Because it was contrary to fact and reason.
Actually it was not.
Did the regime we installed stay in power? No.
No, but that was because we abandoned them financially two years after we removed our combat troops.
I defined destroying the North Vietnamese and establishing a solid South before we pulled out a "victory".
It was the lack of commitment by people like you and the Congress to the people we were trying to protect that caused the fall of South Vietnam.
Pyrrhus won every battle, but he left the Romans in possession of Italy. Of course he could claim victory, just as you do, because he left behind his colonial Greek allies.
His military was devastated.
You really have no idea what you are talking about.
Are you seriously maintaining that having a higher body count counts for victory more than who is left in possesion of the field of battle?
Hardly.
You are not even trying to follow my argument.
Your post was contrary to fact.
Your was, in fact.
They had the training and equipment we gave them. They were not capable on their own if they needed our money.
Israel is not capable on its own then?
Neither is South Korea.
Did we
win the Korean war?
Victory involves achieving objectives.
We achieved our objectives in Vietnam and in Korea.
The Congress then switched power and undermined the South Vietnamese we worked hard to free.
The puppet regime we left in power did not have the support of the people, and its collapse began even before the final push.
It would have remained if Congress didn't cut funding.
But, at the end of the day, there were not two Viet Nams, there was only one.
Yes. Why?
Not because we lost militarily.
We won in every respect.
Two years after our military left Vietnam, we cut funding and North Vietnam came in.
The operation was a success, but the patient died?
Bad analogy. The patient died two years later because the Pharmacy stopped giving them their medicine. If you want to push the analogy.
The Vietnamese had been fighting for their independence for two thousand years before we got there. They waited two years after the French left for the scheduled referendum the US prevented from happening. The US government stopped the democratic process because they knew the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese, communist or not, favored a unified Viet Nam.
Completely false.
We knew that the Communists would take over and the domino effect would cause the region to turn Communist.
A majority of the Vietnamese people were not on our side. They were on the side of home rule, not control by a colonial power.
The North Vietnamese wanted a Communist regime.
Some Southerners wanted it as well.
Yes they wanted home rule. So did we.
But we couldn't allow Communism to take over and cause the entire area to become Communist.
We cut the funding because many Americans had come to see that the preponderance of justice was on the other side; and many more Americans had come to see that we were pouring our money into a bottomless pit of corruption.
And then the North Vietnamese came in and executed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
To the extent that we had clear war aims, those aims included a stable and self-sufficient state of South Viet Nam. That was not achieved.
No one in the world is self-sufficient.
We support dozens of nations militarily.
Viet Nam was unified. Even in the south the non-Europeanized, non-Christianized inhabitants were in the minority. The Vietnamese are and have been for over a thousand years, one people ethnically and culturally. The whole Vietnamese people won, because we aren't there, and our corrupt and repressive puppet regime isn't there.
Your ideas assume all of Vietnam wanted us gone.
In the South that was simply not the case.
I would like to think we played a part.
Then the blood of tens of thousands who were executed by the brutal Communist North Vietnam is on your hands as well as the oppression of the Vietnamese people for the last 40 years.
I, and the others who marched and protested, will take some of the credit for ending the unjustifiable American incursion into a foreign land.
That incursion prevented Communism from spreading across the region and bring the entire area into oppression.
It was not unjustified.
The South Vietnamese wanted us there.
Our liberal Congress and people like you betrayed them and cost tens of thousands their lives and millions their freedom.
Look, I lived through it. Even had you been able to flush all the documentation down the memory hole, I watched it happen. I know what I saw, and it agrees with what history tells me.
You are simply mistaken.
Were you in Vietnam? Did you
see it?
Or did you follow the Media?
I am basing my argument on the
fact on the ground in Vietnam.
On the documentation.
Not your a-historical propaganda that ignores the facts in the name of your ideology.
As well as the testimony of my father who flew Huey transport gunships for three tours in Vietnam and my mentor who was a Green Barret in South Vietnam and worked closely with the South Vietnamese forces.
