A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Lessons of Vietnam

A few that the President left out of his speech, from Andrew Bacevich.

Among others:

Sometimes people can manage their own affairs. Does the U.S. need to attend to that mess? Perhaps not.

Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares?

Bush did not even allude to the condition of Vietnam today. Yet the question poses itself: Is it not possible that the people of the Middle East might be better qualified to determine their future than a cadre of American soldiers, spooks and do-gooders? The answer to that question just might be yes.

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One response to “Lessons of Vietnam”

  1. Jack Perry

    Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together.

    No, they didn’t. They began murdering people who didn’t toe the party line, leading to mass exodus, most infamously the boat people. They tried exporting communism to neighboring states, including Cambodia, which fell apart so badly that they later invaded to remove the party they had helped put into power. Even today large groups of Vietnamese are being ethnically cleansed, in particular Montagnards, some of whom I have personally known and helped adjust to their new life int he United States.

    Maybe now, thirty-odd years later, they don’t behave as repugnantly as they did then. But that’s like saying that Stalin in the 40s did not behave as repugnantly as he did in the 30s, or that China in the 70s was not as chaotic a place as China during the cultural revolution, or that Serbia, if it were still under Milosevic today, would be more appealing than it was with all those naughty Kosovars stirring up trouble.

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