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{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces'''<br/>[[South Vietnam]]<br/>[[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces'''<br/>[[North Vietnam]]<br/>[[Khmer Rouge]]<br/>[[Pathet Lao]]<br/>[[Viet Cong]]
| commander1 = [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] <br/> [[John F. Kennedy]]<br/>[[Lyndon Johnson]]<br/>[[Robert McNamara]]<br/>[[William Westmoreland]] <br/> [[Richard Nixon]]<br/>Nguyen Van Thieu
| commander2 = [[Ho Chi Minh]]<br/>Le Duan<br/>Hoang Van Thai
| strength1 = around 1,420,000 (1968)
| strength2 = around 860,000 (1968)
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}
[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a an [[Atheism|atheistic]], Communist government, part of a "hot war" in the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.Officially, Vietnam is an atheist state.<ref>Jan Dodd, Mark Lewis, Ron Emmons. The Rough Guide to Vietnam, Vol. 4, 2003. p. 509: "After 1975, the Marxist-Leninist government of reunified Vietnam declared the state atheist while theoretically allowing people the right to practice their religion under the constitution."</ref>
The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist Marxist–Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter murdering hundreds of millions thousands of people.
==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor [[Bao Dai]]. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War). The survival rate for French soldiers in Communist POW camps was comparable to the rates of survival in the Dachau concentration camp during the [[Holocaust]]. The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. Contrary to commonly repeated myths; it was North Vietnam, not South Vietnam, that was the most extreme and steadfast in its efforts to prevent any such election from taking place. Nevertheless, it is true that South Vietnam consistently opposed all such arguments, claiming that the majority of South Vietnamese wanted independence, but that those North Vietnamese who wanted conquest should not be allowed to veto their just demands. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.
From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref name="rfa.org">http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.225?uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672298091 Complete Collection of Party Documents] (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 communist cadre during the "land reform", and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were party members; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13, says they were given a proper burial.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref><ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [https://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340, quotes comparable figures for communist cadre executed.</ref> Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the "land reform", of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences. Landlords were classified as 5.68% of the population, but only a fraction of them were killed. These figures are proportionally comparable to those for China's land reform, in which millions of "landlords" were slaughtered.</ref> The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," [[William Colby]] writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref name="vietnam.ttu.edu">http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref> In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the [[Pathet Lao]]), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.name="vietnam.ttu.edu"/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>
The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.
The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.
Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.
The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.
General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.
These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>
In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>
==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref> In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, NorthVietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnamlater admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos andthe Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref> The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam's leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The ''casus beli belli'' for full combat intervention by the United States intervention was an alleged attack exaggerated confrontation between North Vietnamese P4 torpedo boats and the USS ''Maddox'' on August 2, 1964 and a US ship second alleged attack by North Vietnamon August 4, 1964 which involved both the USS ''Maddox'' and USS ''Turner Joy''; the events became known as the "[[Gulf of Tonkin Incidentincident]]". The Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "[[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]]". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US responded respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".
President Johnson, a tormented but deeply ultimately sincere and good man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his wildly incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.
Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.
By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.
By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 60100,000 killedby the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06. pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 were killed by died in the US bombingwar, <ref name="paulbogdanor.com">http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and innumerable [[far-left ]] activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these figures, although demographically they are inconceivably high. In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country numbers but also attributed all of Cambodia at the request of deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the KVM, who had surrounded Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow full toll from the weak Lon Nol regimewar<ref name="paulbogdanor. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force com"/>—despite the North Vietnamese outdemographic impossibility of their assertions. Justifying his actions, he stated:
In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote><blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote><blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote><blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote><blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote><blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote><blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote><blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>
Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.
Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April–May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>
Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.
Meanwhile, in 1973, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again in 1973, Nixon bombed 20,000 of them to their graves, saving Cambodia from the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist takeoverforces. However, The US Seventh Air Force argued that the overthrow of Sihanouk and bombing prevented the violent madness fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of the 25,500 Khmer Rouge left the country in chaos, and fighters besieging the situation remained delicatecity.
The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of [[Tran Van Tra]].
As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.
In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<refname="grunt.com">http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.name="grunt.com"/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for weeks more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.
==Aftermath==
Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been determined to have been primarily execution by the former Khmer Rouge regimekilled. <ref>httpWilliam Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy://wwwCambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> Because only about one-half to a third of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created faminekilled, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state<ref name="Heuveline, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aidPatrick 2001">Heuveline, the abolishing Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of medicine Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and hospitals by the stateMortality, systematic overwork eds. Holly E. Reed and slave labor by the stateCharles B. Keely. Washington, brutal mistreatment by the stateD.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, and normal mortality)''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates suggests that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, death toll was between 2.0 and 2.5 million Cambodians, with a "most likely estimate " figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<refname="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> This is because 2.5 to 3 million Cambodians died from 75-79|accessdate =January 9, and 500,000 deaths over this time would have represented normal mortality. A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-62013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><refname="time.com">http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511947511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge. Another 100-200,000 Cambodians were killed by the brutal dictatorship imposed on Cambodia by Communist Vietnam. Cambodia's civil war from 1978-1994 killed an estimated 200,000 individuals.<ref>http://userswww.erolstime.com/mwhite28time/warstat3.htm#Cambodian<magazine/ref> As estimated by the CIAprintout/0, the deliberate continuation of the great 1979 famine ''after'' the fall of the Khmer Rouge by the invading Vietnamese led to the deaths of an additional 7008816,0000 Cambodians from January 1979 until 1980912511,00.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htmhtml</ref> The CIA estimated that the civil war reduced the expected 1979 population to slightly over 8 million, that the Khmer Rouge reduced the actual 1979 population to between 6 and 6.5 million, and that who were saved by 1980 the population had fallen to roughly 5 American and a half million at the hands of the Vietnameseinternational aid.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The CIA concluded that these tragic events "may ultimately spell the demise of the Khmer as a people."
The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s People's Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>
More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.
<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>
Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.
James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203]</ref>
America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.
Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>
'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. <small>---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986</small>'''}}
==Controversies about the War==
Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Record states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charges President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>
Largely because of misreporting during the war (see Media Bias below) as well as the [[anti-war]] movement, various returning veterans in Vietnam were treated horribly by the anti-war crowd, where they often were spat upon and denounced as "baby killers.<ref>https://americanhistory2013vietnamwar.weebly.com/treatment-of-returning-troops.html</ref> Ironically, as [[Leftists]], many of the anti-war protestors tended to support [[abortion]].
Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Summers, Jr. told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>
British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
The US bombing and invasion Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in the Vietnam killed over 60,000 (higher estimates go War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to over 100replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review,000October 21, 1982) Vietnamese.
Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6;<ref name="ReferenceA">http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Max BootNoam Chomsky]] wrote:'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery—despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!
==References==
==Further reading==
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1] ([https://web.archive.org/web/20071005220621/http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html archived])*[http://www.viet-myths.net/Turner.htm Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate]*[http://www.rjsmith.com/war_myth.html Vietnam War Myths]*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F67C8yzww_Y How the Vietnam War Was Won and Lost by Prager University]*[http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/article-summary/goldwater-on-vietnam#.YH9ZLyWSmUk Goldwater on Vietnam][[Category:Wars]]
[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[categoryCategory:Cold War]][[Category:Veterans]]
