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Reagan's Legacy [retitled] · Jun 5, 02:41 PM
I wouldn’t want to deny any person a eulogy & the fond remembrance of friends & family, but spare me the unctuous treacle that is already beginning to ooze from the mainstream media regarding the late Ronald Reagan, surely one of the most clueless (but lucky) presidents in the nation’s history. He made mendacity a high comic art, I’ll give him that:
President Ronald Reagan News Conference of April 1982: “If I recall correctly, when France gave up Indochina as a colony, the leading nations of the world met in Geneva in regard to helping those colonies become independent nations. And since North and South Vietnam had been previous to colonization two separate countries, provisions were made that these two countries could by a vote of all their people together decide whether they wanted to be one country or not … And there wasn’t anything surreptitious about it, but when Ho Chi Minh refused to participate in such an election [emphasis added] and there was provision that the peoples of both countries could cross the border and live in the other country if they wanted to, and when they began leaving by the thousands and thousands from North Vietnam [emphasis added] to live in South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh closed the border and again violated that part of the agreement … And openly, our country sent military advisors there to help a country which had been a colony have such things as a national security force, an army you might say, or a military, to defend itself. And they were doing this, if I recall correctly, also in civilian clothes, no weapons, until they began being blown up where they lived, in walking down the street by people riding by on bicycles and throwing pipe bombs at them. and then they were permitted to carry side arms or wear uniforms … But it was totally a program until John F. Kennedy, when these attacks and forays became so great that John F. Kennedy authorized the sending in of a division of marines. That was the first move toward combat moves in Vietnam.”
There you have it. For any of you youngsters reading this, it was not Ho who refused to participate in the elections mandated by the Geneva agreements to end the war, but Diem, the American puppet who later held his own private election in the south with the help of the CIA. (To be fair, the CIA advised Diem that an election result of, say, 80% would constitute a landslide; Diem nevertheless insisted on a 98% victory, which he got.) Had a real election been held in 1956, as all parties agreed at Geneva (with the exception of the US, which abstained), Uncle Ho would have won a sweeping popular mandate. And spared the US an agonizing war without purpose. As for northern Vietnamese leaving “by the thousands,” this was an exodus orchestrated by the US to move northern Catholics to the south in order to provide Diem a political base. [The Geneva Accords on Vietnam]
So let’s keep all the hagiography in perspective.
Update: Steve Gilliard runs down the whole sick history of the Reagan Administration.
Update: Juan Cole has the best summary I’ve yet read of Reagan’s legacy.
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