That being said.
I could NOT believe my eyes when I saw this one:
Why America's Pullout From Vietnam Worked
The truth behind Bush's mangling of Cold War history.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 12:10 p.m. CT Aug 23, 2007
Aug. 23, 2007 - The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles (“Russians with dollars,” we were called.) On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon—the where some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken—I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North’s victory over the “U.S. imperialists.” In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi’s new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars). Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall—but the opposite way.
I'm sure all those killed after the fall of Saigon would love to read this happy happy report. I'm sure that all those out there who SERVED in the Nam are overjoyed to know that they went and served so that this analysis could be made. I'm sure that every GI who bought it in the Nam would be ecstatic to know what Michael Hirsh has to say about Vietnam today.
Vietnam was faced with a choice a few years back, not so long ago at all. Turn to capitalistic economics or die out. They chose not to die out. It wasn't because they suddenly love us, it's because they need our cash. Soviet Russia is no more.
Unreal.
Once and Always, an American Fighting Man
(NOTE: Instead of leaving you with the advertisements I usually have at the bottom of each post, I will leave you with one of the videos from Freedoms Watch) [30 second video.]
Wounded Veteran:
Tracked back by:
The Bait Has Been Taken, Now Hook Him and Gut Him from DeMediacratic Nation...
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