[vbmoneyspender]

Former Viet Cong Colonel Pham Xuan An described in 1990 his immense disillusionment with what a Communist victory had meant to Vietnam. "All that talk about Â`liberation' twenty, thirty, forty years ago," he lamented, "produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists."

I have always wondered if the VC understood how they were used during Tet. The North Vietnamese purposefully used them as shock troops so that they would take the brunt of the fighting (and attendant casualties) and thereby leave the way open for North Vietname to dominate the South once the war was won. And this is not the first war in which the Communists have employed this tactic. In Spain, Stalin's thugs spent almost as much going after heretical leftists as they did going after Falangists. Likewise, the Soviets employed a similar tactic in WWII when the paused their assault on Warsaw in order to give the Nazis sufficient time to finish off the Polish resistance.

[SJackson]

"All that talk about Â`liberation' twenty, thirty, forty years ago," he lamented, "produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists."

Funny, I read this in print this morning, then found it on the web from a different source, but I keyed on the same quote you did. Couldn't fit it in the tag line, FR needs to expand that.

I have always wondered if the VC understood how they were used during Tet.

Who knows, for those who survived, it didn't matter, they were finished. But Uncle Ho knew how to snatch victory from defeat, on the backs of those he was "liberating", and with a little help from his foreign "friends". A familiar theme.