Posted on 08/03/2004 7:17:43 AM PDT by presidio9
Edited on 08/03/2004 7:31:38 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
IMAGES of the Vietnam War seem to be flooding into our lives lately. Footage of a young naval Lt. John Kerry, in fatigues, carrying an M-16, patrolling the Mekong Delta. President Bush, in an eerie echo of a previous president from Texas, vowing never to retreat in the face of aggression. Yet sitting recently in the Cafe Au Lac on a tree-lined street in Hanoi's old quarter, opposite the elegantly restored French- era Hotel Metropole, it was hard to remember why we fought that war.
(Excerpt) Read more at whittierdailynews.com ...
Vietnam is a great example of what happens when you quit and let the bad guys win.
They're forgetting the complete teardown and rebuild of Japan and the rest of the Axis powers, plus South Korea, and the successful intervention in several South American countries.
Good to see ya Presidio.
Right. Vietnam is such a terrific country now thanks to the communist 'victory' in the war. People are just flocking in DROVES to go live there!
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Great minds think alike - yours just thought about 47 seconds faster than mine.
Vietnam was not defeated and occupied, like Iraq. Now take those we did defeat and occupy, like Philippines, Japan, Germany, Italy, France (well, scratch that one) and we did a good job.
Vietnam started as a French work in progress, so you might want to lay the blame there.
"let us finally grasp the lesson of imperial hubris taught to us in that Southeast Asian land."
And therein lies the author's true colors!
This one line defines him as an Anti_American kook!
Indeed, it is....Which of these two outcomes do American voters prefer?
The world that
Kerry's Coalition of the Unwilling
made for the Vietnamese children
BBC photo of DaNang school children at ceremony commemorating the fall of Saigon
The world that
Bush's Coalition of the Willing
made for the Iraqi children.
For liberals the only causes worth dying for are Euthanasia and Abortion.
They're forgetting the complete teardown and rebuild ....
Soviet Union...ooops, they dont' exist anymore, Kosovo?
Something to do with being patently obvious.
Bush should have some Vietnamese boat people speak at the convention, explaining what a hell that country became after we left and how much they appreciate America and despise the VVAW for what they did to their homeland.
LOL!
Uh oh.
I've seen fish refuse to be wrapped in the Murky News.
All Vietnam proves is that a Communist State is not sustainable, and so the Communists had to look elsewhere, just as China and Cuba (to a lesser extent) have done. He would have probably written a similar article about Castro's Cuba, because many of the tourist enterprises are truly advanced, while the rest of the country stagnates.
Iraq is different for two reasons: Oil and the ruthlessness of its dictatorship, whose only serious competitor in that regard is North Korea. Neither Iraq nor North Korea could have been defeated from within, because the secret police are too powerful. This is why the leftist argument that we should have left the Iraqis to do their own revolution doesn't hold water.
Equally to the point, there were horribly wasted decades as Vietnam came to grips with Communism. If we had won down there, there would have been much freer society which woulud have prospered instead of stagnating. The best comparison is probably South Korea, which started as a strongman state but made its way to Democracy. The same would have happened in Vietnam if we'd kept control over it.
D
I forgot the name of the man to attribute this quote:
"The Vietnamese are the hardest working people in SE Asia. If it wasn't for the communists, Vietnam would have been the perfect model for pure capitalism. As it is, they are steadily throwing off communism because communism is not their national character."
The Vietnam War (both French and American versions) is the 'cause and effect result' of government intrusion in a military theater of operation. There were too many government suits thinking they were generals and too many generals thinking like government suits. We never lost a battle in Vietnam.
That is a lie. America has been propping up Vietnam (and unfortunately it's ugly Stalinst government) for at least the last decade.
$3 to $5 billion is wired from Vietnamese-American refugeees to their families in Vietnam every year (I heard that in 2003 it was $3 billion during the Tet holiday alone). This massive yearly infusion of American cash is the engine that has pulled Vietnam out of Hanoi's economic swamp. The only reason Hanoi allowed "doi moi" economic reforms in 1989 was to gain access to some of that cash without risking jail.
The implication that communist Vietnam would have cruised along blithely with its Marxist economic model, and its Stalinist social program, it utterly and completely false. Every year Hanoi gives up more and more of its control to gain a piece of the economic pie.
No one in Vietnam believes in Marxism or certainly communism, except perhaps the demented old fogies in the Hanoi Politburo.
But everyone south of the 17th parallel understands America's contribution to Vietnam's economic improvement. Everyone. (To be fair, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore have also helped, but not without regular, unabashed, and repeated public upbraidings of the thickheaded Hanoi government).
The Easter Offensive of '73 is proof US might can build a Nation. "Project Purse Strings", the "Watergate Congress", and Kent State proved the anti-war movement/DNC wasn't about peace, but communism
Vietnamese-American refugees (most now U.S. citizens) are our greatest ethnic patriots and supporters of GWB aside from Philipinos.
Support for GWB, the WOT, and Iraq was between 80 and 90 percent, as revealed by an ethnic poll conducted last year (the results are somewhere out there on the web).
Vietnamese-American newspapers regularly revile John Kerry as a "phan boi", or traitor. Much of that is due to his flirtations with the Hanoi goverment, but also because of his past VVAW activities.
My pet peeve is that the 1 million+ Vietnamese-American refugees (again, most now citizens) do not in any way shape or form support Kerry's past charges of atrocities or war crimes against civilians.
For years I've been asking around about this in the Vietnamese-American community, and there is not a whisper or a rumor supporting Kerry's charges. Not only have V-A's never heard of these "war crimes" but they don't know anyone who has, nor or are there any rumors out there of such things happening. Absolutely not a peep. And who would know better than the alleged "victims" themselves.
Having been to Vietnam several times (and for lengthy periods) in the last 10 years, I can also state unequivocally that America's efforts in VN have not been forgotten (although some vets still there remain slightly bitter about the broken promises of 1975).
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