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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (57352)	11/27/2004 11:38:47 PM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

We bombed NVN into signing a truce agreement in 1973. That's just utterly FALSE! The ugly and unpalatable truth was that America was forced to bring the troops home. In effect America was defeated even though it claimed it made an "honorable withdrawal" from Vietnam! The Vietnam War was conceived on a false premise (the Domino Theory), escalated in deceit (Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964) and continued against the dictates of commonsense because of the hubris of Johnson and Nixon. The War proved to be so ruinous to America in terms of cash, personnel and materiél that America began making overtures for peace in 1968 soon after General Giap mounted his Tet Offensive which wrested the initiative of the war from the Americans! Of course, the Vietnamese cannot claim full credit for their "victory". They in fact had acknowledged they have had a lot of help from a lot of Americans, especially those who protested against the war. To be sure, Vietnam was a proving ground for US modern and state-of-the-art weaponry. But actually the much touted precision-guided munitions were just overly hyped-up stuff ---a fact revisited in Iraq during and after the Gulf War. To conclude: the carpet-bombing of much of Vietnam and the precision-guided weaponry did not force the Vietnamese to sue for peace. Rather it was the confounding resilience of the Vietnamese, the escalating and ruinous costs and the protests of the American public that forced America to withdraw "honorably". As far as I am concerned, the Vietnam War was a horrendous waste of time, money, materiél, effort and an inordinate loss of human lives, and it resulted in a gradual erosion of American credibility and influence, particularly in South East Asia! A deep distrust of Asians and a morbid fear of Communism and the once so-called "Yellow Peril" (The "Red" Chinese) caused America to become obsessed with defeating Communism in Asia. Man! As it turned out, America was but pursuing a phantasm! America shoulda-coulda have done better, instead, with detente and rapprochement with Red China a decade earlier leading to increased prosperity and amity on both sides of the Pacific. To be sure, the Vietnam War was not without value: perhaps for the first time in American history, erstwhile parochial Americans are beginning to realize the kind of stuff that Asians are made of: they see it in the universities, in the marketplac and in other fields of human endeavour. Verily, from something bad, something good always comes!