Vito wrote:
Everybody I know who supports the Vietnam War has been been suckered into
imagining that an evil communist regime in the north attacked the free
democratic government of the south - kind of like happened in Korea. That's
what I thot too because that's what JFK's whiz kids told us.

Umm, yeah. That's pretty much what *did* happen.


Sorry suckers, but that isn't the way it happened. After whupping the frog,
Vietnam partitioned *itself*

WHAT?!?

You are really high on cheap drugs. I suppose the Geneva Convention was
a code name for an all-Viet congress, and the delegates from other
countries were all secretly Vietnamese?


... The North thrived by 3rd world standards (with help
from the USSR)

North Vietnam, 1954 ~ 1962, traded everything they had in the way of raw
materials to Russia ( and to an increasing extent China) in order to
build the largest military they could. The average persons standard of
living declined significantly compared to the colonial period (pre
1954), if you doubt it then check the record of "famines" during that
time frame. Starving & universal conscription is not "thriving" unless
you have a really odd definition.

... but the South got stuck with a murdering Catholic dictator
who funneled US aid into his family's Swiss bank accounts

That is somewhat accurate. Actually Diem was elected Prime Minister at
first. Over time, more and more nepotism made his gov't corrupt &
inefficient... OTOH faced by a ruthless communist insurgency, he placed
a higher value on loyalty than on efficiency. There's a lesson here for
those who pay attention.

... - a dictator so
repressive that Buddists (the majority religion) were burning themselves in
protest!

With encouragement from Communist inflitrators forming a subversive
"opposition" party. You might say the Buddhists were willing dupes...
that is Lenin's words for them.


... So, as the election scheduled to reunify the country approached it
was obviously going to be Commies by a landslide.

Sorry, that's exactly backwards. There was a tremendous flow of refugees
from North to South Viet Nam all through this period. The election was
cancelled in the North and Communist agents in the South had orders to
disrupt the election by the most violent means possible.



Gradually, enough Americans wised up to make Nixon pull out (As some say his
dad should have done) and now Vietnam has essentially the same government it
would have had if the Whizzers had allowed the election to be held on
schedule.

Umm, no. Not even.

Is this version of "history" the same one where Ho Chi Minh was not a
Communist, and didn't make a lot of promises to the ComIntern about
'revolutionizing' all South East Asia? A version where the same Ho Chi
Minh didn't form communist parties in Laos & Camobodia in the 1920s and
1930s... look it up. Wait for the drugs to wear off first.


... That is an indisputable fact.

yeah right.

... But oddly, many Americans prefer to
remain ignorant

Really? And you're at the head of the list, right?


.... But guess what suckers - winning was SecDef
McNamara's biggest nightmare because winning would have made us look like
France. That's why you would *never* have been allowed to "win".

Depends on how you define "winning." A big part of the problem is that
the U.S. strategic concept of "winning" in Viet Nam would have meant
simply maintaining South Viet Nam as an independent non-communist
country... no plans for converting the North, no plans for reducing the
North's motivation or capacity to attack the South...

Oh wait, you don't believe that happened. Maybe you believe that after
the U.S. left, all of South Viet Nam had marvelous party and joyfully
reunited themselves with the North...

The fact is that once we left, and they'd had a few years to rebuild,
North Viet Nam invaded the South with more tanks that Hitler sent into
France in 1940.

If you take a look at how the French got there in the first place, then
you may get a chance at understanding the situation in Viet Nam in the
1960s and early 1970s. Why don't you take a look at their own short
version of their history.

http://www.asia-discovery.com/Vietnam/history.htm

This will probably not work, you have a lot to un-learn first.

Regards
Doug King