Newsweek's "How we could have won in Vietnam"

http://www.newsweek.com/id/221632

To Newsweek,

In response to your Nov. 16 cover story about how we could have won in Vietnam, your writers failed to mention that (a) the fact that we lost in Vietnam did not greatly imperil America as the hawks predicted, and (b) we could have recognized an independent Vietnam in 1945, and worked diplomatically to sway them from communism, thereby averting the deaths of over two million people.

a) After the US withdrew and South Vietnam fell, a pan-communist Asian axis never materialized to threaten Western interests in the region. In fact, those nations were at times hostile to each other. China briefly invaded Vietnam in response to their toppling of the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea - all three being communist nations at the time. Since the 1990s, the US and Vietnam have been cordial trading partners, though of course political differences persist. But there was no "domino effect" or hateful Vietnamese fanatics plotting revenge against America, which is often speculatively associated with radical Islam today. Defeat is never palatable, but it's not the end of the world either, even in Afghanistan.

b) Abraham Lincoln said, "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" A war with Vietnamese communists was not inevitable. The OSS helped Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh (precursors to the Viet Cong) fight an insurgency against the occupying Japanese during WWII, with the hopes of earning independence later. As a vision for the postwar world, the US and UK signed the "Atlantic Charter" proclaiming that all peoples have the right to self-determination, and Ho called Truman on it. But after the war, Washington ignored Vietnam as France attempted to reclaim its former colonies. If we upheld our principles of freedom and liberty, instead of succumbing to Cold War fears and bygone colonialism, we could have made an independent Vietnam our ally. Ho lived in the West and was inspired by the American Revolution, but the US decided to make him an enemy.