VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[jbor]

on 31/8/03 3:26 PM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:

> My knowledge of the Vietnam War is based upon books like Mary McCarthy's
> "Hanoi 1968", Daniel Ellsberg's "Papers on the War", the two Bertrand
> Russell/Jean-Paul Sartre Vietnam Tribunal-books and alike.

Good for you. My knowledge is based on the first-hand accounts of many
hundreds of South Vietnamese refugees living in the local communities I work
with, most of them pretty certain they'd been living in a sovereign state
all their lives until they were forced to flee, and also pretty adamant
about the social and political differences between their own people and
their North Vietnamese oppressors.

In 1954 the Geneva Conference partitioned Vietnam along the 17th parallel,
leaving a communist Democratic Republic in the north (capital Hanoi) and, by
1955, a non-communist republic in the south (capital Saigon). So, they were
two sovereign states from 1954 until 1975.

I wasn't comparing the Vietnam War with the invasion of Iraq. I compared the
fact that wrong information was used as a justification for American
aggression in both instances.

And as to your third point, you're again disagreeing with something I
haven't said. My point there relates to the terrorist attack yesterday on
the Shia cleric and his congregation, and the looming threat of civil war.

best


> Actually there
> hasn't been a South Vietnam before the USA took over the French colonial
> enterprise after the Dien Bien Phu debacle (between 1950 and 1953 alone the
> French got three billion US$ from the Truman government as direct military
> support, 648 million in 1954), thus there wasn't a civil war in which the US
> took sides but only an American agression against the whole of Vietnam by
> installing a dictatorship in Saigon after the French were defeated in 1954
> and the emperor's (a French puppet) resign. The 1954 Geneva Conference did
> not speak of North and South Vietnam but only of Vietnam. There has never
> been a sovereign South Vietnam recognized by the UN, Ngo Dien Diem (like his
> successor Van Thieu) was an employee of the US-government until he was
> assinated in 1963.
> 
> http://www.photo.net/vietnam/luong/timeline.html
> 
>> Mobilisation of US troops occurred after LBJ's Tonkin Gulf Resolution in
>> 1964. Like the recent invasion of Iraq, the justification for deploying
>> American military forces was based on wrong information.
> 
> I don't think that you can compare the Vietnam War to the Second Iraq-war
> which freed the country from a murderous dictator. First, the Vietnamese
> hadn't suffered for decades from such a dictator but were trying to liberate
> themselves from colonialism after the defeat of Japan. Second, there hasn't
> been a UN-resolution on Vietnam. Third, even Eisenhower admitted in his
> memoirs that according to all political advisors he had spoken with Ho Chi
> Minh would have got 80% of the votes if free elections had taken place.
> There is no such person/party in Iraq.
> 
>> And, as it seems
>> might be happening in Iraq now, the American military intervention
> actually
>> did more harm than good to the people they were supposedly trying to
> assist.
>> 
> 
> I have to disagree again. The US-lead troops should simply leave the country
> in a few months when the basic Iraqi administration structures work and
> after Saddam Hussein is either dead or captured. This maybe will lead to a
> civil war between the different ethnic/religious groups but I don't think
> that the Baathists ever will regain power. But I doubt that the current
> US-government will be able to admit that it's the presence of Western
> soldiers that attracts terrorists and strengthens Islamistic fundamentalism.