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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (108117)	7/26/2003 4:57:18 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

I appreciated reading your take on Vietnamese history, anyway. Impossible to do more than guess, at how history might have turned out, if the U.S. had consistently sided with the anti-colonialist and democratic forces in the Third World, after WW2. It would be a very different world. Some of the things you consider mistakes, were probably intentional. That is, they served a purpose for some groups.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (108117)	7/26/2003 2:06:43 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

I was speaking of the govt he would have controlled if we'd intervened to put the Viet Minh in power in 1945 as you advocated. By that time, the communists he led did have control of the VM. Put the VM in power, you put the communists in power. Any alternative view rests on the assumption we could have outmaneuvered the communists and helped non-communist nationalists gain power. This would mean getting involved in a Vietnamese civil war - which of course you could say we did eventually. Why involvement in a communist vs non-communist nationalist struggle in 1945 would have been good whereas it was not good in the '60's is hard to understand. But since you've dissed my motives for this argument (but then you wouldn't know, or care, about that, would you? ), I'll take a stab at giving an explanation why blame-America-for-everything critics might 58 years later retroactively favor American involvement in VN in 1945. The VN communists ultimately won the VN war and what does it turn out that they won for their people? Authoritarianism, poverty, misery. One can surmise that this could be somewhat embarrassing for those who championed the communist victory. So such persons might then claim but the rise of communism in the first place was really America's fault anyway and then throw up any argument they can imagine (in this case that the US should have intervened militarily in VN in 1945 to put the nationalists in power).