies and of negative "spin" by antiwar activists managed to persuade
the American public that it was our biggest failure, instead.
4) That part of the conflict in which US combat forces participated
ended with the Paris Peace Accords of January 27, 1973, when American
troop count was down to about 20,000 and headed for zero by mid-year
-- and with formal treaty assurances from North Vietnam that it would
cease its cross-border aggression against South Vietnam.
At that point, American and South Vietnamese forces had thwarted the
Soviet-supported North. They had both militarily and diplomatically
achieved the same status quo ante as the one which ended the Korean
War twenty years earlier -- not a clear-cut victory, but surely not
the shameful defeat which today's revisionists contend.
Enter Vietnam Two
5) As stated above, it was not until January 1975 that the
Soviet-backed North began "The Second Vietnam War," or Vietnam Two,
against a largely abandoned South. This was a war made possible and
winnable for the communists by three principal factors:
a) the post-Watergate, August 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon;
b) the dominance of the antiwar congressional Democrats (pressured by
Blame America First radicals of the Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, George
McGovern, and Frank Church varieties), who in 1973-74 slashed aid to
South Vietnam by more than half; and
c) the Moscow-Hanoi certainty that an unelected and politically
insecure President Gerald Ford would not dare to intervene if the
North were to invade the South.
6) The final Blitzkrieg-style victory of the Soviet-supported North
Vietnamese came on April 30, 1975. This was not a victory over U.S.
combat forces; our forces had departed more than two years earlier.
It was the defeat of the South Vietnam military, whose assistance and
political support had been decimated by a Democrat-dominated,
weak-on-liberty U.S. Congress.
7) The predicted "communist bloodbath" in South Vietnam did, indeed,
occur. There were tens of thousands of summary executions, millions
of innocents herded into brutal "re-education" camps, and hundreds of
thousands of "boat people" fleeing the single-party, police-state
communist dictatorship. This communist state is still in power,
thirty years later.
8) The long-anticipated "domino effect" also occurred over the next
five years (1975-80), during which a "no-more-Vietnams" retreat by
the United States and its allies allowed some twenty nations to fall
to Soviet imperialism, colonialism, and subversion. Divided into two
slightly overlapping groups, these post-Vietnam colonies for communism were:
Ten plainly Marxist-Leninist states: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Suriname, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
Ten more socialist, single-party "client states," which were close
enough to communist tyranny as no longer to require so-called
"liberation": Libya, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Tanzania, Seychelles,
Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao-Tome/Principe, and the Congo.
9) It was not until Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981
that this veritable avalanche of "dominoes" into the Evil Empire
ceased falling. The trend was reversed by the preemptive "roll-back"
liberation of Grenada from Soviet/Cuban colonial status in 1983.
Although only a tiny part of the Evil Empire, Grenada's great
geopolitical significance was the first clear-cut reversal of the
so-called Brezhnev Doctrine -- that much-propagandized rule which
said "once Communist, always Communist."
10) Whether or not Vietnam One was either strategically wise or
militarily winnable (which this writer strongly believes it was), it
was most certainly a "moral" and "just" cause. As with the case of
World War II, such a determination can be based only on an objective
analysis of the character and motivations of the enemy against whom
the war was fought.
In total context, was this enemy the "good guy" who deserved to win,
or the "bad guy" who should have lost? In this case, that
Soviet-sponsored enemy -- Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam -- proved quite
clearly in the postwar period to be far more imperialist than
"nationalist," far more repressive than "liberationist," and far more
fascist-Left than "people's democratic."
This is why so many Americans have always believed that by any
objective standard, "the wrong side won." And this is why we must
remind everyone, in the name of truth-in-history, that this "wrong
side" victory came against a cut-and-run U.S. Congress -- and not
against American combat forces in Vietnam One, which ended
imperfectly but honorably in early 1973.
Of course, that historic truth is regretted to this day by many of
the anti-liberation left, who would have preferred that "arrogant
America" and "imperialist America" be defeated outright -- just as
they would prefer in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
A final note: The idea that there would be no "domino effect" to a
defeat of American and Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is as
deceitful as the constantly repeated lie that there was no such
triggering effect to the April 1975 collapse of South Vietnam.
Review #8 above for a truth-in-history reminder of the twenty
post-Vietnam dominoes which fell in a period of only five short years
-- four of them during the pathetic Carter-Mondale years -- followed
then by the 1980s decade of the "roll-back of communism," which was
applauded by many (and demeaned by many others) as the Reagan Revolution.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
