Armistice Day: Korea A thought on fighting communism [View All]

[Hanuman]

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a pretty conservative Republican. By default (as kids tend to do) I became the opposite, a pretty liberal democrat if not socialist. In time, my views have moderated substantially and I now find myself what people here might call a moderate.

But when I was growing up, in my teens and early twenties, my dad and I got into thrashing political debates about virtually all the issues. One issue that shut him up was the issue of Vietnam. I argued that it was really a terrible, senseless war. 55,000 Americans died. We didn't keep the country from going communist. It was their own civil war and we had no business interfering. (Of course, the concept that France helped us win OUR revolutionary war and secured OUR freedom and liberty didn't occur to me at the time, but it does now).

At any rate, my dad failed to answer me adequately- what was the point of the Vietnam war?

Until a few years ago, that is.

We got into a less heated debate and the subject came up. He said he'd been thinking about this issue for several years and this was his hindsight assessment:

Vietnam showed the world that the United States was willing to commit vast resources and the lives of it's fighting men to oppose the spread of communism. We may have not always been successful in this endeavor, as seen in Korea and Vietnam, but the people who NEEDED to witness our opposition and resolve, the leaders of China and the Soviet Union for example, took note of how far we were willing to go. If we were willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Americans to stop the spread of communism in small, third world nations half a world away, we were certainly ready to put it ALL on the table to resist communism closer to home.

He believed this was one of the reasons America never directly fought the Soviet Union or China. They knew we were deadly serious and were AFRAID to have a go at us. He believed that sometimes foreign policy doesn't necessarily make perfect sense at the MOMENT it happens- but in this case, the policy to fight communism yielded it's benefits later, throughout the years.

This is what he believed. I'm still thinking about it. Do you have comments or opinions?