[Kaj]

[ QUOTE ]
Communist Vietnam post-war emerged into a different world because of the war than the one it would have emerged into if there were no war. Besides the direct legacy of the war, there were endless other political, economic, demographic, military etc, variations that were occurring during the war and others that would have occurred if there were no war. Never mind butterfly effects, there are 800 pound gorilla effects too.

To decide whether the war was right or wrong because of one aspect of the end position leaves ostriches with better views.

If the goal of the war was to prevent a communist Vietnam for fear of XYandZ, then after the war there is a communist Vietnam and XYandZ did not occur or were not that damaging, we'd need one hell of a lot of information on a grand scale to determine whether the war decision was correct or not and the actual post-war conditions may well be a minor part of the evaluation.

luckyme

[/ QUOTE ]

So would you hypothesize that the war stunted the spread of communism and produced a less hardline regime in Vietnam?

Because I think objective analysis would show that after Vietnam, the US and the world had no stomach and depleted resources to try the containment strategy like that again. And if anything, the communist regime in Vietnam should have emerged as dramatically more hardline and anti-West after the war, rather than be not nearly as dogmatic as we made them out to be before the war.

You are right that there are unaccounted for effects. But objectively, these effects are porbably a higher likelihood of hurting the case for war than helping the case. Since we can only guess, let's make the best guess we can given what we know about the times and the world. And if we do that, I think one can make a compelling case that we hyped the cause for war -- what was a struggle for nationalism, we turned into a global communist conspiracy. In fact, it was our actions to support the South that aligned the North more strongly with China and Russia. If we just shrug our shoulders and say "who knows?" then we fail to learn any lessons from history.