Bad ideas in military history

[Klimax]

So what though? South Vietnam was also a dictatorship with equally bad human rights. What were we fighting for? To stop the spread of communism. And yet, we could have been friendly with Vietnam if only we had realized that the communist world was not one united bloc all marching to the same tune.

You don't need "same tune" to have same wrong direction... (BTW: South Korea) There were at best two communist countries that had any chance at proving communism could work without being crappy dictatorships. Both were violently destroyed. One in Europe and one in South America.

In Vietnam the Western powers were propping up a corrupt dictatorship that was hardly an improvement relative to the communist dictatorship that they were fighting. It can be argued that it was the war that caused the communists to take a turn for the worse.

let me tell you one thing. Communist never need external impulse to turn worse... (also you assume they were "good" in the first place)

 

[steenkh]

Communist never need external impulse to turn worse... (also you assume they were "good" in the first place)

These are just meaningless statements: they can be equally said of any capitalist country.

I based my statement that the Vietnamese brand of communism had potential to be good because they based their declaration of independence on the U.S. one, which is a pretty good to start with.