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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (161276)	5/2/2005 12:30:29 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, re: "Yes, let's all celebrate the creation of so great a worker's paradise that over a million people sold all their possessions for a dangerous trip in a leaky boat just to get out of there. Sounds like a paradise worth celebrating, that." And the alternative was ....? I suggest you take a look at the alternative costs of "not losing." The powerful ideas that drove the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong weren't dying in the face of our military efforts, they were growing more and more popular and attracting more adherents. No matter what revisionists are now saying about how we "could have won the war," the fact is that we did not and could not have won that war without decimating the Vietnamese population. And why "win" at all? What interest would we have served by staying to "win." How much more could we "help" a population that had lost MILLIONS of men, women and children in a war that was actually a civil war. How much more could we have done for an environment part of which we'd shelled, poisoned with chemicals and turned into a barbed-wire, bunkered wasteland. How much more diplomacy could we have conducted with a half million American soldiers, most of whom feared, hated and reviled the "gooks," and a Vietnamese population that resented, hated and feared both the American troops and the troops of the martial law government we propped up. Wasn't the blood of millions, including more than 50,000 American young people enough for you? Yet you and others point to the upheaval that followed the victory of the communist North to support the "awful" things that followed our defeat. You should contrast those terrible events with the soul searing, blood running events that occurred during the time we "helped" that country at the point of a gun. And remember, Vietnamese are now going back to their country so I'd say they have "resolved" many of their problems without any more of our "help." If "winning" meant killing many more of them at the sacrifice of our young, and "losing" meant letting them solve their own internal problems without sacrificing more of our young, THEN GIVE ME "LOSING EVERY TIME. Of course I may be one of those patriotic THINKING Americans who refuses to accept that being American makes us right even when we're obscenely, brutally wrong.