"SteveM8597" wrote in message
...

(Snip)

Our objective was to prevent the spread of communism in SEA. The Domino
theory is evidence of that. I believe we accomplished that.

I agree, but we did it by spending them into national bankruptcy. That in
itself ought to tell us that the Domino Theory was invalid from its inception.
We didn't have to enter armed conflict to contain communism, we had merely to
force them to expend their limited resources in a futile effort to keep up with
how we spent ours.

.....NVN was never able to fully bring SVN into its mold of government. As
was the strategy for NVN, we made the cost of future incursions by the USSR
too high. I am not sure
what the alternate history would have been had we not intervened and all any
of
us can do is speculate. SVN lost their civil war in spite of our support or
maybe lack of it, but we accomplished the larger objective. The USSR never
had
much of a presence after the war and later abandoned VN. Therefore I cannot
agree we "lost" the war. It was a conflict in which there were no clear
winners though no one will ever convnce me that our 58,000 KIAs died in vain
any more than our casualties in Irag.


IAC, I think we can agree on one thing. Cost and difficulty notwithstanding,
our armed forces in largest part performed magnificently and, in point of
fact,
won just about every battle in which they were engaged. Unfortunately,
because
of political constraints, they were not permitted to win the war.

George Z.


We can most certainbly agree on that

Steve