Sen. John McCain diagnosed with brain cancer

[Dill]

(07-24-2017, 01:55 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: 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.

I am a bit puzzled by your reading of the Korean situation. The US and the Soviets both occupied the Korean peninsula after WWII. Immediately after the war, the Americans drew the line between North and South for administrative purposes.  Two years later, the South then declared a government and the North followed suit. Each government had a roughly equal claim to legitimacy, each claim supported by an Allied victor of WWII.

The importance of Dien Bien Phu is that that victory legitimized the Vietminh and Ho Chi Minh as liberators of Vietnam and their DRV as the legitimate representative of the Vietnamese people. This was in the eyes of most of the rest of the world and the great majority of the Vietnamese.   No one "stole" the North from the South. The Vietnamese, represented by the Vietminh/DRV, took Vietnam, the whole of Vietnam, back from the French.

The State of South Vietnam was the colonial puppet government formed after the French reoccupied Vietnam post 1945.  As a French puppet, it did not have the support of the people and was not regarded as a player at the Geneva conference. It was effectively represented by France, so the players at the Geneva signing were France and the Vietminh/DRV, not the State of Vietnam. Diem's Republic of Vietnam (not "South Vietnam") was just an attempt to hijack and nationalize the puppet state under a new name after 1955. Its supporters would be rich landowners and Catholics--about 5% of the population, many of whom had fought with or otherwise worked for the French, who were hated by the majority.

To continue the Civil War analogy, if you think the South's secession was legitimate, then you see the US as "clearly the aggressor"--hence the "War of Northern Aggression" as it is still known in the South. If you don't think the secession was legitimate, then you don't think the US was the aggressor, clear or otherwise.

Same deal for Vietnam. "Clarity" when determining aggression depends upon legitimacy accorded the various actors in the war.

If you think 1) the DRV was the legitimate government of all Vietnam which had agreed to nation wide elections for a unified government to be held in 1956, and 2) that the upstart RVN which hijacked the South, abrogated that agreement to elections, and began actively persecuting and imprisoning former Vietminh, was not a legal government, then the DRV won't appear to be "clearly the aggressor" when it takes back its own territory from what amounts to a rebel government sustained wholly by a foreign power.

If you think the Republic of Vietnam was justified in refusing national elections and was the legitimate government/representative of the Vietnamese people--whether they supported it or not--then of course you think of the DRV as "the clear aggressor" and talk of the DRV's claim to the South mere "spin."