From: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle)
Subject: Re: Principles, principles, principles
Organization: Psych Department, Indiana University
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 22:32:08 GMT

kmitche@eis.calstate.edu (Kenneth Mitchell) writes:
>dks@athena.mit.edu (dks) writes:
>> If it were, I'd be happy to catalog for you the various
>> less-than-noble "causes" for which thousands of people died while
>> "hawks" like Dannikins played shuffleball in Indiana.  If you need
>> to get your testosterone flowing, stick to whooping about the Gulf
>> massacre -- you have no credibility when it comes to Vietnam.

>You've got damned little credibility yourself, guy. We may have LOST ine
>VietNam because of people like you, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't
>an important cause, even a noble one. 

    Weak claim. Firstly, IMHO people like dks didn't cause us to lose in 
Vietnam; the main reasons for our loss were the tenacity of the Viet Cong 
and the close, difficult nature of the terrain. Jungle terrain substantially 
reduced the effectiveness of air support and made ground combat a dicey 
business as well. The reasons for the success of the VC were essentially the 
same as the reasons Boer guerillas were ultimately successful in carrying 
South Africa out of the British Commonwealth.

    That the British were somewhat more effective at fighting the Boers 
was mostly due to the ruthlesstactics adopted by Lord Kitchener. In order 
to deny supply and support to the Boer guerillas Kitchener gathered 
civilians from Transvaal and the Orange Free State into camps referred to 
by the newly invented term "concentration camp" (just in case you ever 
wondered where the term came from). In Vietnam since we were ostensibly 
fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese I suppose it didn't seem 
like a good idea to destroy their homes and crops and incarcerate them in 
camps. We might have won that war if we had been willing to show ourselves 
to be more ruthless and bloodthirsty than the VC; personally I'm glad that 
we didn't go to that extreme.

>To attack the Viet Nam war as somehow wrong or immoral is to APPROVE of
>the Khmer Rouge murders and the Viet Namese "re-education" camps. 

    What incredible bovine fecal matter. I opposed the Vietnam war as 
"wrong" because we didn't have the political will to *really* crush the 
people. Under the circumstances our soldiers in the field were in about 
the same boat as the marines in Beirut. We were there for a noble cause, 
but unfortunately the primary thing that we did in support of that cause 
was to sit entrenched behind barbed wire and present attractive targets.

    Many of the crimes committed by the Vietnamese or Cambodians against 
their own people were heinous in the extreme. Cambodians today remember 
the "Pol Pot Time" as a blur of misery and suffering. Unfortunately many 
of those Cambodians today view the Vietnamese as their saviors rather than 
the US. For some reason they view our effort on their behalf as a half-
hearted and somewhat bungled attempt which was abandoned as soon as we 
found out that we'd gotten into more than we bargained for. That part of 
the war effort is very difficult to portray in a positive light no matter 
what our intentions were. If you think that makes me a Khmer Rouge supporter 
then I guess we just have to agree to disagree.

--
Nathan Engle                        Software Juggler
Psychology Department               Indiana University
nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu      nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu
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