The Vietnam War myth

[JasonC]

The just cause of the war was the undeniable fact that North Vietnam was engaged in continual direct military aggression against South Vietnam, a US ally with every right to defend itself, including by calling in the aid of its allies. The US congress fully authorized the war and did so repeatedly. Nor was it remotely the first time the US president had directed US armed forces into action with less than a declaration of war. That honor goes to Thomas Jefferson in the war against the barbary pirates 200 years ago. And it continued forever, in scores of military campaigns in Latin America, not to mention the more immediate precedent of Korea.

The opponents of the war pretended that it was a domestic conflict within South Vietnam rather than an external aggression directed from the North. This was a flat out lie and they knew it at the time. They simply wanted an excuse to hang their preference for a northern victory, or at the least for the US staying out, on. The same it true of all the legalistic crap.

The surreal declaration that the Soviet Union was the only legalistically correct belligerent in WW II reveals a stunning bias.

And no, the war wasn't a stalemate. The VC were destroyed by the end of 1968, and the NVA pushed out of the country into enclaves in Laos and Cambodia by the time US ground forces left. South Vietnam was free, sovereign, protected by its own military, and in control of its territory. When North Vietnam attempted direct cross border invasion in the Easter Offensive in the spring of 1972 anyway, US air power intervened massively and smashed the attempt. With support of that magnitude, the ARVN were entirely able to hold, and hold they did. The North Vietnamese were not willing to sit still under continually B-52 strikes on downtown Hanoi to keep your precious "stalemate" going, and they sued for peace.

The massive cross border invasion in 1975 is the only thing that conquered South Vietnam. And it could have been stopped just as the Easter Offensive had been stopped, and it would have been had Nixon still been in the White House. (In fact they would not have tried it, had that been the case). Saying the war was a "stalemate" is like saying Germany didn't lose WW I, because after all it conquered France in 1940. It took a separate attack 2 1/2 years later with the combatants changed by US political processes, for the North to win anything.

Once again, the war was lost in the Watergate building and the US congress and not in South Vietnam.

Never forget that the ARVN were the last to give up. Trying asking them whether they were abandoned - those that lived and made it out to freedom. As for the moral equivalence in the previous poster's Soviet apologetic legalisms, its obscenity is highlighted by the million dead innocents in the aftermath of the war. Tell them that the US side in the war wasn't the just one.

And no, no danger of "creep" toward anything was or is required for one free nation to go to the defense of another nation unjustly attacked by a foreign tyranny bent on conquest. Then or now. And all the lies in creation won't make it unjust.