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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (12185)	8/28/1998 2:09:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

<<I don't think you are sympathetic to communism, just mistaken about its virulence and capacity to oppress a population and destroy any opposition.>> That capacity doesn't just spring into existence. It grows. In 1945 Ho did not have the apparatus to oppress and destroy. In 1955 he did. Our support for the doomed French effort created an ideal medium for the growth of that capacity. <<at the time of Dien Bien Phu Eisenhower not only didn't supply air support, he pulled out the only American GIs in Indochina>> By the time of Dien Bien Phu Americans at all levels were totally fed up with the French. By this time the US had been underwriting virtually the entire cost of the war for several years. The French had consistently refused to accept American advice, and made a number of thoroughly boneheaded decisions. The decision to dump the French was a smart and inevitable one. It just came a few years too late. <<In 1945 we had far bigger problems than Indochina to keep us occupied.>> It would have required no more than a modestly funded effort managed by a few pragmatic individuals with a reasonable degree of common sense, for which ideology is a poor substitute. The warning signs of future trouble were there, and people called attention to them. They were ignored at higher levels. <<since we needed their cooperation in Europe we had no real lever to use against them in Asia.>> We bargained Indochina away to hell in a handbasket, with 50,000 of our own lives in the process. In return for cooperation in Europe, which we never even got. I'd say we got a shitty deal. And we went into the game holding all the cards. <<No American was going to tell Degaulle what to do.>> I think Roosevelt could and would have told DeGaulle to &^%$# himself. What had France contributed in the war? What economic leverage did they have? Nada. Only their fictitious promise of possible cooperation. They played us like fools. <<The French knew America had a policy opposing colonialism.>> They also guessed, correctly, that application of that policy would be spotty at best. I suspect that they gambled on the assumption that we had a tinge of inherent racism, and won. What if in '45 the US had said "no more colony", and posted a token force of troops to enforce it. What could the French have done? Refused to join NATO, which they did in any event? Who would have gotten the respect and gratitude of the Vietnamese peasant? Then you go to work. Some judicious aid, free food to the hungry in stars-and-stripes bags. Free medicine, doctors visiting the hamlets. Training for military officers, not the ideologues on top but the field-grade officers, the ones who command troops. Take them to the US, give them a good look around, training in US installations, the works. A look at the life of the American farmers and workers. An American technical advisor wherever needed. Scholarships for plenty of young Vietnamese to study in US universities. No interference in domestic affairs, of course, we don't do that, we're good guys. Remember that at that time the Vietnamese communists did not yet have the apparatus to destroy resistance with violence and terror. I think that under a program such as this such an apparatus might never have been developed. In this case, as I said before, the inflexibility of the communists would have been a vast liability, where in war it was an immeasurable asset. Do you play to your enemy's weakness, or to his strength? Steve PS Just recently a team of Chinese bureaucrats came to the US to observe an election. The election was a runoff in a local race in a southern state, I don't offhand remember which one. The voter turnout was around 10%, and the Chinese left the process a bit confused.