Yes, Slag, it did look different at the time, and I understand how it looked, but the French should not even have been in Vietnam anymore after '45. Vietnam should have been given its independence as soon as the Japanese left. They had fought for it and they deserved it. If Vietnam had been given independence in 1945 as the single nation it already was, there would have been no subsequent war there at all. That war was essentially a fight for national sovereignty against colonial rule, but that was not recognized by the USA. The USA chose to side itself with a Catholic Vietnamese minority in Saigon, a minority which had traditionally tended to work with the French colonial administration. That was an idea doomed to failure. The country is mostly Buddhist, and the Catholics were viewed as collaborators with the colonial regime. The USA-supported government was seen as an extension of the same colonialism as had existed under the French. It then became a civil war to reunite the country and eject the foreign presence.

I appreciate our freedoms as much as you do, Slag, but I realize that they are the inevitable result of past tradition and circumstance in the places we live in. They go back not just to your Constitution (or mine), they go all the way back to the Magna Carta. We are lucky. We got born into prosperous societies with a democratic tradition already strong and functioning. Cubans, Trinidadians, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Iranians, Iraqis, Russians, Vietnamese, Afghans, Africans, most Asians...they're not so lucky as we were.

And I don't think what we're doing in our foreign wars is helping them much at all. I think we're making it worse. That's why I'm in opposition to big power policy.