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Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Well, Jebbie, bend over and for your really-hates, I'll inject you your due reward.:p

I didn't know we were at that stage of the relationship yet

All we really needed to do was to keep South Vietnam in supplies. Congress was Democratic-controlled at the time, and Nixon, who with benefit of national experience, hindsight and strategic reappraisal in prosecuting the Vietnam War, was employing a more successful strategy, Abrams' style rather than Westmoreland's, disgraced himself all the way out of office with the Watergate scandal. With the President too politically vitiated and distracted to get Congress to measure up to the demands of common decency to an ally, Congress' funds cutoff doomed South Vietnam as an independent political entity -- and more than a few South Vietnamese as living entities, let alone independent ones. Would a Republican-controlled Congress have been that feckless?

If Nixon was so wise and caring he wouldn't have besmirched himself in the first place with Watergate. Or was it all a clever Democrat scheme to make sure communism could flourish? Either way supplying is what we did with a certain fellow named Saddam Hussein. Maybe you've heard of him? My point is that had South Vietnam won it didn't guarantee a good government.

National level Republicans do behave in a genuinely anti-communist manner. Their Democratic counterparts -- "have done everything differently."* And they've failed a lot and lost a lot thereby. When it came to coping with the major threat to the United States and the rest of the world of the twentieth century, the Democrats ran the gamut between singularly imperceptive incompetence and general failure, and they spent a solid fifty years staying hosed up. They're still in this habit, and they're still just as incapable.

It's pretty hard to fail when you don't play. Republicans are 0-2 from where I sit. They started, they failed. What exactly have Democrats failed? Rwanda? At least we didn't start that. When it comes to something big like wars I'd rather err on the side of caution than firing and missing the target.

South Vietnam's political fault lines seem really to be nothing more or less than the legacy of French colonialism and post-colonialism: in particular a policy -- seen also in Lebanon, to outcomes not very different -- of parceling out portions of a former colony's political power specifically to this or that faction/religion/definable group. The ruling South Vietnamese elite lacked close ties to the rest of the South Vietnamese population, particularly out in the sticks where the North's forces had freest hand. A political structure made from such rotten timber isn't going to handle pressure from outside at all, let alone anything approaching well. One good shove and crrraaackkkk, crunch!

Agreed. Which is why I'm not fond of the USA mucking in others affairs. Colonialism has been little but a mess in the end.

Really, we went into Vietnam out of a humanitarian impulse. That we didn't succeed meant blood and sorrow, and no redress. That Vietnam has since enjoyed a measure of anti-Communist success, to the point where Communism is now maintained mainly as a sort of state religion to which one must outwardly subscribe at least if one wants to be an official, largely heals the ulceration.

Oh please. You believe it was for humanitarian reasons and not trying to be the primary superpower in the world (as opposed to the USSR)? I have some ocean front property I'd like to sell you.