Replies

As an administrator, even if you are a blessed saint, you lose if you can not guarantee the physical safety of the people. Eventually the people will be forced to support the guerilla movement to preserve their own lives. The communits in Viet Nan began by killing 25,000 villagers. It worked.

Well, they didn't win until they had large columns of Soviet armor for a conventional invasion of South Vietnam, deprived of US air support by the US congress. When they tried it in 1972 while US air power was still around, even with almost all US ground forces already out of the country, they lost. When they tried just a guerilla uprising countrywide in 1968, they lost. Watergate doomed South Vietnam, not a 1965 execution spree.

But certainly, half the idea was to force military actions that would divide political support here, then play them up to the useful idiot crowd. That part you can indeed say "worked". Then again, it didn't exactly elect George McGovern. Notice also that it was hardly our domestic useful idiots who had lost their security. In Algeria, the last to give up were the Harkis, and in South Vietnam, the last to give up were the ARVN.

Moral - let's not call too loud on "inevitability" to cloak our own failings.

Great discussion.

Keep in mind that in Viet Nam by 68-69 we were wiping out the VC cadres and infrastructure in the South using the Phoenix program. This was JasonC's "well aimed" counter terrorism done very well. Between the Phoenix Program and the losses in Tet 68 the VC were on their backs: those losses had to be made up by sending vastly more NVA down the HCM Trail.

This movement of NVA was not interdicted for political not military reasons. Even after US main battle force departure and Vietnamization the war was at best a stalemate, and the North finally won with a conventional invasion only after the US Congress cut off military assistance to the RVN in 73-74, largely as a swipe at Nixon post Watergate.

In terms of Algeria, El Salvador and other cases where there is no HCM Trail and no NVA to send into the war, it is possible to wipe out the terrorist leadership and cadres with tightly focused well aimed "Phoenix Program" type operations without blowing up so many civilians that they are alienated and driven into the terrorist camp. We were doing it well in the RVN, and we did it in El Salvador, a clear victory for our side. We will have to do it on a large scale now in Afghanistan.

The unreported war will be the critical part of it, the "Phoenix" war.