Sen. John McCain diagnosed with brain cancer

[Dill]

(07-25-2017, 04:35 PM)Bengalzona Wrote: My belief is that that may have worked if the puppet leader we set up in the South would have been willing and able to assemble a governing coalition from the varied and disparate interests in the South. It is pure conjecture, of course, because Diem was not willing. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He tore the separate groups in the South apart making it far easier for the Viet Cong to infiltrate, influence and ultimately win. The question of legitimacy of the South is really a non-question. They were legitimate in the U.S. eyes (which counts for something), but they were never really legitimate among the masses distrusted their own government.

Agreed. Someone else might have cobbled together a government which was supported by the people. Though I am not sure where that someone could have come from.

The diversity of the South would have been difficult for anyone to manage, and while the Hoa Hao et al would have initially endorsed Ho, the Vietnamese George Washington, they would have eventually the conflicted with the DRV.  There is another point I forgot to add above. The Binh Xuyen gangsters functioned like a private army for Bao Dai, discreetly servicing his vice requirements and directly controlling the police force in Saigon. When the virtuous Diem came to power, he no longer required such services and used the military to destroy the Binh. So while he was guilty of nepotism and his relatives were pretty corrupt, he did clean up Saigon a bit, but in ways that disrupted a thriving economy of kickbacks and under-the-table payment.s

Diem was a strange mix of Confucian mandarin (he was one of the top civil servants in the French administration for decades) and Roman Catholicism. He was always praying bringing his family to church, and via policy furthering Catholicism at the expense of Buddhism. A "personalist," he imagined that if he created a public role of purity (he was probably celibate, never married) and virtue it would "trickle down" to the masses. That was at root a very SEAsian notion of a royal family with a leader at the center whose health radiated out to the rest of society.

When all these CIA types brought their polls and surveys to him, and reports of resistance to the feudal extractions of Delta landowners, and warned him not to unnecessarily antagonize Buddhists by canceling their holidays, he just waived them off and asked for helicopters and howitzers. It was Communists causing trouble. nothing more.

So it was a very difficult situation. On the one hand, Diem only had his Republic of Vietnam because the DRV defeated the French  (and his own ARVN with them, who had fought for the French). Everyone in Vietnam understood that. So to most he appeared beholden to the DRV for his "independence."  On the other hand, his support was from the Francophile Catholics who "collaborated" with the French, and landowners who knew they would lose their land under Ho.  Almost a million of this group had moved south in '54 and staunchly supported Diem. That was not inconsiderable support--they were mostly well educated and know how to manage property. But keeping them happy was exactly what angered 90% of the remaining population. E.g., wherever the Vietminh had controlled territory in the South before '54, they had abolished the practice of landowners extracting 25% of the grain profits from the peasants who worked their land. And for the most part, the landowners had gained ownership of their land from the peasants thanks to the French system of taxation, which the majority of the country thought foreign and unfair (and made them easy converts to Communism). Bao Dai left things as they were in '54, but when Diem took over he immediately restored the 25% "rent" which peasants had not been paying for years.  If you are already poor and paying the guy who took your daddy's land, that's gotta hurt.

Suppose now a different leader had emerged, one less tone deaf to non-Catholics and more interested in exploiting US political science to cobble together coalitions--would he have been able to keep Diem's base AND those they exploited?  I'm not sure that was possible.   Bao Dai let the religious groups keep their private armies, calling them officially members of the Army of the State of Vietnam. Perhaps doing that, courting the Buddhists, and talking land reform, buttressed with US investment in roads and farm equipment would have won over enough people. 

I know I am going on too long, but I'll risk one more point cuz I know you like military history. The US also handled Diem and successive regimes thereafter ineptly. They for the most part had little understanding of the complexity of Vietnamese politics, what drove resistance to Diem and what made Communism attractive to so many Vietnamese. The first half of the war, they only imagined upping firepower would produce results. By the time the US finally realized that the RVN had no chance without winning the hearts and minds of its population, it was largely too late, and impossible to take back all those arc bombings and agent orange.  There is an interesting book by Stuart Harrington called Silence Was a Weapon. He was an intelligence officer helping run Operation Phoenix in 70-71, and makes an interesting case for its belated effectiveness. As one of the few US soldiers actually fluent in Vietnamese, he was out in the hamlets speaking directly to peasants and captured Viet Cong to figure out what the war was about for them. Why did 19-year-old North Vietnamese walk south for months, living on a handful of rice a day, and refuse to retreat in battle while their ARVN counterparts took paychecks till they had to fight, then deserted and sold their weapons on the black market? He answers this question very well. I recommend the book for anyone interested in COIN issues, in fact.