Generational Dynamics World View

[David Horn]

(10-18-2020, 05:13 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 18-Oct-2020 World View: American assets supporting the French

(10-18-2020, 03:02 PM)David Horn Wrote: >   We had assets on the ground supporting the French years before
>   Dien Bien Phu, because I knew a few of them.  And the Viet Mihn
>   were well aware of our help.  The first few names on the Vietnam
>   War Memorial wall should have been from that time, but the
>   arbitrary cutoff was the 1955 creation of MACV.

The following is from K. W. Taylor, A History Of The Vietnamese,
Cambridge University Press, 2013:

Quote:>   "The contradiction between French colonialism and
>   American promotion of an independent, sovereign Vietnamese state
>   had been a prominent aspect of US involvement in Vietnamese
>   affairs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the late 1950s,
>   although the French were no longer part of the situation, an
>   analogous contradiction between controlling the policies of a
>   client regime and respecting the sovereignty of an allied
>   government became embedded in the US bureaucratic structure that
>   grew up around the American commitment to defend a noncommunist
>   South Vietnam. This contradiction became increasingly volatile as
>   the Hanoi decision to initiate war in the south gathered momentum
>   and Saigon's dependence upon US assistance accordingly
>   increased."

OK, but so what?  We decided to eliminate any potential "Marxist" government in the south, and guaranteed a bloody war as a result. That one's on Ike.  If he had OK'd the election in '56, things would have been different ... but, of course,  he didn't.