To take on the Vietnam points: I recommend you read the Pentagon papers (hardly a lefty account) - the distinct sensation you get was that the war was unwinnabl

To take on the Vietnam points: I recommend you read the Pentagon papers (hardly a lefty account) - the distinct sensation you get was that the war was unwinnable, for the simple reason that they did not have the people on their side. The South was not a cute democracy, it was a brutal, corrupt dictatorship (with whom the US themselves had huge issues). Remember those monks setting themselves on fire? They were protesting the Southern dictatorship - not Ho Chi Minh. It seems to me the "it would have been better if ..." is a bit moot as it was probably never going to happen. It is also based on an analogy which strikes me as a little simplistic (outcomes for Western backed 3rd World countries have been highly variable, especially in the absence of a communist threat). One thing that is for sure: Given the outcome, it would have been much better for everyone had the country to have been left to it's own devices from the outset, not starting their post-colonial era with the bitterness and destruction of decades of war. Finally, Vietnam was aligned with the USSR, not China, with whom they were at war in the late 70's.