The benefits of bombing Viet Nam.

[Greg Nowell]

I did read that there were forests in Viet Nam that were so filled with shrapnel
that cutting one down would virtually destroy a chain saw.  It occurs to me that
in an odd way this prevents Viet Nam from adopting a Brazil/Indian slash attack
on forest resources.

I'm beginning to think that the Vietnamese were better off with agent orange
than Iraq & Yugoslavia are going to be with depleted uranium.    -gn.

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> >But they could do that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no?  They did it in
> >Vietnam and Cambodia, no?  There were no lossess resulting from high
> >altitude strategic bombing - but th eissue was not losses but effectiveness
> >as these air raids did not produce the desired tactical impact.
>
> Oh there were more than a few losses to anti-aircraft fire then.
>
> A couple of points. One, while the snazzy smart weapons obviously don't
> spare civilians as advertised, they can do a shitload of damage. And two,
> while the bombing in Indochina didn't have the military effect desired at
> the time, in retrospect it's hard to argue the Vietnamese won that war. The
> U.S. military left the country a smoldering, poisoned ruin, and people are
> still suffering the consequences today. This is especially true when the
> bombing is followed by an economic embargo, which is, as a couple of
> Foreign Affairs authors argue, a true weapon of mass destruction.
>
> Doug

--
Gregory P. Nowell
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science, Milne 100
State University of New York
135 Western Ave.
Albany, New York 12222

Fax 518-442-5298