Why America’s Pullout From Vietnam Worked (Barf Alert)

Newsweek/MSNBC ^ | Aug 23, 2007 | Michael Hirsh

[DakotaRed]

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.

[Pontiac]

You can't get this stupid without drinking... a lot...

Oh I don’t know?

If you saw a couple of Michael Moore movies, maybe.

[gridlock]

If you saw a couple of Michael Moore movies, maybe.

But I can't sit through a Michael Moore movie without drinking... a lot!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct.

That works just fine - if America's Pullout the Democratic Party's bugout from Vietnam occurred in 1990. But here's a news flash for Michael Hirsh: the Democratic Party's bugout from Vietnam occurred during the Ford Administration - that is, over 15 years earlier. And many others have graphically illustrated what happened to the last people who trusted the government of the US and the Democratic Party when the US reneged on a comittment.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Because a whole bunch of little yellow people that the left doesn’t like were brutally slaughtered?

[MrB]

Leftists never make a cause-effect connection between their actions (or inactions) and the actual results.

All that matters is how they FEEEEEEL about an issue, and their intentions.

[savedbygrace]

Here’s the address to Email the author:

webeditors@newsweek.com

[dan1123]

This was the “harsh” aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam.

No it wasn't. President Bush was referring to events in the 1970s, not the 1990s. It's like the left has a mental disorder that works around the immediate postwar history of Vietnam.

The decision to pull out had very little effect on the ultimate outcome.

Yeah, so over a generation after the Vietnam war, things begin to start looking positive for Vietnam, so things were never bad there after 1975 (/s). And of course, he has a magical historical what-if box that tells him if the Vietnam War never happened, it would not have affected Russia's relationship with China, the fall of the Berlin wall, or the end of the USSR.

[dan1123]

It's amazing how much misinformation Hirsh crams into a single sentence.

It only makes sense if you live in leftist delusional fairyland. It's actually a good debate technique. The unaware public gets presented a fairyland instead of the real world where leftist ideas always seem to fail and the facts never seem to go their way.