Irony – Writ Large
Saw this headline just now:
Vietnam Seeks Western Warplanes to Counter Potential Chinese Threat
“Vietnam is in talks with European and US contractors to buy fighter jets, maritime patrol planes and unarmed drones, sources said, as it looks to beef up its aerial defences in the face of China’s growing assertiveness in disputed waters.”
At least one of the touted reasons we went there 50 plus years ago was to curb the influence of China in the region.
Gotta wonder if they’ll also offer us the Navy base in Da Nang to help fend off the EVIL Empire??? The Philippines has been said to be considering similar.
My first thought was to simply suggest they try to put together useful aircraft made from all of the ones they shot down. Kinda think that might be feasible. If not… it IS fun to consider.
I am running out of words here folks. The more I think about the notion of VietNam pilots in F-15s and the like, the more I giggle. Like… Maybe THEY’LL buy our A-10s? They are no longer needed by our forces, etc.
I could go on… Bet you can too.
Category: Geezer Alert!
Just sell them the new F-35s at a nice mark up.
PROFIT!
Vietnam’s economy could afford the pilot’s seat…maybe.
That’s OK, we can just extend them a nice line of credit and then, when they can’t afford to pay we just foreclose on the whole country!
Then, we fix it up some, flip it and make a nice profit!
I hear Cam Ranh Bay is a tourist resort now. I’m sure the Chinese Elite would love it.
Maybe they’ll ask the 101st and 3/82nd to base at F’ing Phu Bai. Several of us here could be called up to go there again since it was so much fun last time.
Irony? I thought I was the last practitioner of irony around here.
I s’pose Olongapo and Subic Bay will start calling all the bargirls back, too, if the PI is going to want in on it.
You do know that most of this has more to do with disputes between China and Japan over those islands that lie between the two of them, right?
Was this directed at me? If so, I don’t understand it. My comment could be best described as “smart ass commentary”.
No, SJ, it was in reponse to Zero’s title ‘Irony’. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
If they are looking for a portly survivor of eight conflicts that has gone from steely eyed and barrel chested to bleary eyed and barrel bellied with hands like rocks…well, ok, hands that like cocks…please have them contact me. Since the local Dunkin Donuts closed, I don’t have much to do unless I’m “head down ass up” being turned into a human fatsicle while licking down the toilet seats at my local bus station.
The bus station is nice because my ass looks like a bag of nickels. I’m only easy because I have to be.
sincerely
John “Faker 6” Giduck
Screw them. There’s enough B52 and A6 pieces in their jungles to build their own Western planes. Maybe Jane Fonda can man an AA gun to help them out too.
Fuckin’ A YEAH, send “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, the Vietnam posers and the draft dodgers over there, While we’re at it, let’s send John “Lurch” Kerry and as much of his ilk as we can starting with Al Gore Jr., he can make sure they’re doing ops in an environmentally friendly way , supervising them from the air in his Gulfstream jet!
Kerry?
We couldn’t afford all the Purple Hearts.
Somewhere above the wild blue yonder, LtCol D is looking down and saying “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”
Are they going to remove the remains of that B-52 in Saigon before they buy anything from us?
The year will be 2020 when all hell breaks out in the region.
For anyone who attended any war college or has played the war game … It always come back to China.
Now none of this would have happened if the Clinton admin did not give the Chineeze the keys to the castle. They have everything now, including all my personnel information.
Oh, “the world (as we know it) will end in 2030” that has to do with global population, yet it is all connected.
But what do I know …
You may be more accurate than you know, Master Chief.
Well for the first time in a long time I’m not certain I’ve got anything to add to this…
I mean, are you fucking kidding me?
Thank you. (Through my clenched teeth I can’t speak for the upset.)
This is no more ironic than the fact that West Germany was a member of NATO and a US ally, or that we had a mutual defense treaty with Japan.
We declared war on Germany twice in less than 25 years: 1917 and 1941. Ten years after that second war ended in May 1945, West Germany became a firm US ally – one we were treaty-bound to defend.
Japan had attacked the US at Pearl Harbor; we fought a truly brutal, “take no quarter” war with them that ended in 1945. Less than 7 years later, they became our ally – one we were also bound by treaty to defend.
It’s now been more than 40 years since we fought the Vietnamese. The world has changed greatly since then.
As Lord Palmerston put it: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
I wholeheartedly agree, Hondo. The buyer of my goods is my friend. The millions of American families affected by WW II through losses of friends and family, not to mention the returned fighting men who saw the horrors inflicted by our enemies, had every right to spit every time Japan or Germany was mentioned. Instead, they they bought transistor radios and VW Beetles, saw our enemies become allies, and moved on. (I knew one man who did not. He was a POW and absolutely refused to buy anything Japanese. hell, he wouldn’t even get into a Japanese-made car. I never had the heart to tell him that his TV and radio were full of Japanese-made components.)
That was hardly the main reason, 2/17 Air Cav – and I suspect you know that full well.
The US needed Germany and Japan as allies during the Cold War. It was in our nation’s interests to keep both as allies – and to deny the Soviets their resources.
That was the same stated reason that we went to war in Vietnam. The only difference is that – unlike Germany and Japan – we really had no strategic interest in keeping Vietnam in “our camp” during the Cold War, and had no real need to try. Historical enmity and Chinese aspirations for regional expansion (and past occupations of Vietnam by China) made it clear to anyone with half a brain that China and Vietnam were on a collision course over the long haul. The USSR was simply too far away to matter much at the time.
Realpolitik often isn’t pretty. But it’s the way the world actually works. Anyone who denies this – or tries to argue for “moral considerations” taking precedence – is a damn fool. And any nation that ignores this fact risks not remaining independent for very long.
No, I wasn’t talking geopolitics and I wasn’t considering the USSR at all, really. Those are valid issues. My point was more mundane, that most Americans did not harbor hatred for our WW II enemies for long after the war ended but went on with their lives, including buying our former enemies’ goods.
OK, now I’m synched up again. I took your previous comment as “we allied with them because they sold us stuff cheap”, which wasn’t your intent. I now understand your point.
Yeah well… I suspect I’m not the first to consider such as personal either. Context does matter amigo, but we all have our own contexts.
Aside: As an acknowledgement of yer point. I considered referring to Santayana and history myself.
However, I was giggling toooo much to be so earnest.
China and Viet Nam have been uneasy neighbors for some time. I remember the border war I reference, but I got the year wrong, thinking it happened sooner. With Viet Nam invading Cambodia, it’s hard keeping all of this straight sometimes.
http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1879849_1846233,00.html
That’s only the most recent Sino-Vietnamese conflict, CC Senior. Vietnam and China have a history of intermittent hostilities stretching back roughly two millenia.
Hell, one account of Vietnam’s founding is that a Chinese warlord went rogue, went south, liked Vietnam, declared it to be “Nam Viet” – which translates roughly as “Land of the Southern Viet” – and declared his independence from China. The present name “Vietnam” was supposedly derived by inverting that.
He and his descendants then supposedly made that independence reality for a couple of hundred years – until China reconquered Vietnam. They’ve been alternating between Chinese attempts to occupy and Vietnamese resistance to foreign occupation – by China and others – ever since.
We had our chance to make Vietnam a firm member of the US camp – or at least, no worse than an Asian Yugoslavia, not aligned with the USSR or China – in 1945. Ho Chi Minh asked point blank for our assistance in establishing an independent Vietnam after World War II (he’d been allied with the US during the war). We turned him down, preferring to back the French instead.
Fast forward 70 years, and today it’s in both nations national interests to be allies. What changed in the last 50 years? Just the world – and with that, the world’s balance of power.
Hondo, we hardly had a choice in siding with the French. We needed their support in containing the Russian bear’s European aspirations much more than any Southeast Asian communist regime. Remember France was an original NATO member.
However, I’m with you on the business of looking out for our future self-interests and if that means arming the Vietnamese to put a boil on China’s butt then so be it.
Another aspect of this may be that we want to deny China access to the significant oil reserves in the continental shelf off Vietnam. Since this island building program became an issue, I’ve been thinking that may be China’s real objective. By securing control of those various islands, China is in a stronger position to exploit those fossil resources.
Oil on the Vietnamese shelf?
Of course it’s China’s real interest, Poetrooper! It’s the SOUTH CHINA SEA, for Pete’s sake! They’ve been inching toward that for several years.
Why else would they build that idiotically large aircraft carrier and then claim it was just a tourist attraction?
I would disagree, Poetrooper. And I’ll offer three words to show precisely how we could have convince the French to see it our way had we wanted to support Vietnamese independence: “Marshall Plan” and “linkage”. Similar financial arm-twisting certainly convinced the British to give up their 50% ownership of Belgian uranium ore stocks stored in the US shortly after World War II – in spite of the fact that they needed that uranium ore for their own nuclear program.
The French would have been torqued. But like Britain, they’d have bit their lip and complied. They were absolutely flat on their back and NEEDED our economic assistance hugely to rebuild their nation and economy after World War II.
That was IMO one of the Truman Administration’s two most serious blunders in foreign policy. The second was SECSTATE Acheson’s speech in January 1950 which put Korea outside the US defense perimeter in the Pacific. That omission emboldened Kim Il Sung to attempt to conquer South Korea a bit over 6 months later, resulting in the Korean War.
One word rebuttal:
DeGaulle
DeGaulle was not in power in France between 1946 and 1958; he resigned in 20 January of the former year. Ho Chi Minh asked for our support in Sep 1945.
DeGaulle’s presidency was also quite tenuous in 1945 prior to his resignation; his government had huge internal divisions.
Finally, DeGaulle was no fool. He’d have been angry, but he’d have realized that he had no realistic alternative had we threatened to withhold economic assistance – just like Britain did on the nuclear issue. And his successors would have been far less difficult to deal with.
Admint it, Poe: the US fornicated Fido in that case. The cost was 58,000+ dead, several times that wounded, billions poured down the toilet, and an internally divided nation.
Hondo, you’re misreading me; I’m not defending our screwups, I’m just considering the realities of the times. Of course no American government would have done it the way we did had they been able to foresee the consequences.
I also think you are underrating the influence De Gaulle had on French politics even while officially out of power. He was the most prominent “eminence grise” in France during those postwar years.
And De Gaulle was an egotistical prick who was particularly sensitive about French sovereignty and “egalite” especially in matters concerning the Brits and Amis, so much so that he told us to stick NATO where the sun don’t shine, made us close our bases on French soil and proceeded to develop his own nuclear force. We didn’t have a bad relationship with France; we had one with Charles De Gaulle.
As for the Brits caving, again one word: De Gaulle; they didn’t have one.
Did we screw up? You bet, but look at it the other way; what if we’d provided full military support for the French instead of minimal assistance and nipped that communist infection in the bud? France would have still had to give up her colonial power eventually but perhaps not to a communist regime.
What if? What if? What if? It’s all Monday morning quarterbacking.
I’ll accept your statement that you’re not trying to justify our errors. However, it certainly seems to me that you’re trying to justify our involvement in Vietnam. I regard that as a fundamental error. I also disagree with your analysis. IMO the British had someone with more backbone, stronger will, and better leadership qualities than DeGaulle, Poetrooper. He was named “Churchill”. He got canned in the 1940s by the British electorate, too – either 1945 or 1946, if memory serves. Neither was a factor again until the French had quit Vietnam; Churchill didn’t return to power in England until 1955, and DeGaulle didn’t return to power in France until well after that. All we would have done had we jumped in and supported France even more in the late 1940s/early 1950s would be to have further aligned ourselves with colonialism. When we went into Vietnam after the French left, we were seen by the Vietnamese as the “new colonial power” trying to run their affairs. That was almost enough in and of itself to guarantee failure. The Vietnamese had been fighting greater powers (China, France) for 2000 years to maintain or reacquire their independence. In their eyes, we were perceived as being just the “next foreign power” trying to take over their nation. The truly sad part is that, bluntly, in the 1950s and 1960s strategically Vietnam didn’t matter. Whether they went Communist or stayed “free” (a myth; there was essentially no actual democracy in South Vietnam under Diem, Ky, or Thieu) did not make a damn bit of difference to US interests. Vietnam was not about to align with China, and the Soviet Union was too far away to be of much help to them (or hindrance to us). In short, they were strategically irrelevant. That’s the real irony of Vietnam: we fought a major war in a place where we had no strategic interests at stake for no good reason. Much like Bosnia or Rwanda, fighting that war was not in our national interest; we never should have been there. But we were. We committed one of the… Read more »
HONDO…..the last election in Vietnam Thieu, recieved approx. 97 percent of the vote. I remember while in country, I wrote a to the editor of my local paper. I remember saying ” God isn’t even that popular!
Justsayin
Good grief, Hondo, you’re refighting the Vietnam War here at TAH? And accusing me without any basis of justifying it? For crying out loud, all I said was that we had little choice in supporting the French in Southeast Asia. Their interests were much closer to ours than the communists in Hanoi and their buddies in Beijing and Moscow.
And based on that you accuse me of being a big supporter of the American War in Vietnam? That’s a real stretch.
It’s all too easy to look back now and see all the errors now; but back in the fifties everything wasn’t quite as clear and simple as you want to make it now.
In those days North Vietnam was a client state for the Chinese and the Russians, both of whom could well have been testing our will and their Viet proxies in mainland Asia.
I don’t know that with any degree of certainty but then neither do you unless you have access to Chinese and Russian foreign policy strategies that the rest of us don’t.
Just as with the Democrats and the Iraq war, hindsight’s always 20/20.
Oh, and Churchill and De Gaulle were two entirely different breeds of cat and dealt with their Anglo Allies in far different ways both during the war and after so that’s not an effective argument.
I’m going to bed.
Poetrooper: pray tell – where did I accuse you of being a “supporter” of the Vietnam war? Short answer: I didn’t. What I said was that your comments above appeared to be attempting to justify our involvement in Vietnam. In your last comment here, you appear to continue to do so – saying “we had little choice” and calling North Vietnam a “client state for the Chinese and the Russians”. That seems to me to be at the minimum implied justification for the US involvement in Vietnam. The fact is that we did have a choice – and IMO made the wrong one. Moreover, the fact that the North Vietnamese were a “client state” of the USSR was true in 1965. It was not true in 1945; Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh were them IMO roughly as independent in their views and leanings as Tito – e.g., nominally “Communist’, but willing to accept help from whatever source best suited their purposes. And it was 1945 when Ho asked for our help. Due to historical enmity, the North Vietnamese were NEVER a threat to become a client state of the Chinese, and they never were. They accepted Chinese equipment/supplies/food, but would not generally allow Chinese troops and advisers. That historical enmity is precisely why the Vietminh made accommodations with the French, allowing them to return to power in Vietnam in 1946, when the Vietminh’s initial attempt to establish an independent Vietnam after World War II failed. At the time, the Chinese offered to send forces to Vietnam to support Vietnamese independence efforts. The Vietminh leadership almost accepted the Chinese offer – until Ho reminded them that the Chinese stayed a freaking CENTURY the last time they’d come to Vietnam in force. The Vietminh leaders then decided that allowing the French to return – temporarily – was a better option. Further: short of sending troops ourselves, there wasn’t much we could have done to support France during the First Indochina War. Hell, we bankrolled virtually their entire effort – what do you think happened with a huge chunk of the military… Read more »
3/17 Air Cav: I assume you’re being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Thieu was elected with a plurality – 34% – his first time around in an election regarded as being reasonably fair. He took 94% of the vote when reelected – running unopposed, after excluding all other viable candidates in order to ensure his reelection – in an election as crooked as any con game you want to name.
It’s a pity FDR didn’t hold on a bit longer. He was fairly anti-colonial and might have supported an independent Vietnam.
You would have wanted Roosevelt to stay in office for another five terms???
I’ll say this much good about FDR – he did seem to want to end the French colonial regime in Indochina immediately after World War II ended. Had it happened, that IMO would have been a truly good thing.
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/hessrooseveltandindochina.pdf
That’s one of the few good things I can say about FDR, but as the old saying goes: give even the Devil his due.
“. . . . God is an iron. . . ”
(Partial quote from “God Is An Iron”, Spider Robinson.)
“. .. . and that’s a hot one.”
Wait a minute! Doesn’t this belong in the gigglesnort category?
Didn’t they already offer to let the the US Navy use Cam Ranh Bay after the Soviets left it in the 1980’s? The same facilities that were built for the US Navy in the first place?
And I have to throw in with Hondo here. This gets a big “meh” from me. The Vietnam War is now as far back in history as the US Civil war was in 1920. If there’s a good strategic reason to ally ourselves with Vietnam I see no reason to do so.
We’ve become allies with countries that did much, much worse things to us than Vietnam ever did.
To be honest, I’d kind of like to visit there sometime. I’ve heard it’s beautiful. Maybe see some of the areas where my dad fought with the 11th ACR.
Besides, let’s face it: Vietnam was the last place we fought a major war in a country populated with hot wimminz. There’s a reason you don’t see any Afghani or Iraqi war brides coming home. 😉
I recall a young Marine getting his ass in a sling for leaving his post to marry an Iraqi lady, 2003 or 2004.
Take a tour of Vietnam. You can stay in 5 star hotels with English speaking staff. watch HBO TV in English also Aussie cricket matches. They have MacDonald’s and KFC. However, if you want to see the real Vietnam get out of the big cities go to small towns in the country .If can get a Vietnamese-American go with you that would help.
“In Country” by Nelson DeMille (Vietnam vet). Good read.
May I direct your attention to the cover of National Geographic, circa 1980, where a certain Afghan maiden is depicted on the cover?
The green-eyed beauty grew up and was found 17 years later when, now with a face covered, she appeared on another Nat’l Geo cover. Check this out. The article is a good read.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text
EDIT: In my second Paragraph above, last sentence should read: “If there’s a good strategic reason to ally ourselves with Vietnam I see no reason NOT to do so.”
Actually they did offer to rent us Da Nang after Clark closed. Cracked me up. Guess the Russians did not spend enough money in the ville. And the Navy does sometimes get stuff repaired at Cam Ran Bay.
The 2020 conflict will start as a naval engagement over Tiawan.
That is all.
Interesting, informed, stimulating, comment. Whilst the world is focused on the Middle East, Asia arises. Hope we have a Commander in Chief that can forcibly deal with it.
Over
This was meant to be nested in response to MCPO’s post
Hope we have a Commander in Chief. I don’t believe we do.
On the bright side, if the shit hits the fan this will give all those “I was in ‘Nam” posers the opportunity to live the lie for once.
Well there already is one doing that, a-not-for-long halfassed lawyer. Pictures without his supposed must-have cane and, I guess, he caught the Agent Orange during the vaca there last year because he was never close to it before.
China is like the rich farmer who didn’t want all the land in world, just all the land that touched his. If you look at the map, it says “South China Sea,” right, so there you go.
The folks over at http://www.strategypage.com have covered Chinese ambitions a lot (e. g., http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/china/articles/20150605.aspx).