From: john@anasazi.com (John R. Moore)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: The draft and Vietnam
Date: 15 Sep 92 06:12:35 GMT
Reply-To: john@anasazi.com
Organization: Anasazi Inc, Phoenix AZ USA

Keywords: 

In article <casseres-140992104641@missmolly.apple.com> casseres@apple.com (David Casseres) writes:
]In article <1992Sep11.170722.14124@anasazi.com>, john@anasazi.com (John R.
]Moore) wrote:
]
]> I think it important to point out that [Col. David H. Hackworth] was in VN and
]> saw how stupidly the war was being prosecuted, but he was not in a position to
]> determine whether the war was being fought for good ends.
]
]Why?  Was he unable to look around him at the behavior of the Saigon
]government?  If he was not in a position to determine whether the war was
]being fought for good ends, who was?

People who realized that the Vietnam War was about containment, not
about "democracy in Viet Nam."

]> In his book (which I have
]> read), his main argument against the war is that "we weren't really
]> fighting for the democracy in VN, because it wasn't a democracy." With
]> this level of unsophisticated analysis, it is hard to take his views
]> on what was going on in the US (as opposed to VN where he was present) 
]> very seriously.
]
]It certainly did not require any sophistication to observe that there was
]no democracy in Vietnam.

No, the lack of sophistication is evidenced by anyone who believes
that the issue of democracy in Vietnam at the time was germaine.
In spite of what the politicians of both parties said, VN was
not about preserving democracy in the South... it was about stopping
the spread of communism. Vietnam was simply a battleground between the
US and the Soviet Union.
]
]> Hack got pissed off at how the war was being fought, 
]> and translated that illogically into a view that the war should not be
]> fought.
]
]That's an easy assertion to make, but there's no evidence for it.  On the
]face of what he says himself, he decided the war should not be fought
]because the regime that it was defending was no damn good.  Where is the
]illogic?

Read his book.

]> That is like being unhappy with how a mechanic is fixing your
]> car, and concluding from that that the car should not be fixed.
]
]No, it isn't.
Yes, it is.
]
]> This is not to start an argument as to whether the war was correct,
]> but rather to show that Hackworth's logic is suspect and his knowledge
]> of what what it was like to be facing the choice in the US is poor.
]
]You haven't shown that in any way, and if you claim the Vietnam War was
]"correct," you're certainly starting an argument.

As I said, I don't want to argue the "correctness" - we have been
around and around on that on the net already. I am simply pointing out
that Hackworth's analysis is shortsighted... you could say that
he was looking at it from a tactical viewpoint, but missing the
strategic viewpoint. Whether it made sense from a strategic
standpoint is indeed something we could argue about, but I would
rather not. 

If you insist on getting hung up on the behavior of the regime in
SVN, we could then start tossing around the behavior of the regime in
NVN, and later PRVN, but why bother when the behavior of neither
regime was important in the decision of whether or not to prosecute
the VN war?
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.theory