07-24-2017, 01:55 PM
(07-24-2017, 02:34 AM)Dill Wrote: Dien Bien Phu (1954) comes to mind--the most important battle in the long war to free Vietnam of foreign control. Winning there enabled the Vietminh to leverage the French out of Indochina.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed the Geneva Accords with France and the Peoples Republic of China shortly thereafter, drawing a PROVISIONAL border at the 17th parallel to allow the French and the remnant of their colonial government under Bao Dai to disengage from the Vietminh and begin the withdrawal. In 1956, per the Accords, a nationwide election, monitored by the UN, was to be held for a unified government--one Vietnam.
The French withdrawal was completed by 1955. Shortly thereafter, Bao Dai's prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, took over in a coup, declared the Republic of Vietnam, and in 1956 refused to hold elections. The US, though it had previously agreed to the unification, promptly recognized the government of what they called "South Vietnam."
Outside of the Catholic, French-speaking minority which had administrated the colonial government for France, the people of Vietnam, North and South, did not recognize the Diem regime. As Diem sought to impose control on the largely Buddhist population, protests, riots and armed resistance followed (as B-zona noted above). In 1959, the National Liberation Front was formed. The US began sending advisors, then larger contingents of troops, a whole Marine division in 1965, until, by 1968, 500,000 Americans were propping up the unstable, coup-plagued government.
As you say, there are different "opinions" about the war. If the views of the majority of the Vietnamese count, then the North Vietnamese were not "invaders," since they were fighting for their own country in their own country. If anything, they were driving out invaders--the foreign soldiers propping up an RVN that did not have popular support. What people in the US call the Vietnam War was a civil war in which the people of both the North and South defeated a weak, illegitimate regime to accomplish what should have been settled in 1956.
Dien Bien Phu occurred between North Vietnamese forces and French colonial forces. While I understand your including it, it does not fall under the scope of American involvement in Vietnam. As to the rest, you can argue how odious the South Vietnamese regime was, why it was propped up or the views of a supposed majority of Vietnamese (btw we have a very sizeable Vietnamese population here and they would take extreme issue with your characterization in this regard); the end result is that the North used military force, both conventional and guerilla, to forcibly occupy territory and overthrow the current government of South Vietnam.
Vlad actually makes a good comparison, it was, in many ways, a civil war. However, none of that changes one simple, undeniable, fact; that the North was the clear aggressor in this war. The rest is spin. South Korean has a very credible claim to the territory of the North, it was stolen from them by the Soviets. However, if they invaded North Korea tomorrow to reclaim that territory and overthrow the current government then they would be the aggressors. North Vietnam was the aggressor, this cannot be credibly argued against.
