Hi Jacob Snyder; Re casualties lost while winning hearts and minds. The whole idea is a good one, but the casualties lost would be tremendous, and there simply is no way to avoid this.
Re: "In 1965, we should have landed the Marines at Haiphong, not Hue, and driven on Hanoi. Yes, that would have reduced casualties, in the long run. It would have been a big conventional battle, and we would have won it. For the rest of the war, the Communist's efforts would have gone entirely to re-taking Hanoi; there would have been nothing left to send down the Ho Chi Minh Trail."
Very little materiel or manpower was sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If it had been a vital lifeline to the fight in South Vietnam, the brilliant geniuses who were running the war for the US would have shut it down and won the war.
The problem is that the conflict in South Vietnam was supported by too many of the South Vietnamese people. We were not beaten by an industrial giant. We were beaten by people who used our own discarded weapons against us.
The problem with winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam was that the South Vietnamese government was, for most of the duration of the war, a corrupt minority government. With the additional problem that the Vietnamese had already been abused by the French, it would have been difficult at best for us to win them over. But the Catholic South Vietnamese government in a country that was primarily Bhuddist (remember those self-immolating monks) was a situation that was guaranteed to lose us the war.
The diplomatic situation was that we could not take over South Vietnam and run it as a colony. Doing so would have simply proved to even more Vietnamese that we were a colonial power. So we were left attempting to support a South Vietnamese government that fundamentally did not have the support of the South Vietnamese people.
Re: "expel the entire hostile civilian population within our perimeter." This is a war crime as defined by the Geneva Convention. At the very best it would be ineffective, at worst it would have created vast populations of guerilla warriors.
Re: "rest of the army (most of it, actually), still uses the conventional-war high-mobility, overwhelming-firepower tactics." Young foreign men with overwhelming firepower tend to alienate the locals, not win hearts and minds. Overwhelming firepower is what you use in order to (a) cow the enemy and bystanders, and (b) minimize your own casualties in a battle. But overwhelming firepower tends to lose the hearts. I mean Jesus Weeps! If US firepower created a frequently violent "peace" movement in the US, just imagine what it does in the country (or ethnic group) where it's used.
Re: "If we are winning the HeartsAndMinds campaign ..." Well, if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle. The fact on the ground is that we were winning the HAM battle at no time during the Vietnam war.
Re: "Tell General Giap that we will withdraw from Hanoi, when all guerrilla activity has stopped in S. Vietnam, all communist sympathizers have been repatriated to N. Vietnam, the DMZ has been extended westward to the Thai border (and patrolled by a well-armed permanent UN force)." He'd have told us to go 'f ourselves. And the guerilla war would have simply continued.
Vietnam is a good chunk of territory for running a guerilla war in. And since the various ethnic groups bleed across the borders, you have to expect that there will always be infiltration across those borders (which are very very very long).
All these ideas of big invasions to force the Vietnamese into negotiation were considered and rejected by four successive US administrations. The Vietnamese fought a guerilla war against the Japanese and French, and they were a lot more ruthless than us. They would have kept fighting us forever.
The world is a brutal place. People come down with incurable diseases. Old age eventually kills us all. Hell, it has even been proved that there are math problems with no solutions. And there are wars that cannot be won no matter what strategy is used.
But all this is sort of off topic, so you can have the last word.
-- Carl |
