US History and actual History.

[flarty]

snip

I did have a reply all typed out but firefox crashed and it burnt
But sorry i didn't mean to agitate you. I was just expressing my opinion that Bomb was used more as a political deterrent to the soviets who had amassed the biggest military force on the planet. Probably more so than to end the war. If Truman and his pals didn't feel the soviets were so much of a threat i dare to say other avenues would of probably been sought.

snip

How about the fact that its widely acknowledged the Kennedy was very nervous about the brewing trouble in Vietnam after seeing what had happened previously in the country regarding the old french rule. He was being pushed around by military officials who he completely began to ignore after the bay of pigs fiasco. After his assassination it was LBJ who carried on to worsen the situation. There was roughly 16000 military advisers in Vietnam at this point.

Over the Nixon administration this was increased to 500,000 the war lasted till he was shortly impeached. As well as Kissinger green lighting some of the most horrific bombing campaigns ever as well as illegal bombings of Cambodia and being quoted to have said soldiers are "dumb, stupid animals to be used". He was ironically awarded a nobel peace prize for negotiating a truce with the Vietnam opposition, though there negotiator (i rubbish with foreign names) refused the award on the grounds that not long enough had passed to see if the deal is successful. Something only pursued by the US because Daniel Ellsberg leaking confidential pentagon papers that since the Johnson administration had concluded the war could not be won, would inflict more casualties than ever publicly announced. It also led to the reveal that Johnson had lied to congress as well as the public regarding these matters.

So it wasnt a hur hur Kennedy invaded 'nam and nixon bought our boys home.

Kennedy through naivety did as his military advisers told him, then refused to listen to them after the bay of pigs. Once assassinated the following administrations towed the line doing as they were asked/told. To keep fighting an un-winnable war. Im guessing it was good for profit

I leave you with a qoute from Eisenhower that kind of served as a look into the future, when he was leaving office no less after a decade of threatening various nations with the bomb =/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

as for the rest of your post i didn't bother to read it, your assessment on the Vietnam war was such a half truth that it doesn't warrant my time sorry.

 

[Atmos Duality]

US history was painfully skewed when I was forced to learn it, at pretty much every turn.
As such, I generally only do heavy research on it as needed, and take everything with a grain of salt.

I mean, I thought it was awfully convenient to focus on the Civil War so much in middle school and early High School, but make nothing more than a footnote mention to Vietnam.

Of course, the US is by no means unique in this; every major nation or empire does this. It's just as important to not skew back so far that we start demonizing the subject (as a lot of modern "White Guilt" culture tends to).

 

[bug_of_war]

It is more a case that Australia and the rest of the pacific stopped the Japanese advance and the yanks were the fact that let the allies go on the offensive. Don't get me wrong, we would not have been able to drive the Japanese out of the Pacific without them, but the defensive war was not the Uncle sam show at all. Then, when the yanks did show up, they took all the high profile jobs and shunted the Australians off into quagmire shitholes like bouginville. I'm just so fucking tired of yanks ignoring their allies, in this war, in Korea, in Vietnam and in the war on terror. Yank soldiers tend to be pretty good about it, and so do yank pollies, but you try and find a yank civvie that has even heard of Kokoda or Bouganville.

While your statement has truth to it, you're not doing yourself any favours by frequently calling the Americans 'yanks'. Yes I know, it's what we say to describe the Americans in whole, but your devaluing your point by calling them yanks. Most people don't associate WWII as the uncle sam show as America did not participate a whole lot in the European fighting, which is where WWII begun. America did not give Britain the capability to go on the offensive, the USSR did, and that's only because winter came 6 weeks early and the Germans were ill-equipped for the climate.

As for the Americans not knowing Australian battles such as Kokoda, I bet you that most school kids in Australia have little idea on such battles either. Unfortunately Australia's part is often downplayed, but it's not because America is shouting it's every move in a microphone, it's because not a lot of people teach about Australian battles, even in Australia. I learnt more about European and Asian battles/events in my schooling years than I did about Australia and that problem lies at our education curriculum for not teaching us about our own history (although I have been told that Australian history has begun being taught more prominently now).

 

[beastro]

snip

I did have a reply all typed out but firefox crashed and it burnt
But sorry i didn't mean to agitate you. I was just expressing my opinion that Bomb was used more as a political deterrent to the soviets who had amassed the biggest military force on the planet. Probably more so than to end the war. If Truman and his pals didn't feel the soviets were so much of a threat i dare to say other avenues would of probably been sought.

snip

How about the fact that its widely acknowledged the Kennedy was very nervous about the brewing trouble in Vietnam after seeing what had happened previously in the country regarding the old french rule. He was being pushed around by military officials who he completely began to ignore after the bay of pigs fiasco. After his assassination it was LBJ who carried on to worsen the situation. There was roughly 16000 military advisers in Vietnam at this point.

Over the Nixon administration this was increased to 500,000 the war lasted till he was shortly impeached. As well as Kissinger green lighting some of the most horrific bombing campaigns ever as well as illegal bombings of Cambodia and being quoted to have said soldiers are "dumb, stupid animals to be used". He was ironically awarded a nobel peace prize for negotiating a truce with the Vietnam opposition, though there negotiator (i rubbish with foreign names) refused the award on the grounds that not long enough had passed to see if the deal is successful. Something only pursued by the US because Daniel Ellsberg leaking confidential pentagon papers that since the Johnson administration had concluded the war could not be won, would inflict more casualties than ever publicly announced. It also led to the reveal that Johnson had lied to congress as well as the public regarding these matters.

So it wasnt a hur hur Kennedy invaded 'nam and nixon bought our boys home.

Kennedy through naivety did as his military advisers told him, then refused to listen to them after the bay of pigs. Once assassinated the following administrations towed the line doing as they were asked/told. To keep fighting an un-winnable war. Im guessing it was good for profit

I leave you with a qoute from Eisenhower that kind of served as a look into the future, when he was leaving office no less after a decade of threatening various nations with the bomb =/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

as for the rest of your post i didn't bother to read it, your assessment on the Vietnam war was such a half truth that it doesn't warrant my time sorry.

Relevant thread to read: http://www.tboverse.us/HPCAFORUM/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12221

At the time, the general Communist strategy was "Push out a bayonet; if it strikes steel, pull back. If it strikes flesh, push deeper." The North Vietnamese objective was primarily a reconnaissance in force; a probe to determine what the South Vietnamese were actually up to and how strong they were. From a Russian/Chinese point of view, that same reconnaissance in force was intended to determine how strong the US commitment to South Vietnam was. To see this in context, its essential to look at the 1958 involvements in the Taiwan Strait (Quemoy) and Lebanon. Both were similar reconnaissance in force probes, both met solid resistance (in both cases, the key factor is the type and character of the aircraft deployed) and in both cases the probe pulled back. The problem in South Vietnam was that there was a complete shortage of skilled personnel able to take up leadership positions. This meant the US had to take up the slack.

North Vietnam had two other objectives. One related to the fact that by 1959, South Vietnam was settling down fast and beginning to pull ahead of North Vietnam in the process of becoming a viable state. All in all, the late 1950s were pretty good years for South Vietnam while they were chaotic and disrupted in the North. So, the North Vietnamese attack on the South was very much a spoiling attack intended to disrupt South Vietnamese development rather than actually occupy the place. It took place when it did because the accelerating development of the South made it appear that the window for such a spoiling attack was closing

The other objective was simpler. The Viet Minh that had expelled the French was not a communist organization - in fact communists were a minority (although an active minority) within it. The Viet Minh was a nationalist organization representing round 15 different political groups. The Communists only came to dominate it after the Geneva agreement. The political cadres sent south from 1959 to 1962 were the nationalist veterans. This achieved two things; one was that it gave the infiltration a nationalist rather than communist air and secondly it got all those non-communist Viet Minh veterans out of the way. By the way, the prevalence of nationalists in the Viet Minh was why there was such a deficit of leadership in the South.

The North Vietnamese expectation was that there would be a re-run of 1958. The assault on the South would disrupt their economic and political development and bring North and South to the same level. The strong American involvement would identify the South as an American puppet. They expected that the US would do what it had done in 1958; use their power to isolate the area and bring in massive force to illustrate what they could do. Nobody ever planned to invade the North or occupy Hanoi. the key word was isolate not occupy. The Chinese could have done little or nothing to stop that process and they had no intention of doing anything. They made that very clear right from the start, do anything when the confrontation was in their own front yard on ground of their own choosing and they couldn't do anything in an Indochina backwater. Hence my reaction to the nonsense posted above - its just the same old tripe repeated by people who don't have a glimmering of an understanding about what they are talking about.

What surprised everybody in Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow was the lack of the expected American reaction. Instead of isolating the situation, the Americans did nothing. The bayonet had met soft flesh, the COmmunists pushed deeper and the rest is history

I think its more complicated than that. The Democrats won the 1960 election with the need to rebuild the US Army as a major part of their manifesto - and Maxwell Taylor was a major part of that. he was very much the eminence gris behind Kennedy policy-making. But, the great question always was, why? The truth was, the US didn't need a big army for an Eisenhower era defense policy. That had been made quite clear in 1958. If it was to have a big army, then the defense policy had to be amended to make one necessary. Flexible response came out of the political need to create a big Army in fulfillment of electoral invective. Remember McNamara was the third choice as SoD; the first two choices refused the appointment when they were told what the defense policy had to be. That's very informative.

Having a big Army also meant there had to justification for it and that meant getting involved in a land war. Vietnam came along at the right time. The U.S. fought a ground war in Vietnam because it was forming a large land army and needed a war to demonstrate its value.

It's interesting that in none of the decision-making memos did escalation figure in any serious sense. Everybody knew it wasn't going to happen that way. Chinese conventional involvement was also discounted - the Air Force took one look at the number of Chinese aircraft that could be deployed and where from and burst out laughing. The number of Chinese aircraft deployable barely made triple digits; it would have been a massacre. The actual force structure the Chinese could have deployed was much less than Korea (which was very favorable ground for a Chinese deployment). The infrastructure just didn't exist for a major Chinese troop involvement - and in 1979 we saw why. That was predicted by Saint Curtis and John McConnell in 1961. The Russians very bluntly stated that if they got a nice trade deal from the U.S., North Vietnam could go and hang itself. Which was what happened in 1972.

If the war had been handled the way it should have been (isolate and contain) there would have been no ground involvement of any consequence and the whole ghastly mess would have been avoided. Today, it would be just another obscure little incident that created a kerfuffle in the press at the time and quickly faded away. Today, there would be a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam just like there is a North Korea and a South Korea

If you dismiss it, at least look up who Stuart Slade (Handle being "The Admiral on there) is and his qualifications.

You seem to think the military walked together lock step and ignore the civilian part of the DoD which Kennedy put in place led by Strange MacNamara. The amusing thing about Eisenhower's speech and it's relevance to the Vietnam War isn't that the danger came from a pack of conspiratorial comic too masterminds but simple inter-service rivalry (The Army angry and becoming the weakest and least relevant of the services post-WWII) combined with bean counters who thought their new way of managing war had rendered old lessons obsolete (Strange, the Whizz Kids and their manipulation and falsification of evidence to justify their policies, central being the expansion of the Army).

Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

 

[Sean951]

In defense of LBJ, he escalated because he really, REALLY wanted to end that damn war. He hated it with a burning passion. What he really wanted was for all that money to go to his War on Poverty, and that couldn't happen while we were stuck in Vietnam.

 

[RoonMian]

I always figured that a large number of Americans have a predisposition either culturally or genetically towards being aggressive in nature due to German lineage.
Eight million Germans settling into the country over a period of 300 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American

http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=53

What is this I don't even....

Sorry if this is a bit off of the topic but...

Are you really saying that in your opinion Germans might be (or might have been before the beginning of the 20th century) culturally more predisposed to violence than others?

Are you really saying that in your opinion Germans might be genetically more predisposed to violence than others?!

EDIT: I was so like "WTF?!?" that I mixed up violence with aggression... But still, the same.

 

[GamerAddict7796]

I believe it is a very little known fact that the US supplied the IRA with weapons.

 

[TheIronRuler]

Yeah. Countries aren't one entity, and sometimes don't make decisions based on what's right for them at the time (in hindsight). Big messes get interpreted as plans as if leaders planned it all along. Current biases are used to interpret history in different ways. History is never the truth, but often the tool in a war of propaganda and indoctrination. If you repeat something enough times, it comes into reality as if it's true. Same goes for your text books.

 

[themilo504]

My Dutch school books barely feature any Dutch history at all Holland isn?t even mentioned until the eighty year war, apparently the low countries magically appeared one day occupied by the Spanish.

 

[the clockmaker]

While your statement has truth to it, you're not doing yourself any favours by frequently calling the Americans 'yanks'. Yes I know, it's what we say to describe the Americans in whole, but your devaluing your point by calling them yanks.

The rest of your post is pretty agreeable and to be entirely honest, I stopped caring about this thread a few days ago, just lost interest you know. However, the section that I quoted baffles me. How does using the word yank devalue my post, I see a lot of this on this site, people choosing to be offended by inoffensive words. Civvie is apparently offensive, yank is offensive, yet somehow, Aussie is fine.

I have never, never in several years living in the states and several years working with them at home, never met a yank offended by the term yank. Most of them loved it, hearing the antipodean lingo.

bloody hell...

 

[Voulan]

In a Revolutions course I did in History at uni, we looked at the Cold War and America's treatment of the Latin American countries, and it had me seething. Especially since our lecturer told us that he taught the same subject at some US universities, and many students had never known about these details or even knew about it, because they were being safely omitted from American history. The specific instances we looked at were Nicaragua and Cuba, and the controversies are terrible. the Iran-Contra agreement, for example, had the US selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contra army to continue mass-killings of Nicaraguan civilians, after UNESCO pulled their funding because it was so barbaric. When it was found out, it was humiliating for the US, and they were forced to pay reprimands - only when they rigged an election and got a US sympathizer as their new president, they called it off, so they literally got nothing. And to this day, despite every other country in the world recognizing how pathetic and barbaric it was, the US still say they did the right thing.

I don't mean to get heated, but it really is utterly pathetic. Whenever I hear Reagan's name I want to punch a small child.

EDIT: I forgot about how the US usually ignores or undermines the work their allies do in wars. As a Kiwi, I know a lot about the work the ANZACs have done, so I get really annoyed learning about how fantastic and incredible the US army was.

 

[bug_of_war]

The rest of your post is pretty agreeable and to be entirely honest, I stopped caring about this thread a few days ago, just lost interest you know. However, the section that I quoted baffles me. How does using the word yank devalue my post, I see a lot of this on this site, people choosing to be offended by inoffensive words. Civvie is apparently offensive, yank is offensive, yet somehow, Aussie is fine.

I have never, never in several years living in the states and several years working with them at home, never met a yank offended by the term yank. Most of them loved it, hearing the antipodean lingo.

bloody hell...

I wasn't offended by the term yank or civvie, didn't mean to make it sound as though I was. The reason it can devalue your statement is because (personally) I believe that when referring to wars and battles we should show the decency to refer to the soldiers whom gave their lives as Americans, or Australians, or British etc. I didn't mean to annoy you either so I apologize for doing so.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Basically everything that's happened in foreign diplomacy to Latin America?

And also very few people seem to realise that America has propped up dictatorships & delivered weapons to extremist groups. I guess that this is quite recent history so it could be more sensitive to cover.

From a serious academic standpoint, the various events in Latin America from the 80's to present are exempt as they are not sufficiently old enough to have developed anything resembling an academic consensus on the truth of the situation.

 

[flarty]

snip

Irrelevant on the reasons why they expanded more in to Vietnam, your narration of the Vietnam made Kennedy look like a war mongering asshole and Nixon the savior who managed to bring our troops home.

As for the DoD ignoring the civvie side of the organization. Its not to hard to imagine that was the case since they were lying and concealing important information about the war to congress and the public.
I'm even willing to bet that by the Nixon administration it would be people with shares in weapons companies that was running the entire DoD giving them an interest in prolonging the war. Bit like how the majority of the Bush administration all had ties and shares to oil companies and Lockheed martin.

And while they are very lovely extracts you posted that portray the north as barbaric transgressors. it conveniently forgets that there may not of even been any Vietnamese present at the Gulf of Tonkin.

Whatever you attribute all the failings to be it, malice, stupidity or profiteering. It doesn't change the fact that the US knowingly fought and prolonged a war they knew they couldn't win, killing millions of people. Lets not forget that LBJ drafted people in to the army knowingly sending them to their deaths.

In defense of LBJ, he escalated because he really, REALLY wanted to end that damn war. He hated it with a burning passion. What he really wanted was for all that money to go to his War on Poverty, and that couldn't happen while we were stuck in Vietnam.

Ahhh so that's how you end wars, by ramping up the killing, kill everyone till theirs no one left. I was under the impression to end a war you withdraw troops and apologize and mediate a truce. Or how about not invading a country just because you don't like them or they hold some private interest for you.

 

[Samus Aran but a man]

Oh yeah Lincoln TOTALLY cared about the slaves!

 

[mitchell271]

Being Canadian, there's something we're quite fond of up here. Most Americans seem to think they won the war of 1812 (even though they lost miserably to the British military) but Canadians see it as something else [a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/war-of-1812-vital-because-it-kept-out-us-politics---and-snooki-poll/article4099806/"]as seen here.[/a] To quote the article, "Americans see it as a war that produced their national anthem. Canadians see it as a war which saved them from American assimilation and preserved them from American politics, gun laws and shared citizenship with Snooki of the Jersey Shore."

To everyone but the Americans, it seems like they've lost every war since WWII. Vietnam was a horrible loss, Korea was a mess and the "War on Terror" hasn't been going so well.

Not saying Canada's perfect, we've done stupid shit as well (2nd battle of Ypres anyone?).

I dunno, do they teach you guys about Japanese American Internment?

Not like we're clean of blood either, Canada did the same thing.

Damn, ninja'd on that one.