Of course we bombed NVN into accepting a truce agreement. See Christmas bombings 1972.
As he systemically withdrew U.S. troops, President Nixon continued to work for a peace treaty. Encouraged by the antiwar movement, the North Vietnamese stalled. Finally, the President ordered the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in December 1972. Historically this has become known as "the Christmas bombing," although President Nixon had ordered a 36-hour bombing pause for Christmas and a 36-hour bombing pause for the entrance of the New Year.
The bombing worked. Newly revealed records show that the North Vietnamese leadership was profoundly frightened by the bombing. It had already been getting pressure from Moscow, which was paying most of its bills, to stop trying to win militarily. As of May 1972, the secret official policy of the Soviet Politburo was to recognize that President Nixon had decided that South Vietnam could not be allowed to fall. In January 1973 the North Vietnamese came to the peace table and signed an agreement guaranteeing the liberty of South Vietnam with the right of the South Vietnamese to determine their own future.
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On January 23, 1973 the Paris Peace Accords were initialed for the United States by Henry Kissinger and for North Vietnam by Le Duc Tho. They were signed four days later by U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, Tram Van Lam, Nguyen Duy Trinh, and Nguyen Thi Binh. Chapter Four, Article Nine of those accords stated, "The South Vietnamese people shall decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam through genuinely free and democratic general elections under international supervision."
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The 94th Congress was flexing its new-felt power over the Presidency. The final and ultimate casualty of Watergate would be Southeast Asia, with the Congress writing its own unilateral peace agreement in which it embraced demonstrators, much of the press, and those whose sense of morality did not include personal risk or, in the end, even economic risk, for the liberty of others.
Prime Minister of North Vietnam Pham Dan Dong put it simply, and in a way that reveals a different perspective on our 37th President than the one presented in the history books. "When Nixon stepped down because of Watergate," the communist leader said, "we knew we would win."
As the U.S. economic pipeline was strangled by Congress, a massive avalanche of supplies went to the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao from the Soviet Union and to the Khmer Rouge from the People's Republic of China.
General Van Tien Dung of North Vietnam would later write in his memoirs that because of the cutoff of U.S. aid, President Thieu, the President of South Vietnam, was finally "forced to fight a poor man's war."
Long Beret, the Premier of Cambodia, said, "We have no more material means" to continue the struggle and "we feel completely abandoned."
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nixonfoundation.org
Whether or not we should have gotten involved in SVN in the first place is debatable. It is a fact, however, that the war was lost in the US at the instigation of the left. The human cost of this in SE Asia was incredible. |
