This is an un-nuanced analysis of Vietnam's history that basically blames the United States for Vietnam's rampant corruption and the failure of the communist model (can you name a country where this has worked?).

The author uses stories of war crimes and American military destruction to paint the Vietnam War as USA (with the help of a puppet government) vs. the people of Vietnam. This narrative is naive and ignores the historical and political complexities of the time:

1. Modern Vietnam was only unified in 1802, and then quickly colonized (and separated into three zones) by the French less than 50 years later. It is incorrect to think that Vietnam was always one country and the 1954 Geneva Accords arbitrarily split the country for the good of the West.

2. The Viet Minh, who fought and expelled the French were a multi-ideological group that included non-communist nationalists. Ho Chi Minh systematically eradicated the non-communist factions and consolidated power. Some of the fanatical anti-communists that arose later in South Vietnam were those that had had family members murdered by the communist faction.

3. This narrative ignores the Republic of Vietnam as a true sovereign state. It is incorrect to describe RVN as simply a puppet of the US. True, the Vietnam war was a proxy war, but its involved nations had agendas of its own and ignoring these is patronizing and false. People vote with their feet. In the 300-day grace period after the 1954 division that allowed open migration between the two Vietnams, 600,000 people migrated south compared with around 150,000 to the north. Around 1975, those who could scrambled to escape the country. Over the next 20 years, over two million less fortunate people would risk their lives on rickety boats to flee the communist regime. It's a very naive picture to paint that the US was bombing all the of the poor Vietnamese who just wanted independence into submission.

Aside from the lack of historical nuance, the author goes on excuse the communist regime from blame, with incredibly disingenuous passages like this:

"The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people."

The US did not leave Vietnam in ruins. War, two-sided war did. In Saigon, where did war widows and orphans come from? From the North killing the fathers and husbands in war. Who created the refugees and destroyed two thirds of the villages? The North, when it invaded the South. War is complicated, and obviously both sides are complicit in this tragedy, but not in the author's eyes. (Unsurprisingly, he doesn't mention the scores of summary executions and systematic torture of ARVN veterans in "re-education camps" post 1975).

The US made plenty of blunders and ill-conceived and unwarranted political plays during the course of the Vietnam War, but North Vietnam does not get away blame free here. And while our standard history narrative in the US mostly half-apologetically describes Vietnam as a mistake and tries to forget about it, few people stop to consider if perhaps the US was on the side of "good" (or at least, the better of the two) in this case.

How might Vietnam be different today if it had gone the way of South Korea (which, at the time, was even poorer than Vietnam)? When looking at its Cold War era allies (USSR, PRC), it's no surprise that Vietnam ranks so poorly on corruption. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.