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

To: Sam who wrote (239923)	8/26/2007 2:05:05 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

You're ignoring culture and geography. That was eastern Europe. Vietnam was culturally and geographicall very very different. They didn't fight against the French so that they could be puppets of the USSR. Or the US. Yes, plus there's the issue that eastern Europe basically ended WWII under Soviet occupation. The most depressing part of the post - Vietnam war era was how the US ended up effectively backing the remnants of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after Vietnam drove them out of power, because, well, China was backing them against Vietnam, and we liked China better than Russia and Vietnam, or something. I guess that particular cynical exercise was maybe a warmup for what was to come in Afghanistan, which almost brings us back to the present mess.

To: Sam who wrote (239923)	8/26/2007 2:38:38 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You're ignoring culture and geography. That was eastern Europe. Vietnam was culturally and geographicall very very different. They didn't fight against the French so that they could be puppets of the USSR. Or the US. And you're acting as if the USSR was the figment of Dulles' imagination. When I say, look at the track record of Soviet clints, by all means let's not confine ourselves to Eastern Europe - let's look at Korea too, just for one example. They too were fighting an anti-colonial war against the Japanese. How'd Communist independence turn out for them? Whatever Ho would have wanted, the USSR would have had a rather large vote in the outcome. Now I can agree that it was stupid for the US to wind up in the position of fighting France's colonial war, but that hardly means that the USSR and China didn't have their plans for Southeast Asia, plans that were very much antithetical to both the nationalist strivings of the Vietnamese and US National interests.