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

To: Ilaine who wrote (48902)	10/2/2002 7:16:33 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "I used to work with a former Colonel in the Vietnamese Air Force who said that Kennedy was assassinated by the VietNamese because he had Diem assassinated. If true, serves him right." (1) Kennedy gave support for a coup against Diem. The Vietnamese killed Diem. (2) Since there was only about 2 weeks between the two events, it's highly unlikely that the Vietnamese had anything to do with it. By the way, I have no doubt that Kennedy would have continued the policies pretty much exactly as Johnson did. That is, he would have avoided bombing North Vietnam before the election (in order to paint Goldwater as the nut case rightwinger who wanted to get the US into another disastrous land war in Asia only a decade after Korea), and then, when the war went against South Vietnam after the election, Kennedy would also have got the US sucked into the war. If Kennedy had wanted to go the other way he technically could of, I suppose, but the fact is that the build-up of US actions in Vietnam were widely supported by almost the entire Congress. Johnson was only a little less intelligent than Kennedy. The basic problem was that everyone likes to give good news to the boss. So the people who worked for Johnson / Kennedy told them that the war was still winnable no matter what was going on with the apathetic South Vietnamese. This let them delude themselves (in that natural way that humans have of seeing a solution when there is none) into thinking that they could save Vietnam. Political discussions at the time were all about something called the "domino theory". The domino theory was that after the Communists took over South Vietnam they would then naturally also take over the rest of Southeast Asia (i.e. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.), and that the loss of that territory would be devastating to the US. The domino theory turned out to be partly right, in that Laos and Cambodia did fall, but Laos had already fallen and Cambodia was just another unimportant corner of the world. The important countries of Thailand and Malaysia never had significant Communist incursion. At the time, the domino theory seemed quite believable. I believed it myself. The arguments were pretty good in favor of it. My excuse is that I wasn't old enough to smoke, LOL, but the rest of the country, both parties, believed it enough that it tied Kennedy's and Johnson's hands as far as US involvement. The error behind the domino theory was the assumption that Communism was a single force with a strength that depended only on the ability of the Communist nations to provide arms and supplies to the rebels. This ignored the "hearts and minds" of the civilians in the countries to which the theory was applied. So instead of having a military / diplomatic / economic / political policy that was devoted to winning the hearts and minds of civilians in foreign nations, our policy was simplified to a military one devoted to cutting off the arms supplies to Communist rebels. But the very military act of cutting off arms supplies to Communist rebels had the effect of losing hearts and minds of the villagers who lived in villages we had to attack. For this reason, US policy in Vietnam was doomed from 1954. It was not a Democratic or Republican error. It was a hopeless war. Engineers have a phrase "if the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems will be treated as nails". The most effective and easily controlled tool the US government has is, unfortunately, military force. I say "unfortunately", because if our diplomatic / economic / political force were as easy to control and as overwhelming as our military force is, for example, those would be the tools used to combat terrorism. This is also how the administration is split, in terms of diplomatic versus military control. -- Carl