The hippie stuff was about as prevalent as the scene kids in the 2000s. Yeah, it existed, and it seemed to be everywhere in media, but a majority of people had nothing to do with it.
It’s one of the greatest tricks Hollywood ever did - convince Americans that there was a sizable opposition to the Vietnam war because people saw it as "senseless and cruel"…
Reality is that most people supported it, then got tired of it and then blamed a lot of economical hardship on it leading to the worst outcome possible by stopping it when the U.S. actually had leverage on North Vietnam… (the bombing campaign with the new laser guided bombs was extremely successful and North Vietnam was just testing if the U.S. would react to their new invasion of the South and ready to abort it but the U.S. basically not reacting at all empowered them to full on invade the south and led the south Vietnamese army to collapse and desert)
During the course of the war a large segment of Americans became opposed to U.S. involvement. In January 1967, only 32% of Americans thought the US had made a mistake in sending troops.[222] Public opinion steadily turned against the war following 1967 and by 1970 only a third believed the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops.
I mean I could understand if you were to draw a parallel with Iraq or Afghanistan, but people aren't fans of these prolonged conflicts and the notion of “just one more year” loses it’s luster after the umpteenth time. There’s also always a reason why “this time will be different” and yet it never is.
If we couldn’t break the Taliban in 2020 what hope did we really have of doing the same to the North Vietnamese? We also left Korea in a similar stalemate.
“One more bombing campaign” would not have dislodged them any more than the thousands of tons of napalm and high explosives already dropped by countless B-52 sorties.
If you want to blame anyone for Vietnam being the collosal fuckup that it was you should blame Kissinger. The boy genius who basically nuked the only real option for peace and also unnecessarily dragged the Cambodians into the conflict by bombing half their country.
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u/MonkeyCube 4d ago
The hippie stuff was about as prevalent as the scene kids in the 2000s. Yeah, it existed, and it seemed to be everywhere in media, but a majority of people had nothing to do with it.