[luckyme]

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Your points are good ones, but David's point is a more limited one. If I understand it correctly, it is that if we fought the war to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist gulag, and we lost the war and the Communists took over, and it didn't become anything close to the disaster we said it would, then that it compelling evidence--not proof--that fighting the war was failure from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. It my well be that a no-war Vietnam would have been different than post-war Vietnam and that David's formula is therefore not "proof." But he is not claiming it is proof; just a compelling piece of evidence.

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Evidence yes, but his initial claim (that I was addressing)was that there was no need to consider anything else to conclude that the war was a mistake.

chez

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And my spin is that without a good examination of lots of competing possible outcomes, including the butterfly and gorilla effects of random major/minor influences events there is no reason to assume there is a compelling connection between a specific condition of the world six or more years after the war and the similar looking specific condition that may have occurred without the war.

At the VERY least we'd have to rule out that the war achieved our goal even by losing it, for example, but I don't want to simplify it that much. Not unlike how standing up to bully and taking a beating may still dissuade him from further aggression ( very loose non-analogy).

luckyme.