John McCain: War Hero or North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator?

[cfimages]

@KingZog

[quote=“cfimages”]The hard-core Communistic ideas and policies came later than the mid-50s when all this was taking place.

That’s not true

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nhan_Van_affair

This was in 1956, the same year that the referendum was supposed to take place. Still think it was a good idea to let the referundum go ahead and let the North engulf the South?[/quote]

I’d bet that there’d have been a lot less dead if the north took over than there was after close to 20 years of war, which ended up seeing the north take over anyway, plus the spillover wars in Cambodia and Laos and all the millions dead there.

Maybe we should let China and Taiwan both organise referundums now on whether unification should take place. Averaged over Taiwan and China I’m sure they’d get a majority, given that the result will be 100% in favour in China.

Totally different situation because they’ve been separate for 60 years. In Vietnam, the partition of the country only came after the Geneva Agreements in 1954 and was intended to be temporary until the referendum could be held.

[Mawvellous]

[quote=“cfimages”]

Maybe we should let China and Taiwan both organise referundums now on whether unification should take place. Averaged over Taiwan and China I’m sure they’d get a majority, given that the result will be 100% in favour in China.

Totally different situation because they’ve been separate for 60 years. In Vietnam, the partition of the country only came after the Geneva Agreements in 1954 and was intended to be temporary until the referendum could be held.[/quote]

Actually it was not a referendum but national elections. The South refused to hold them because Ngo Dinh Diem knew that Ho would win.

The analogy is also false because there were separate majorities in BOTH North and South Vietnam for reunification. The corrupt and nepotist regime was deeply unpopular despite his 98.2% election ‘win’ the proceeding year, his American advisers had suggested that a 60-70% majority would look more ‘realistic’. Ah…the smell of freedom!

The US should have accepted reunification under Ho, and found a way to live with it. The war was a grave mistake that cost millions of lives and had all kinds of unindented negative consequences.

[Gao_Bohan]

[quote=“Mawvellous”]
The US also exhausted huge amounts of resources fighting in Vietnam. Without that expenditure, more support could have been given to regional US allies.[/quote]

That would have been pointless if the Communists had swept through southeast Asia unopposed. We did expend tremendous resources in Vietnam, but I believe it was necessary.

The Vietnam war is also often cited as a factor in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, with US carpet bombing of Cambodia leading many Khmer peasants to support them.

That is no doubt true. This gets into the realm of speculation, but I think there’s a good chance that all of Indochina would have become Communist even if we had never intervened, albeit in a more moderate form.

However the North Vietnamese were never more than cool towards Democratic Kampuchea, and by 1978 they were outright hostile. Of course it was the Vietnamese who toppled the regime.

Yes.

So much for the fallen dominoes being a threat to the US…these were very much national movements who relied on either China or the USSR for support, and often played one off against the other.

As previously stated, I believe those “fallen dominos” went sideways and crooked due to our intervention. An easy, non-violent victory for the Communists would have given them more resources to devote to expansion elsewhere.

Yes of course the USSR tried to expand its influence, and devoted substantial resources to it (as did the US). This does not indicate that the USSR was planning to take over the world. The internationalism of the early Commitern was most definitely dead.

I disagree with that. Even during the 80s the USSR was funding Communist insurgencies/regimes in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

[quote]I don’t believe a Communist Asia would have been a threat to the US or its vital interests. A threat to regional interests or allies in the region? Of course.
However there is no evidence to suggest that the loss of Vietnam would have resulted in Communist regimes in other important Asian allies such as Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or the Philippines. Asia is geographically and politically dispersed. What happens in Vietnam is unlikely to have any affect on say Taiwan.

“Gain inertia”? An interesting one.[/quote]

Small nations have a habit of aligning themselves with whichever regional power is strongest. How do you think Taiwan would have fared if we had abandoned our policy of opposing Communist regimes in Asia? It would surely have been reincorporated into China. It has been mentioned on these forums previously that Li Guangyao (Lee Kuan Yew) accredits the US intervention in Vietnam with preventing a Communist surge in the region that would have engulfed his country.

I think we’re starting to go around in circles here. We have a fundamental disagreement on the nature and power of Communism. You seem to perceive it as a specific means to an end for anti-colonial insurgencies. Actually, I agree with you. But I also believe that, whatever their motivations, those nations accepted the suzerainty of Moscow or Beijing and could have been harnessed for a more global war. Of course the USSR and the PRC had little love for each, particularly after Stalin died and Mao immediately and publicly denounced Khrushchev, but in a third world war there’s no question they would have been allies. I believe that our anti-Communist policies prevented the Communists from ever gaining enough power to start that war. And yes, those policies included supporting ruthless dictators, military regimes, one-party states, etc., but I don’t see that we had an option.

Regarding the destruction in Vietnam, I can only say that a full-scale invasion of the North early in the war may have prevented much of the chaos. Unless, of course, the Chinese had intervened as in Korea.

[Mawvellous]

[quote=“Gao Bohan”]

Small nations have a habit of aligning themselves with whichever regional power is strongest. How do you think Taiwan would have fared if we had abandoned our policy of opposing Communist regimes in Asia? It would surely have been reincorporated into China. It has been mentioned on these forums previously that Li Guangyao (Lee Kuan Yew) accredits the US intervention in Vietnam with preventing a Communist surge in the region that would have engulfed his country.

I think we’re starting to go around in circles here. We have a fundamental disagreement on the nature and power of Communism. You seem to perceive it as a specific means to an end for anti-colonial insurgencies. Actually, I agree with you. But I also believe that, whatever their motivations, those nations accepted the suzerainty of Moscow or Beijing and could have been harnessed for a more global war. Of course the USSR and the PRC had little love for each, particularly after Stalin died and Mao immediately and publicly denounced Khrushchev, but in a third world war there’s no question they would have been allies. I believe that our anti-Communist policies prevented the Communists from ever gaining enough power to start that war. And yes, those policies included supporting ruthless dictators, military regimes, one-party states, etc., but I don’t see that we had an option.

Regarding the destruction in Vietnam, I can only say that a full-scale invasion of the North early in the war may have prevented much of the chaos. Unless, of course, the Chinese had intervened as in Korea.[/quote]

Yes I agree with you about small powers aligning themselves to whoever is strongest. I think many of the Communist groups in the Third World were essentially nationalist movements, they aligned themselves with Moscow or Beijing because they offered financial and military support. Ho was very adept at this, and playing the Russians and Chinese off against each other.
Possibly such problems could have been avoided if the US had provided a means for the realisation of nationalist ambitions, and distribution of land and wealth away from the colonial elites and to the masses. Unfortunately instead they supported reactionary leaders such as Ngo Dinh Diem who were more interested in protecting their own privilege. Where pro-US regimes pushed forward progressive economic policies (such as land reform in Taiwan) results were favourable.

I also think you underestimate the degree of animosity that developed between China and USSR. If Sino-Soviet ties had remained strong, it is even possible that the US embassy to China would still be in Taipei. I think there is a big question as to whether China and Russia would have been allies in a world war.

I also have to question why you think that the communists wanted to start that war. The USSR no more believed that it could win a war against the US, than the US thought it could win a war against the USSR. After WWII the USSR was primarily concerned with maintaining hegemony over Eastern Europe and ensuring its own security, as well as competing with the US for influence in strategically important parts of the Third World. Its main objective was to counter American ‘containment’ policies. The USSR never envisaged an attack on the US or Western Europe. They did not believe that Communism would spread to the continental US via Hawaii, as some proponents of domino theory claimed.