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Ahhhhh.....nuclear weapons and Grand Strategy.

Once the war in Korea came to a halt, the communists (Soviet Union, China) could focus on Vietnam. They ran France out.

The problem was always the stupidity of the Vietnamese people. They believed the communists. They suffered horribly so the communists can ride in limousines and the people can work for $100 a month.

I have often wondered why the South lost. Todays environment provides a partial answer. We joked that the average Vietnamese only worried about his water buffalo and his rice patty not the politics of the war. We supported a corrupt regime in South Vietnam, the people saw corrupt politicians and the war was lost. We seem to be recognizing our own corruption today - look at our own politicians. Our troops didn’t lose the war and in general I believe the Vietnamese respected our troops. Corrupt governments don’t generate nor deserve loyalty.

You misapprehend the Vietnamese. They are as stupid as are the South Koreans and have the same business sense. Their form of government, authoritarian whether communist or junta style is pretty much dictated by the fact that the family or clan is the basic unit of society rather than the individual as it was in say, 1776 in the USA. The South Koreans are unique in the world in that they threw off a repressive dictatorship in a clan based society and did not replace it with a worse one. They made a successful transition. Other democracies have all arisen from societies based on the individual, refugees from other more rigid societies, who left their families behind or were imposed by conquerors on completely destructured conquered societies. That's why the southerners in VN are much more entrepreneurial than the northerners. The South was historically analogous to our own West, mostly empty, and populated by people migrating for opportunity and their own land away frơm the rigidly structured North.