On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Did the U.S. really lose the Vietnam war?
Yes. How can you doubt it? Everything we feared happened. To put it differently: things could not possibly have worked out worse, and could well have worked out better, if we'd let them hold an election in 1954. Everything it cost us was in vain. How is that not losing?
> The only revolution of consequence after the U.S. withdrawal was in
> Nicaragua, and that didn't end very well.
Yes, but what does one have to do with the other? The US successfully crushed lots of revolts all over Latin America. But that's just the point -- they were independently crushed. Nobody was deterred from starting them from the spectre of what happened in Vietnam. If Vietnam "worked" the way George Friedman argued, the 60s and 70s and 80s in Latin America should have never happened.
Similarly in Indonesia. The war in Vietnam didn't stop revolt from happening there. It was brutally crushed locally. And it would have been brutally crushed locally just as effectively if Vietnam had been securely communist when it happened.
Vietnam was a waste of blood and treasure expended for no discernable interest. And the results weakened America's world power, economically, militarily and politically. Yes, it recovered. You might even argue that it's stronger now in the broken places, although I think I'd disagree. But that doesn't make Vietnam not a mistake, something it would have been greatly better off not having done.
I think you have to make an honest effort to imagine the contrapositive here.
> But I think the presumption should be that the people who sometimes look
> like wackos really know what they're doing.
That's my always my presumption with everyone. But it doesn't always stand up to examination.
Michael