In retrospect, was U S civilian resistance to the Vietnam war justified? If so why has the resistance to the conflict in Iraq been so comparatively tepid?
Why no major upheavals for 20 years of combat?
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Because these days we have a volunteer army. When “our boys” could get drafted to fight in a stupid war, the impetus to resist was much more powerful. (Although I think you might mean the war in Afghanistan when you speak of 20 years.)
Thanks birdie for some VALID editing in addition to getting right to the core!
In Viet Nam, we were fighting to stop the spread of Communism. In this last war, we were fighting another unseen enemy, but it was one that had attacked us here at home. But the end result will be the same: When we pull out, they win.
US casualties have been much lower in Afghanistan for one reason. Another is the Vietnam war was much better reported and the American public was much better informed about the horrors and the futility of it all.
I’m with @janbb – too many of my friends were drafted. (I was a year or two too young for the draft). And several of them went to Canada rather than serve.
Vietnam, like Afghanistan, was a made-up war to satisfy politicians and corporations. But as @janbb notes, the guys who were drafted had no choice. That’s the big difference.
I don’t have a problem with someone volunteering to serve and potentially die. I had a big problem with forcing people to die at age 18.
I think @kritiper has it right. The US seems to have a good justification for their action in Iraq: because they are the homeland of some super stereotyped extreme terrorists, and there have been reports of them causing havoc everywhere in the world. Meanwhile no Vietnamese had ever caused direct harm to the US. All we did wrong was embracing communism. And seems like the 1960s America had some hipsters who were against capitalism, and some people who genuinely thought we didn’t do anything wrong to the US.
I should mention that I saw a handful of media (movies, books, games) from/set in the 70s, and when the Vietnam war is mentioned, most people just acted indifferent, very similarly to the attitude you see in the current Iraq thing. The most extreme reaction was in a movie I watched long ago don’t remember the name right now, have to look it up. In the movie, a character mentioned that his brother fought in Vietnam to free the “country of Saigon”. So it doesn’t seem like everyone in the US was against the Vietnam war.
@Mimishu1995 Of course, not everyone was against the Vietnam War but many, many people were. There were huge protests and marches. Many of us did not espouse to the “domino theory” that we had to stop Communism at all costs.
@janbb I didn’t know that. I’m so glad to know it wasn’t just Vietnam that was against the war.
@Mimishu1995 Many of us hated it. Many also were against the war in Iraq and felt it was unjustified but there weren’t as many organized protests.
”...fighting to stop the spread of communism” @kritiper? _Really? Do you believe that? So when we pulled out early, in 72, communism just went wild.
@Mimishu 1995 It is important that you understand that just as with the French, the United States withdrew from your country because the conflict there was no longer politically acceptable HERE. In other words, the issue was forced once support for the war meant defeat at the polls. The great irony to the war in your country is that the people in MY country TO THIS DAY still do not understand that your country’s struggle was a carbon copy of our own. It was a war of INDEPENDENCE—an all but sacred part of our own mythology.
So did they gain their independence?
Yes. And the price was horrific. The place was and should still be “the jewel of Southeast Asia”. We failed both the country and ourselves at the close of WW II when we rebuilt Japan & West Germany and handed Vietnam back to the French. BIG fuckup.
They declared it in 1945. So why were we there again?
@Dutchess_III According to the views of JFK, and NATO, and SEATO, and the West, in general, yes. Study the history of the JFK period.
“Initially, the American intention was simply to help South Vietnam to maintain its independence in the face of Communist aggression from the north.” from HISTORY OF THE US ARMY by James M. Morris, Exeter Books, New York, copyright 1986 by Bison Books Ltd.
I kind of have. My point is we pulled out having accomplished nothing.
That’s because we didn’t fight to win. LBJ was guilty of micro-managing the war from Washington, DC and selecting coal dumps, for example, as top of the list bombing targets.
But to win what? When we pulled out communism didn’t take over south Vietnam so we weren’t fighting to stop the spread of communism.
They already had their independence so we weren’t fighting for that.
All we did was tear the shit out of their jungles and villages….for nothing.
But win what? After we left nothing changed. Communism didn’t take over South Vietnam. They already had their independence. We were there for no reason and we accomplished nothing.
There was no hope of winning short of overrunning and subjugating the North, the price for which would mean political suicide for any attempting it and
the risk of open revolution here in the streets. Of all the people in the world, WE should have recognized that our ACTUAL role was in effect mere continuation of the process abandoned by the French. We were so convinced of the bugaboo of communism that we failed to recognize that the people understood it as a war for the independence and UNIFICATION of the country.
@Dutchess_III Well, it did become communist after Saigon fell and the country was reunited under North Vietnam’s communist party.
The point is that we had no strategic interest in being there and that we weren’t being effective. It was a failure.
I think @janbb has it right. It was the draft that largely caused the opposition to the Vietnam War to be so especially pronounced and I think was the greatest factor in fomenting opposition. Though there are other factors that I think contributed as well. For one, while I do remember opposition to the Iraq War when it started, the prevailing attitude in the country was that the Iraq War was a justified response to 9/11 (misguided as that may have been) and Americans were fiercely patriotic after 9/11, understandably so. Americans hated communism as well, but we had not just been attacked prior to Vietnam like we had been prior to Iraq. Vietnam was also the first time that a war we were fighting was being broadcast on the news into the homes of many Americans who were seeing for the first time what war was really like; seeing what was going on and how horrible and futile it seemed strengthened opposition to the war. By the time the Iraq War began, we were simply numb to this. Additionally, Saddam was a dictator we had fought before in the Gulf War; even if the Iraq War was launched on the mistaken pretext of WMDs, most Americans agreed that Saddam was no good and needed to go. Unfortunately, he was replaced with an ineffective weak government that quickly gave way to the fanaticism of ISIS—we seem to be slow to learn our lesson about “nation building”, but I digress.
At this point, these conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on so long that most of us are just able to ignore them. And without a draft we just don’t have the same stake in them.
The war effectively ended the draft, eliminating any necessity (or expectation) that the people who own the country might be required to fight and die for it.
The Vietnamese fought for their independence; the Americans fought to prevent Vietnam falling under the sway of world Communism. A complete misunderstanding of each other’s position.
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