The Republican Airline Pilot a paradox?

[Timebuilder]

With all due respect, that flies in the face of history. When we made the decision to intervene in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was not in Vietnam, nor did it enter Vietnam during the course of the war.

I think that what was meant was that communism was taking a foothold in Vietnam, and without the benefit of hindsight that we now enjoy, many in the US thought it was necessary to try and contain that spread. In those days, images of Joe Stalin and Mao were frightening indeed, and one needed to look back less than two decades to remember the horrors of WWII, making the spread of communism frightening in a very similar way.

We did not agree with that treaty and we intervened to support an illegal government in "South Vietnam" and devide the country into two. The Vietnamese chose to resist and I think they were right to do so.

Actually, the South Vietnamese, however they came to be known in that manner, asserted that this election had been engineered by the nationalists to obtain the desired result, which is easy to do in an undelevoped coutry. We provided advisors to the South, which snowballed in short order into fightiing the nationalists, then taking on the name "Viet Cong". I think it is a little unrealistic to say "The Vietnamese chose to resist" as if to say that the entire penninsula was acting against an invading US army. In fact, we were acting in support of those who wanted to remain free of a communist dictatorship that was quickly developing in Hanoi under Chinese communist influence. The Gulf of Tonkin fiasco was seen by the administration as a necessary tool. I don't agree with that, personally. Then again, I too have the benefit of hindsight.

Our military intervention accomplished nothing other than the killing of thousands of American youth, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, the division of our own country and the loss of great treasure. It was wrong then and it remains wrong today.

What we were wrong about was our underestimation of the communist influence, and the determination of the Chinese to extend communism into Vietnam along the Ho Chi Mihn Trail. In a conflict where everyone can look alike, where only the NVA regulars had consistent uniforms, we needed to do a better job in controlling ingress to the South. We didn't. Instead, we took the same hill several times, and sought to see body counts as an indiction of "winning" when we didn't have the political will to really win. What is wrong is the sacrifices we made in our blood without being willing to get the job done.

While our goals were indeed laudable, we needed to make a realistic assessment of the situation and withdraw if we were unwilling to win. That is perhaps our greatest mistake.

Brother has fought against brother and countries have been divided for eons. This is not a reason to think that it is never advised to engage in these conflicts. In fact, one can say that our resistance (if you will) against the British crown was similar to the struggle of free Vietnamese against the growth of communism and its influence. We cannot look at such struggles as static entities without considering the reasons an motivations of those invovled in the conflict. If the Viet Cong meant to impose a communist dictatorship on free people in the South, then they cannot also be "freedom fighters" seeking to expel an "invading" US force. Similarly, if Iraqi insurgents seek to drive out the US and return a Bathist regime of terror and torture, they cannot be described as freedom fighting nationalists, either.

You have to look at the big picture. Freedom is a worthy goal. Three decades later, we cannot say that Vietnam would be the country it is today without French and American influence. That would require the ability to see an alternate timeline. We can easily see now, from our present day perspective, that Vietnam could have been handled far better than it was.

We can, in addition, say that Iraq would still be a place of torture and mass murder were it not for the action we are taking there right now, finishing the job that we left unfinished when we took Sadaam at his word as a part of the ceasefire agreement.

We cannot say precisely what positive message of freedom that will spread throughout the arab world as a result of the toppling of Sadaam, but we can clearly see it is better than the alternative.