Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FIRST TRIP to Saigon in 1962 as a reporter for the New York Times, David Halberstam saw the American effort in Vietnam as a worthwhile endeavor. The war, he says in his notes in The Best and the Brightest, seemed to be a test of two political systems in a political war, and he preferred "our system." Admitting his failure, the failure of the press and many others at the time to see the atrocities the United States government would commit in Southeast Asia, Halberstam arrived at a different conclusion by 1962--that our handling of Vietnam was doomed...
...wise thinking on the part of the Carter administration to never again be drawn into a situation similar to the one which 20 years ago grew into one of the greatest calamities this country has ever experienced. Zagoria's argument that South Korea is not the same country as Vietnam and that the government should not withdraw its military support through the "residue of guilt and fear left over from Vietnam" is well taken, but there is a radically different conclusion to be drawn from those lessons the government had to so stupidly learn from Vietnam...
...South Vietnam was different. There was a war there that was already ten years old when the U.S. government became involved--but Korea has been without a war for more than a quarter of a century and not due to the presence of one American division in South Korea, as Zagoria argues. Rather, the nature of the situation in Korea is such that the chance of war is an extremely dubious proposition...
...repression of human rights, claiming that the country must be unified against the North, but Park believes this is the way to keep himself in power. Although his support is weakening, the South Koreans' unity against the North is not. Unlike the Viet Cong, who knew that South Vietnam was internally weak and spiritless in its fight against northern communism, Kim II Sung knows very well of the solidity of the opposition in the South. If he is plotting to take over the South before he dies, as Zagoria so weakly argues, he had better have a good plan...
...States has no business, under any circumstances, in South Korea. And it seems appropriate that in a decade which is on the surface so full of political apathy, that the Carter administration is wise to begin taking steps to avoid a situation which required the protests Americans raged over Vietnam during the later '60s. Neither the government nor the citizens of this country may support Carter today, but there is little doubt that if the U.S. were to involve itself in a Korean civil war in the future, Carter would deserve the blame for the kind of mindlessness for which...