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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (48396)	10/1/2002 12:40:21 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; While I agree with you that the Communists were worse for the Vietnamese than the Diem regime, that's not the way that the people there saw it. The US spent far more lives and money helping the South than the Soviets or Chinese did helping the North. For whatever reason (and I would call it Communist repression just like you would), the fact is that the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese rebels were more willing to fight than the South Vietnamese loyalists. I don't know how the Communists convinced people to fight against the government in the South. My suspicion is that most people in the south were, as so many secret US government reports reveal, "apathetic", while the few people who supported the Communists were believers. What caused the apathy in the South? My suggestion is that it was caused by their regime being fundamentally repressive in an unnecessary way. That is, they were ineffectively repressive while the Communists were effectivelly repressive. It really doesn't matter why. We provided the South Vietnamese with enough weapons that they should have been able to shoot their way to the Chinese border. Don't give me any BS about how much help the Chinese or Russians gave. Vietnam absorbed a substantial percentage of the US GNP for a decade [the budget deficit eventually destroyed the dollar], and at that time the US was way stronger economically than the Chinese or the Russians were. Their economies were not even in the same ball park. The fact is that the South Vietnamese had an abundance of money and weapons, and direct military support from a superpower. What they lacked was a desire to fight. This whole discussion gets back to the concept that I've been trying to make progress with you guys, which is that a superpower cannot control a territory where it fails to win the hearts and minds of the people. You can win the hearts and minds through fear, but the level of fear is so high that it hasn't been done since 1945. And it's not like the cold war doesn't have examples of places where the Communists were defeated at little cost to the US. *Why don't you explain the differences between how much effort the West had to put out in order to prevent Greece or Afghanistan from going communist?* Both these places were examples of places where the US backed government had the hearts and minds of the citizenry. The result of Vietnam was fully reversed. My explanation is that the Vietnamese were apathetic, and that this was due (at least in part) to their regime being repressive. Your explanation is that .... [Fill in your explanation here.] Re: "And now today, despite the fact that repression continues, few in the western media care, nor is it likely that the Communist government will fall anytime soon." Well, if there was oil, or Israel involved, then maybe people would give a damn. I'm sure that there are old people in Vietnam today that wish they had supported the South Vietnamese government more, but that's now, it wasn't then. Your thesis is that the US could have won in Vietnam. Okay, explain why Reagan was able to win so cheaply in Afghanistan. -- Carl