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Thanks for an interesting article. The Vietnam War is so often held up in America as a huge wrong-headed failure, but looking at the consequences of abandonment really questions the PC analysis
And it gets even more interesting when you start comparing it to the Korean War.
Consider about the same number of Americans died - 54,000 in Korea 57,000 in Vietnam, even though American troop involvement in Vietnam lasted more than twice as long (4 years vs 10 years). The number of civilans killed was probably much higher in Korea, as was the number of foriegn troops killed. Consider the Korean war memorial plaque says "Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met" http://www.aalgar.com/graphics/travel/041801/korea.jpg Something that could very well be said of Vietnam veterans. Yet the Vietnam war memorial is a list of the people who died, in the order that they died, dug into the ground. Both were examples of a communist superpower backed north launching offensive aggresions against a market based, albiet dictatorial, south. Both were cultures and peoples very alien to the West. In the first case we won, and the South continues to exist and is one of the greatest and most startling examples of democracy and markets in action in the world today, home to the worlds 11th largest economy. Compare that to the North, arguably the worst country on the planet. South Vietnam had won its war, and stood alone defending itself for two years after the US withdrew militarily after signing a peace treaty with the North (which, surprisingly, the north violated, even after the north vietnamese general recieved the nobel peace prize)
Even worse, in 1973 it awarded the prize to Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese Communist, who, along with Ho Chi Minh and other Party leaders, imposed a vicious Communist dictatorship in North Vietnam that slaughtered at least 50,000 Vietnamese in the 1950s and then invaded and conquered South Vietnam. All told, the death toll caused by that Communist dictatorship and its warring totaled two million individuals - http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1977 His figures err on the low side, and do not count the dead from Vietnams aggressive wars launched against Laos and Cambodia.
By the time of Nixon's resignation however, the democratically controlled congress had made it illegal to send any aide to indochina, dealing the death blow to the people of South Vietnam.
That whole war was a monument to complete mismanagement by our side, starting from philosophy and going all the way to the pullout.
Indeed, there was certainly a lot of problems with the way the war was fought. However I disagree with Rand on Vietnam, and the idea that we did not have a philosophical basis for the war applied to Korea just as well, yet that war was succesfull. Fostering the growth of democracies is a clear act of self defense, something not recognized in the cold war era times. 'Realists' preferred the 'stability of dictatorships' over the chance of electrions putting non friendly extremists into power (a complaint often made against Iraq now) With North Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, etc etc etc that doctrine has clearly proven itself completely and utterly wrong. The stability of dictatorships is clearly an oxymoron.
Michael Dickey
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