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Which world would you rather live in?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being
that a belch is more satisfying.
-- Ingmar Bergman
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:21AM
We made the early mistake of backing the Ngô family, a typically corrupt, self serving bunch of third world plutocrats whose sole concern was their own benefit. It was easy for the Việt Cộng, who in a large part were part of local populations, to win the battle for "hearts and minds". Your crops were in trouble? Your animals sick? The Việt Cộng were there to help. Help the Ngô family and their backers? The Việt Cộng were there to see and "reward" that as well. Too many officers (and reporters, who were allowed then to be embedded in troops) saw the truth and reported it, but their reports were ignored in favor of keeping the money flowing to where it did least good. By the time the Ngô family was deposed, the war was lost and it was just a long battle of attrition until the U.S. tired of the cost. The Chinese threw in support once they realized the situation, thinking they would capitalize on it in the end, but in the end, the Chinese (and Russians) made the same mistake the French and the U.S. did, believing it was a war of ideologies. To the Vietnamese people, it was always about independence.