To claim that our "massive US military aid" to Thailand was cheaper than the our war in Vietnam is to admit to being a lunatic.
Since I made no such claim, and noting the non-sensical illogic of your statement, one would guess that your public display of lunacy forgoes any requisite confession to your state of mind.
Cambodia and Laos had insurgencies years before we pulled out of Vietnam.
Hello??!!! Insurgencies, supported and facilitated by N. Vietnam.. Wars of aggression against a variety of other cultures which the communists wished to subjugate?
Can you even begin to accept that the N. Vietnamese aggressed against the newly created Laos, desiring to annex that country, or to at least make it a puppet state?
Can you admit that upwards of 30,000 N. Vietnamese soldiers were stationed in Laos to protect the "Ho Chi Minh" trail, the only major supply line into S. Vietnam??
I mean, COME ONE CARL!!.. At least be objective enough to recognize that "insurgencies" cannot truly exist without external support from someone. Even the American "insugency" against the British would have failed without French support.
But the most important point is that the US became the world's only superpower despite parts of southeast Asia going communist.
Insurgencies are "proxy wars" Carl. Carried out by powerful rivals on foreign soil, they represent the battlefields where rival ideologies battle and compete.
The purveyors of these ideologies are too big and powerful to risk confronting one another directly, so they do it through proxies. And neither party can just refuse to participate in these conflicts for fear that their large portions of the global population will fall under hostile governments.
And certainly the national governments (really power brokers) in these "proxy" nations recognize the tremendous personal advantage they have in playing the superpowers off against one another.
So yes.. the US opted for direct involvement in Vietnam.. And maybe in retrospect, maybe what we should have done is launched a insurgency against N. Vietnam. But given the internal repression of that government, it would have required massive amounts of financial and military assistance to achieve, as well as reciprocating with a similar overt presence of US troops/advisors within Laos to turn it into a base of operations (and not just covert Air America and CIA folks), just as the North Vietnamese were doing there and in Cambodia to carry out their insurgency against S. Vietnam.
But we chose not to respond in kind to the type of aggression Moscow and Bejing were enabling Hanoi to carry out against its neighbors.
In other words, southeast Asia was not a critical domino that would result in Communism taking over the world
Only because the "dominoes" stopped falling after Cambodia and Laos. Thailand didn't fall and remained independent rather than becoming a proxy state of the Communist superpowers. However, had Thailand have fallen, Indonesia would have been next, and that would have imperiled Australia and the sea routes between the Indian Ocean and South China sea and Pacific.
Thus, it's rather stupid of you to claim that this region was not in the strategic interest of the US and West world, nor a direct threat to its properity. Because had it come to pass, the repercussion potentially could have been far different than you foolishly presume.
It's like saying the course of WWII was not affected by the defeat of Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. Had the British lost control over Suez and the Arabian oil fields, the course of the war would have been DRAMATICALLY different, as would the shape of the post-WWII world.
Hawk |
