[lit-ideas] Re: European Vietnam?
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:24:16 -0500
On 2/13/2011 6:27 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
The effect of the Great War on the European mindset was doubtless momentous.
The disillusion was surely realism.
Disillusion usually presents itself to us as
realism, doesn't it? Even when it is not realism?
The latter disillusion [that the war could and should have been avoided] was
arguably the more important, as it is easier for the powers-that-be to dupe us
that our military are now fully competent (despite past failures) than to dupe
us that cause for the next war is sufficient,
and so this disillusion operates at a deeper and
more longstanding level.
From what I've read, combat strategies aside,
millions dead bracketed somewhere, Europeans were
also duped by the peace. Lloyd George and
Clemenceau had political obligations to extract a
harsh peace settlement and failed to create the
conditions for a lasting peace, largely to satisfy
their political needs at home.
It is vital to distinguish whether the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam was a
failure of competence or lack of sufficient just cause or both. What kind of
analogy we make with the European experience depends on whether, as with the
Great War, it was both.
Curiously, Ho Chi Minh tried to meet with Wilson
at Versailles and was rebuffed. One wonders how
things would have proceeded had the
Powers-That-Were used Versailles as a platform to
establish standards for national independence
rather than cling to their colonies.
I think it was more than just -- quite noble even
-- for the US to try to shut down the Soviet Union
through containment strategy. However, while the
US viewed Vietnam as part of containment, the
Vietnamese viewed it as a struggle for national
independence. That's where US incompetence comes
in, as in US involvement with other countries: our
inability to view the world by anything but Cold
War principles. Tens of thousand of nuclear
missiles have that effect.
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