Quote Originally Posted by Mike in Hilo View Post
My two cents. This was, after all, the third world--and as far as third world governments and armies are concerned, Thieu's was almost certainly above average--just not good enough to beat the odds without some ongoing US help. Both army and gov't had been around for decades, unlike the Iraqi army. The ministries and their provincial branches were competent (well educated engineers, agronomists, public health officials, etc., etc...). And Thieu could not have made territorial forces and land reform the priorities that he did without "getting it." The problem was far less one of incompetence than lack of political will (as it relates to acommodation with the enemy) and the related issue of corruption.
But how truly competent was it really compared to the NLF and DRV? An example would be Thieu's land-reform program. While better executed than the travesty that occurred under Diem, which ended up disenfranchising farmers, how was it anything but a pale imitation of what the Front had already done in its "liberated" zones?

Legitimacy was in VN a function of the people's confidence in the ability of the government to prevail. In 1970 VN, the government that had legitimacy in the eyes of the people was the USG! Not the NLF or Communist Party for sure...And they believed, correctly in the event, that the GVN would fold under PAVN pressure after we left. (As the Vietnamese peasants were wont to tell me in their GI English, "[When] GI go home, VC come in."
So would you assess GVN as never having real legitimacy in the eyes of the South Vietnamese population?

Unquestionably, the pre-WW II French regime had legitimacy. When the communists started subversion in the North Vietnamese countryside in the1930's, they knew that no villager would dare take up arms against a Frenchman. So they began by getting villagers to sully their hands first, by having them participate in "peoples' executions" of Vietnamese village elders.
How true is this? The De Tham resistance went on for almost 30 years before being finally suppressed in 1913. French "legitimacy" must have been rather thin on the ground given their utter failure to defeat the Viet Minh or regain control of the countryside after 1950.

Also, how successful were Diem's programs once the NLF was formed and started hitting back rather than accomodating, that is by 1962, when VC main forces had acheived the ability to mass for battalion-sized attacks on ARVN bases? How truly successful were the Strategic Hamlets, given the incompetence of the Diem administration in the countryside and the inability of the Civil Guard to face down the rural guerrillas, as well as the fact that the man running them and the previously disastrous "agroville" program was a VC agent?