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-UE
Why would somebody say, in 2013, that the Vietnam War was NOT a mistake?
Those were not the words this person actually used, to be fair. They reacted to somebody talking about there being Vietnamese victims of America's "Imperialist war" by talking about all of the people the Viet Cong killed via execution, "re-education" camps, hard labour, and Vietnamese who fled the country in boats and died at sea. They went on to say that if the wonderful Socialist Republic of Vietnam hadn't helped those victims by now, then the victims were blaming the wrong people.
It still came across to me as the person defending the decision to send U.S. troops into Vietnam, though, and that baffles me and pisses me off. I mean okay, I wasn't alive back then, but I have never heard anybody name one good thing that came out of that war. Just a lot of death and suffering, a lot of people being sent to their deaths against their will due to being drafted, a lot of people dying in the most excruciating ways possible (I mean, fucking NAPALM, a substance that is designed to stick to your flesh and slowly burn it away, and the "good guys" were the ones using it!) a great number of whom were civilians, Vietnam vets being traumatized for the rest of their lives if they actually did make it back home, and all for WHAT?!
It wasn't because the U.S. went "OMG, those evil Viet Cong are going to do monstrous things to the people there, we have to run in and stop them and save the day!"
No, it was because of the fucking Domino Theory, because they feared the spread of communism. Theory said, correct me if I'm wrong, that Vietnam becoming communist would lead to other countries becoming communist and pretty soon the U.S.S.R. would have all of these communist allies who would back them up against the United States, right?
The Viet Cong won, Vietnam became communist, and despite all of the terrible things that happened to the people who lived there in the aftermath, communism did not spread like wildfire. Other countries did not all fall like dominoes.
Meaning that it was all for nothing. Fighting to stop the Domino Theory from becoming a reality was for nothing, because there was never any way it was going to become a reality. Fighting to protect the South Vietnamese was for nothing, because all America did was make things worse and delay the inevitable, and oh yes, kill a whole lot of civilians themselves.
I mean, am I missing something? How can anybody possibly look back at the decision to go into Vietnam, knowing what we know now, and say "Yeah, it was the right call"?
Comments
I guess the decision might be defended along the lines of "seemed like a good idea at the time", but sounds like this isn't what that person aimed for.
As it turns out, I misunderstood the guy. He wasn't saying it was a good idea, but he was saying that blaming America makes no sense over forty years later, since so much of the suffering inflicted on the people there happened after the U.S. forces left.