From: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Subject: Re: U.S. Is Not Going to War in Somalia for any Good Reasons
Reply-To: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 20:25:55 GMT

In article <1gkbb2INNlfd@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
>>
>>I'd question popular support of the war in Serbia itself.  Milosevic's
>>political support is iffy.
>
>Uh, what does this have to do with anything?  Would there be a revolution if
>he were unpopular enough?  An election?  Certainly if he were unpopular
>enough with the military leadership, things might change.  But that has
>little to do with popular support.

[On how Western gov'ts have legitimized Milosevic]

>All this stuff may legitimize the government to us, but I think the Serbians
>will not care in the slightest whether their government is "legitimate".  I
>mean, if they had much effect on it in the first place.

Leslie Gelb (or Anthony Lewis, I forget which) seemed to believe that
it does.  Governments in industrial states cannot support themselves
in the long-term by military force alone.  They need popular support
(or at least popular apathy) to maintain power.  Milosevic is a
charismatic leader, and has held on in part because he is perceived to
be legitimate.  Actions that puncture this legitimacy certainly cannot
hurt.

>
>>I was refering more towards how Vietnam was more of a war of national
>>independence, and not an invasion by a foreign power.  You can look at
>>references in Neil Shennan's _A Bright Shining Lie_.
>
>A war of national independence, perhaps.  But in addition Vietnam was a
>communist takeover using all the traditional communist methods.  I have read
>Sheehan's argument that Ho Chi Minh need never have become a communist, and
>it is not particularly convincing.  So what if he appealed to the US for aid
>on occasion?

Actually, Sheehan goes farther back, towards WWI and the Versailles
Conference.  Ho had gone to Paris to appeal for Vietnamese
independence (assuming that Wilson meant what he said about national
self-determination).  He found the only group that would listen to him
were the French Marxists.

>So did Castro and the Sandinistas, and we did give them aid,
>and they still became communist.  Besides, it was very early on when the
>communist apparatus took charge of the Viet Minh, and after that happened
>the war was inevitably a communist insurrection.

It was a Communist insurrection, but was that it's primary
characteristic?  I'd argue that it was primarily a war of
independence.  Certainly, it was not southward expansion by Communist
China, considering the historic animosity between the two nations.

BTW, there's an interesting essay in the January Harper's about the
end of the 20th century.  The author, John Lukacs, argues that most
Third World insurrections were not Communist inspired, in the sense of
a monolithic Communism directed by Moscow.  In most cases, these were
insurrections against the colonial West.  Communism was a convenient
moniker, as it may lead to aid from Moscow.  A main target was the
United States, which, of course, had come to symbolize the Western
world.  "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" after all.  They were
Communist because they were anti-American, not the other way around.

>
>Sheehan does not talk about the Viet Cong methods of conquest.  Thus their
>barbarism is not evident from his account.  It was this barbarism that gave
>many South Vietnamese the motivation to fight.

True.  Authoritarian regimes are not pleasant in general, not even
right-wing ones.




--
The insane fear of socialism throws the bourgeois headlong into the
arms of despotism.
			-- Tocqueville, 1852