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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (188749)	6/7/2006 7:52:03 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

You should read Norman Hannah's book about Laos and Vietnam. biblio.com His emphasis, which I find compelling, is that had we denied the NVA the use of the Ho Chi Minh trail, even if it required partitioning of Laos, the war would have gone far differently. You don't win a war by permitting the enemy the benefit of outflanking you and forcing you to defend every inch of your border while he only has to defend a tiny portion as was represented by the DMZ. And of course, it's true that there was corruption in S. Vietnam. Our policy was to bear the brunt of the struggle while we pumped economic assistance into the coffers of the government. This was an open invitation to corruption and exploitation of that assistance. More emphasis should have been placed upon the SVN government bearing the brunt of defending itself and ending corruption. I hope this is a lesson we're learning in Iraq.. That ultimately the responsibility for securing their government, if not the sovereignty of Iraq as a state, depends upon their actions. We'll be happy to help them, but we're not going to do it for them. And while you're on your book buying spree, pick up this one: amazon.com It pretty well lays out the NVA plan to conquer the south was originated LONG BEFORE US forces were committed in force. So forget about all the peace talks that the NVA were supposedly involved in. It was duplicitous. Here is a good article that pretty much sums of both positions: historynet.com The evidence provided by the PAVN history demonstrates clearly that, after 1961, even the most effective internal pacification measures in South Vietnam would have been insufficient without any companion effort to block the flow of troops and supplies from the North. In his book The Key to Failure, former U.S. State Department officer Norman B. Hannah described the American failure to take decisive action on the ground to block North Vietnamese infiltration through Laos as the U.S. government's single greatest strategic error of the Vietnam War. Whether or not one believes such action was feasible at that time in tactical, strategic and domestic political terms, the revelations provided by the Vietnamese officers who wrote the 1994 PAVN history lend powerful support to Hannah's argument that the Communist supply line through Laos, the foundation for which was laid by the North Vietnamese decisions of 1961, was indeed the key to the Communist victory in the struggle for South Vietnam. But I'm pretty sure that you're not going to bother yourself to read either of those books, let alone the article. And you certainly won't bother to read them objectively. Hawk