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

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (68311)	1/24/2003 9:50:43 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

then perhaps things would have been different today. I recall reading somewhere that Ho Chi Mhin tried to contact the US government for aid after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Would not have made any difference, Noel. If you read Ho Chi Mhin's History, he as an absolute committed Communist.

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (68311)	1/24/2003 10:14:38 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Good post, Noel. Under Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese were instrumental in saving 400 to 500 American pilot lives, this at great cost to themselves. Ho Chi Minh was a proponent of democracy and wanted to model Viet Nam's charter on the US Constitution. At the end of WWII, Roosevelt wanted to help implement Vietnam's independence, but was blocked by Britain and the State department. Feeling betrayed Ho Chi Minh who'd hoped for independence turned on the west and went to China Russia...From Roosevelt backing down to Eisenhower's grave errors to Kennedy sending more troops and Johnson escalating war to Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and Loas, it was a debacle for which we continue to pay As of yesterday! "Researchers have found a link between a type of leukemia and Vietnam soldiers exposed to herbicides like Agent Orange," a long time coming but way too late for a friend whose 44 year old Vietnam vet husband succumbed five years ago. usatoday.com yarchive.net The Eisenhower Administration developed and implemented policies in Southeast Asia that contributed directly to the massive American military involvement in Vietnam in the decade after Dwight Eisenhower left office. Working with the most recently declassified government records on U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1950s, David L. Anderson asserts that the Eisenhower Administration was less successful in Vietnam than the revisionists suggests.Trapped By Success is the first systematic study of the entire eight years of the Eisenhower Administration's efforts to build a nation in South Vietnam in order to protect U.S. global interests. Proclaiming success, where, in fact, failure abounded, the Eisenhower Administration trapped itself and its successors into a commitment to the survival of its own frail creation in Indochina. The book is a chronicle of clandestine plots, bureaucratic fights, cultural and strategic mistakes, and missed opportunities. Anderson examines the politicla environments in Saigon and Washington that contributed to the deepening of American involvement. Contrary to other studies that highlight Eisenhower's restraint in preventing French collapse in Indochina in 1954,Trapped By Success shows how the administration publicly applauded South Veitnam's survival and growing stability, while it was actually producing an almost totally dependent regime that would ultimately consume billions of American dollars and thousands of American lives. columbia.edu “The United States could probably have walked away from Vietnam at that time,” Fine said. Instead, Eisenhower decided to support the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was later assassinated in a military coup. Eisenhower’s second critical error came in 1957, when he rejected a Soviet Union suggestion that North and South Vietnam join the United Nations. The U.S. buildup in Vietnam began under Kennedy. The number of advisers there grew from 692 when Eisenhower left office to 15,500, making it much harder for Johnson to get out of Vietnam. Also, since the Kennedy administration had connived in the coup that overthrew Diem, the United States government was left with some responsibility regarding the successor regimes in the South. “Full scale Americanization of the war,” Fine said, began under Johnson. His major concern was “that if South Vietnam fell, he would be blamed and his real love, the Great Society, would go down the tubes.” When Nixon took office, he introduced “Vietnamization”—the gradual removal of our troops accompanied with massive aid to build up the South Vietnamese army so it could hold its own for a “decent interval” after the U.S. withdrawal. However, the South Vietnamese army was not a real military force. It was a political force that could prop up a regime, not an army that could really fight a war, Fine explained. In January 1973 Nixon accepted peace terms in Paris that ensured South Vietnam’s defeat: the United States would withdraw all of its troops from South Vietnam but the North Vietnamese could keep its troops there. Under President Gerald R. Ford, the North Vietnamese launched a full scale conventional attack on South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army collapsed. “Vietnam was one of the great tragedies of American history,” Fine said, citing loss of life, increased problems for the U.S. military, division in the country as a whole, and the 1.5 million refugees who fled Vietnam. “Yes, the war was a tragedy. We wreaked terrible destruction on Vietnam, on Laos, and on Cambodia, and we inflicted serious damage on ourselves.” umich.edu

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (68311)	1/24/2003 10:45:38 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

I had to look up a famous incident. On April 26, 1954, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wounded Chinese dignity by refusing the outstretched hand of Foreign Minister Chou En-lai. Seventeen years later, on February 22, 1972, arriving at Beijing airport, President Richard Nixon extended his hand as he walked toward Chou. Nixon's gesture represented a tremendous shift in Cold War international relations. What made a new Sino-American relationship possible were political and strategic concerns that brought both nations toward accommodation. When Dulles encountered Chou, he saw the Communist regime as a virtual Soviet pawn possessing no legitimacy of its own. Minimizing Chinese nationalism, Dulles and his chief, President Dwight Eisenhower, saw China as a faithful member of a cohesive "Sino-Soviet bloc" dedicated to undermining American power and prestige in Asia and the Third World generally. Yet China was also poor and relatively weak militarily, and Dulles sought to isolate Beijing to reduce its influence, as well as promote internal disintegration and a split with the Soviet Union. Thus, keeping Beijing out of the United Nations remained an important U.S. diplomatic priority. asia.cnn.com Seeing China purely as a Soviet puppet has to be one of the great diplomatic misreadings of the 20th century. I'm not quite sure, but I think there may have been a similar incident with Chou and maybe Rusk or Acheson that predated the Korean War. The fundamental blunder the US made in Viet Nam was even earlier, when it decided to support the reestablishment of French imperial rule in Indochina. It would perhaps have been wise for Dulles and company to have read their Palmerston. "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. " xrefer.com