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December 26, 2007
An attack on 4 myths of the Vietnam war
This was an interesting essay on 4 myths of the Vietnam war that have been strongly held by the "left wing" of the United States for 30 years now.
Who Owns the Vietnam War? (by A. Herman, Commentary Magazine, Dec 2007)
1. America’s cold-war obsession with Communist totalitarianism led it to intervene in an internal struggle in which no conceivable vital interest was at stake. - False. Ho was a die-hard Communist from the beginning. We had just as much stake in Vietnam not going Communist as we did in Korea. Same idea: containment.
2. In Vietnam we found ourselves confronting a powerful native insurgency in the form of the Vietcong, an indigenous guerrilla force. - False. The VC in South Vietnam were largely soldiers from the North. There was very little real support for the Communist government in South Vietnam. And what little support there was vanished in the face of their constant terror and brutality towards the people in the villages they took over.
3. The frustrations of fighting this losing battle wrecked the morale of American troops. - This is false. Compared to other wars U.S. soldiers in Vietnam behaved about the same as they did in other wars fought in the 20th century. They fought well, they treated the local population well, and they came home and lived (on average) pretty good lives.
4. Despite intensive bombing, and despite Richard Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia in an effort to wipe out enemy sanctuaries there, the American intervention was destined to fail. - False. We could have won the war, we could have supported the South Vietnamese government like we promised, and the consequences for our defeat were serious and world-wide. "After Vietnam it was “politically impossible for the U.S. government to undertake large-scale military intervention anywhere in the third world,” a fact of which Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries took ample advantage. Even during the war, new pro-Soviet regimes had emerged in the Congo (1968), Benin (1972), and Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974). At war’s end and thereafter, the list grew to include, in 1975, Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola, then Afghanistan (1978) and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979)."
Nice essay.
Posted by rakhier at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)