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Who won the Vietnam War?

Who won the Vietnam War?

  • The French

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The British

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Americans

    Votes: 6 6.1%

  • The Canadians

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Chinese

    Votes: 3 3.0%

  • The Russians

    Votes: 3 3.0%

  • The Japanese

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Vietnamese

    Votes: 46 46.5%

  • No one

    Votes: 23 23.2%

  • Other

    Votes: 18 18.2%
  • Total voters
    99
Only the people in the defense and support industry won anything during Viet Nam. I'm sure a politician or two might have made out well too.
 
Perotista said:
I would say the North Vietnamese and their allies the USSR and China. Who lost, the South Vietnamese to include the 2 million South Vietnamese who were killed or died in the North Vietnamese re-education camps and fleeing Vietnam by boat. The Cambodians to include 2-3 million Camobidans who were either killed or died at the hands of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge along with another 500,000 Laotians who were also killed by the PL to include the attempted extermination of the Hmong tribe of Northern Laos particularly around the PDJ. I would also include the United and the allied forces in Vietnam.
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That still bothers me if I think about it.
 
Grand Mal said:
The Vietnamese people have been fighting to have a country they can call theirs for generations. They have it now, and they're doing well with it. It's a small country and doesn't step on any toes. Who can say it was a bad result?
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The Chinese want the South China Sea.
 
Go to Vietnam today, it is one of the most intensely capitalist nations on earth. I've been all through the country a few times, this is not what Uncle Ho wanted... USA won....eventually
 
Risky Thicket said:
That still bothers me if I think about it.
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I try not to, I spent 10 years over there going from country to country, Thailand to Laos to Vietnam and back to Thailand, 67-76. It was hell working at JUSMAGTHAI with six air bases full of fighters and bombers and them just sitting on the ground back in April of 75. I lost many a good friend when those countries fell. I try to just to remember the good and forget the bad and most of the time I am successful. i guess that is why when I get into conversations dealing with my experiences over there I always end up talking about the bars and bar girls.
 
John Kerry.
 
beefheart said:
Go to Vietnam today, it is one of the most intensely capitalist nations on earth. I've been all through the country a few times, this is not what Uncle Ho wanted... USA won....eventually
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Well, capitalism won anyway. It always seems to, eventually, even in places like China.
 
Porchev said:
Vietnam was also lost because the military had their hands tied by not being able to bomb certain targets--in part because the Administration (LBJ) didn't want to take chances of killing Russian advisors to the north Vietnamese. If we were more aggressive with air power then it could have went a lot differently.
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No, Vietnam was lost because we were fixated on prosecuting a European style war in a foreign country ill-suited for such; not to mention the fact that we allowed ourselves to get into the middle of another country's civil war, which is no place for any right thinking nation to be.

The idea that our "hands were tied" is naive revisionist history perpetrated by "American Exceptionalists" lost in the misguided (and rather arrogant) perception that America can do no wrong.
 
upsideguy said:
No, Vietnam was lost because we were fixated on prosecuting a European style war in a foreign country ill-suited for such; not to mention the fact that we allowed ourselves to get into the middle of another country's civil war, which is no place for any right thinking nation to be.

The idea that our "hands were tied" is naive revisionist history perpetrated by "American Exceptionalists" lost in the misguided (and rather arrogant) perception that America can do no wrong.
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No, the military was not used to it's full potential (not talking about nukes though). If we fought them like the Christmas bombings (Linebacker 2) for an extended period (instead of 11 days, perhaps 11 weeks) it is plausible that it could have went differently. We ignored striking certain areas for years then when we did the north Vietnamese were quick to talk about stopping it.
 
Porchev said:
No, the military was not used to it's full potential (not talking about nukes though). If we fought them like the Christmas bombings (Linebacker 2) for an extended period (instead of 11 days, perhaps 11 weeks) it is plausible that it could have went differently. We ignored striking certain areas for years then when we did the north Vietnamese were quick to talk about stopping it.
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If it's worth going to war at all, then it's worth going all the way to win. In the case of Vietnam, it was not worth going to war, and we did not go all the way to win. It was more like an Orwellian little unending sort of war. Moreover, it is the first war that Americans could actually see via their television sets, and they didn't like what they saw. America lost its taste for this war than never really was a war after a few years of brutal fighting and getting nowhere.

America may be exceptional and all, but it made a huge foreign policy blunder in getting involved at all, then it lost the war.

At least, the Fall of Saigon didn't look like a victory party to me.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Well, capitalism won anyway. It always seems to, eventually, even in places like China.
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I was pretty shocked at how Capitalistic Vietnam was, in all honesty...
 
upsideguy said:
No, Vietnam was lost because we were fixated on prosecuting a European style war in a foreign country ill-suited for such; not to mention the fact that we allowed ourselves to get into the middle of another country's civil war, which is no place for any right thinking nation to be.

The idea that our "hands were tied" is naive revisionist history perpetrated by "American Exceptionalists" lost in the misguided (and rather arrogant) perception that America can do no wrong.
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The politicians tied the hands of the military... there is no other way to view it, honestly. Compare the movement of our armies in WWII to Vietnam. If the Germans had been funnelling arms through some country like the Ho Chi Minh Trail we would have gone in there and destroyed them. We would not whine about it being across a border. We bombed Berlin and most of Germany to rubble but not North Vietnam.. again, politics.
 
I have clicked on "the Russians". And regretted it a moment later. As a Pole, I have...shall we say...reservations about many things Russian.

Still, equating the Soviet totalitarian monstrosity that succeeded in installing a puppet regime in Vietnam back in those days with the whole of the Russian nation is most unfair: Russians had lost more people to the Communist Moloch, in proportion, than almost any other ethnic group, outside of Cambodia....

P.S. "A goal of the unified Vietnam", seriously? "Unified" by a force that was as hostile to everything distinctly Vietnamese as to the evil, evil French or American influences? It was not a unification. It was a violent rape by an imperialism much worse and much more debasing than anything that happened before.
 
Cyrylek said:
I have clicked on "the Russians". And regretted it a moment later. As a Pole, I have...shall we say...reservations about many things Russian.

Still, equating the Soviet totalitarian monstrosity that succeeded in installing a puppet regime in Vietnam back in those days with the whole of the Russian nation is most unfair: Russians had lost more people to the Communist Moloch, in proportion, than almost any other ethnic group, outside of Cambodia....

P.S. "A goal of the unified Vietnam", seriously? "Unified" by a force that was as hostile to everything distinctly Vietnamese as to the evil, evil French or American influences? It was not a unification. It was a violent rape by an imperialism much worse and much more debasing than anything that happened before.
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I was thinking of voting Russia. It was the Soviet Union who armed the north, who probably manned the air defenses of Hanoi and Haiphong.

It was all of the Vietnamese people who lost in 1975.

The Vietnam war was just one battle of the Cold War.

The West didn't win every battle during the Cold War. But in the end we prevailed.

Prime Minster Margret Thatcher was the one who originally said "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War." But there were many others who should also get credit, the United Kingdom, the people of Poland even the Pope played a role along with those who served during the Vietnam war helped in winning the Cold War.
 
APACHERAT said:
I was thinking of voting Russia. It was the Soviet Union who armed the north, who probably manned the air defenses of Hanoi and Haiphong.

It was all of the Vietnamese people who lost in 1975.

The Vietnam war was just one battle of the Cold War.

The West didn't win every battle during the Cold War. But in the end we prevailed.

Prime Minster Margret Thatcher was the one who originally said "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War." But there were many others who should also get credit, the United Kingdom, the people of Poland even the Pope played a role along with those who served during the Vietnam war helped in winning the Cold War.
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Agreed, but will add that it was also the former Soviet leaders who said Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Only the leftists in the western democracies deny it.
 
MadLib said:
...after sabotaging the Paris peace talks in order to win the election.
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Lets not forget John Kerry who interfered with the Paris Peace Talks and met with the enemy in Paris and delayed the final agreement for days. How many more names went up on the "Wall" because of Kerry ? Who did end up being the last American soldier to be killed in Vietnam that Kerry kept talking about ?
 
Vietnam was won by the Vietnamese Communists even before we got involved, as soon as France left. The United States should never have made itself a supporter of, and a successor to, French imperialism in Indochina. The untrammeled brutality with which the war was conducted only compounds the fact that we made this huge blunder.

One of the things I'm sick of hearing, however, is how all of our modern wars are Vietnam 2.0. Afghanistan isn't Vietnam, people. Neither is Iraq. It seems that the antiwar movement, proud of having been vindicated after rightfully and justly protesting our intervention in the Indochina quagmire, has now lazily decided to attach the Vietnam label to any and all conflicts that don't provide a quick and easy victory.
 
The Vietnamese Communists won this war. Maybe a better question would be: Why was the United States there in the first place?
 
reefedjib said:
The leadership of the North Vietnamese "Communist" Party won. The Vietnamese people certainly did not win. From 1975 to 1986, not only were there widespread persecutions, but the economy sucked. Doi moi has helped the economy tremendously, but they are still a dictatorship, and treat their people poorly.
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I disagree. The Vietnamese reunited their country and threw finally the foreigners out after 50 years. They got their country back from foreign invaders. That's is what the French were AND we were.....foreign invaders
 
APACHERAT said:
Lets not forget John Kerry who interfered with the Paris Peace Talks and met with the enemy in Paris and delayed the final agreement for days. How many more names went up on the "Wall" because of Kerry ? Who did end up being the last American soldier to be killed in Vietnam that Kerry kept talking about ?
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The big thing was when Kissinger gave a backdoor to Nixon and to the South Vietnamese, which led the latter to reject the peace accords entirely. The ~27,000 names on the wall are because of Kissinger's and Nixon's manipulations, not because of an activist soldier.
 
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