mixedmedia said:
I hope that everyone will take the time to read this from beginning to end. It is well worth it and the least we can do. Consider it an exercise in patriotism taught by one of our country's few legendary heroes.
http://yonip.com/main/peace/vietnam.html
I read it. Because of his premature death, it was, perhaps, the first chapter in a series that he would have written on the subject.
The 1954 Geneva Convention which brought an end to the French involvment in Southeast Asia divided the former colony of French Indo China into Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam, which was partitioned into North and South along the 17th parallel of north latitude.
Eventually, the communist government in the North began to agitate for uniting both parts under its rule. The government in the South rejected this and pretty soon things began to get ugly.
South Viet Nam called for members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to come to its defense.
SEATO was organized in 1954 under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty by representatives of Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States. Established under Western auspices after the French withdrawal from Indochina, SEATO was created to oppose further Communist gains in Southeast Asia.
The US honored its obligation and took the lead position. Popular at the outset, the effort lost popular support when it became apparent that the goal was not to achieve a swift military victory, but rather a political solution which would encourage the communists to withdraw to the north. Masters at guerilla fighting and protracted negotiating and having little regard for the lives of their own fighters, the communists settled in for a war of attrition, hoping that the number of casualties inflicted on the US forces would eventually exceed the tolerance of the US public.
They were successful.
While Dr. King did not live to see it, the US did acquiesce to internal pressure and abandoned the South Vietnamese to defend themselves against the anticipated communist incursion from the North.
Within two years of the US pullout, more than two million civilian deaths occurred in South Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Had he lived, I wonder how Dr. King would have reacted to that carnage and how he would have reacted to the ethnic cleansing that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Rwandans in the 1990s.
Any ideas?
