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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (8705)	6/7/1999 8:42:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

One indispensable text on SEA history, unfortunately rather difficult to obtain, is a book called Why Viet Nam?, by Archimedes L.A. Patti. Patti was in charge of the first OSS team to enter Hanoi after the Japanese surrender, and his book is an extremely detailed day by day recitation of the events that occurred between that time and the French reoccupation of the south, during which time he was the senior American official present. It is not easy reading - he was an intelligence officer, not a writer - but the detail and notes are meticulous, and the appendices alone are worth the price of the book to anyone interested in really understanding what was going on. Patti was convinced that a deal could have been cut with Ho that would have kept Vietnam geopolitically neutral in return for support for Vietnamese independence. He was also convinced that the French were finished in Indochina. Both convictions are supported with abundant detailed evidence. Patti's opinions were ignored by the home office, and he is virtually forgotten in most histories; he is occasionally briefly referred to as a young OSS officer who was entranced by Ho's magnetic personality and thoroughly deceived as to his evil intentions. He was young, a full colonel at 24. He was recruited for the Indochina mission during the close of the war based on his command of French and his record. He had previously been operating in German-held Yugoslavia, responsible for dividing shipments of armaments and other supplies among competing groups of anti-German guerillas - not an easy task. He was assigned the mission of recruiting, training, and supervising teams to conduct sabotage and guerilla missions to pin down Japanese troops in Indochina and prevent them from being pulled out and used against US forces in the Pacific. He was originally supposed to work with remnants of the French military, but ended up using Ho's guerillas when it became clear that the French wanted the Japanese to pull out, and had no intention of cooperating. The actual level of cooperation with Ho's forces is described in great detail in Patti's book. In short, Patti does not give the impression of being naive at all, and his survival indicates that he was a pretty solid judge of character and situation. As in China, armchair operators in Washington overruled the reports of their people on the spot, observing developments, because those reports were not ideologically acceptable. In both cases we ended up pouring vast resources into propping up dead causes, doing ourselves no good and a great deal of harm. The absolute opposite of realpolitik, and further evidence that ideology, of any sort, is the ultimate political blindfold.