Originally Posted by TSGracchus

We DID have that potential, we DID exploit our energy resources, we DID grow our economy at an amazing rate, but those energy resources were nonrenewable and are at this point dwindling and over 30 years past the peak. The remaining oil reserves sequestered for environmental reasons are a tiny fraction of the whole, and would not be economically significant even if all of them were opened for production.

Back to the thread topic: it's important to understand the full history of Vietnam that led to the harsh atrocities committed after the war. If you only look at the U.S. exodus and its aftermath, and don't dig deeper into the whole history, it can look like the exodus was what caused the aftermath, and tell yourself that we should have stayed. But that is not even close to true.

You need to start with the French occupation. Vietnam, which had a long civilized history before that, was colonized by France in the mid 19th century. The Vietnamese agitated for independence for a very long time, but their demands were ignored. Thus, you could say that this struggle had been going on for almost 100 years by 1975, and most of the time it had nothing to do with the U.S.

In the 1940s, the French were driven from Vietnam by the Japanese. The Viet Minh, a nationalist-Communist insurgency headed by Ho Chi Minh, was formed in 1941 to oppose both the Japanese and, ultimately, the French. The Viet Minh occupied Hanoi and proclaimed a provisional independent government in August-September 1945, after the Japanese surrender.

There is some evidence from memos that FDR intended to support Vietnamese independence, and had no intention of restoring the country to French rule after the war; however, he died in office before the war ended. President Truman, who was really our first Cold War president, was persuaded to reverse Roosevelt's intentions at least partly because of the Viet Minh's Communist leanings, and also partly for the diplomatic purpose of securing French support in NATO and the U.N.

This was our first opportunity to avoid the debacle in Vietnam. Had we supported Vietnamese independence as Roosevelt intended, there would never have been a Vietnam War. Vietnam would almost certainly have played a middle ground between the United States and the Soviet Union in order to remain fiercely independent of both Cold War powers. Also almost certainly, its government, lacking the brutalization that comes from decades of war, would have been much less harsh.

After the French were defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, an agreement was reached temporarily dividing the country at the 17th parallel and calling for unification elections to be held in 1956. This was our second chance to avoid the debacle. Had the elections been held as promised, Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won, the country would have united peacefully, and there would have been no Vietnam War. Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. supported South Vietnamese dictator, refused to hold the elections, but the U.S. could have insisted rather than supporting him; we supported him and canceled the elections, again for Cold War reasons, because Ho would have won them.

We had a third chance to avoid the debacle in the early to mid 1960s. At that time, it became apparent that the South Vietnamese government was nonviable and could not defend itself against the North. It would have been perfectly feasible for us to declare that we had done all we reasonably could, and say as Lyndon Johnson dishonestly but accurately did in the 1964 election that this was a job for Vietnamese boys not American ones, and if they wouldn't or couldn't do it that was too bad, but not our fault or our problem. Instead, in 1965 Johnson escalated the American presence, using the deliberately deceptive Tonkin Gulf incident to get Congressional support, and turning what had been a Vietnamese civil war into an American war.

After that, we were in the boiling soup and there was no way out except to retreat. We were unwilling to invade and occupy North Vietnam because of the fear of widening the war by having the Chinese intervene. Even if we had done that, we would still have faced an insurgency that could never be finally defeated and would continue inflicting casualties on our soldiers until we wised up and left -- just as we now do in Iraq.

Those pathetic scenes of the helicopters leaving the embassy roof were ordained by the mistakes we made in 1945, 1956, and 1965 when we passed up our three chances to avoid the debacle by avoiding the war. Once those mistakes had been made, once we were committed to the war, those scenes became inevitable. It was only a question of when, and if we had not left in 1973, it would only have delayed the inevitable and cost more American lives because of the delay.

It's very important to take the right lesson from what happened in Vietnam, and not to forget that no matter how powerful our military may be, there will always be problems that it simply cannot solve.