HOW THE RIGHT SAVED US FROM THE REDS: PART I

If you are young and a product of our American educational system, you may not know that there is a country in Asia called Vietnam, a place about the size of Pennsylvania, and that we once fought a war there.

This was a righties' war all the way: unrealistic, unnecessary, enormously destructive, and unsuccessful. A Democratic administration waged it, but the left turned against it early and only the right tries to defend it today.

We were in it against a Communist regime. And naturally we were fighting to keep the world's Commies from taking us over in the longer term. Today Saigon, tomorrow Seattle.

But the Commies in Vietnam were not part of a worldwide conspiracy. They were not, as my grandfather liked to believe, cat's-paws of the Russians. Their venerable leader, Ho Chi Minh, had struggled for decades to get his country free of foreign control, and he wasn't about to hand it over to the Russians. He took their help but maintained his independence from them.

The Vietnamese Communists were primarily nationalists. And they were fighting to reunite their country, which was half Red and half something else - something that we called free while making it into a horror.

Ho had lived and worked in America as a young man. He knew us. And he liked us. If we had courted him instead of opposing him, we would have fared much better. Possibly we could have not only avoided the war but influenced Vietnam toward a less rigid and more democratic system. It would at least have been worth a try, considering what we ended up with.

You will be told that we were over there on behalf of American values, notably democracy. But were we?

In the 1950s, when the French colonialists were driven out of Vietnam, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed to a negotiated settlement with the North Vietnamese such that nation-wide free elections would be held, on the basis of which Vietnam would be reunified.

But then Dulles got some disturbing intelligence. It seems that Ho Chi Minh was very popular as a patriot - he was seen as their George Washington - and that his forces were favored to win the elections. Well, we sure as heck couldn't have that! So Dulles backed out of the agreement.

Have you got the picture so far? We were fighting for democracy, except that it was the enemy that wanted democracy while we were against it.

There was an unforgettable movie about the Vietnam war called "Hearts and Minds," a phrase that President Lyndon Johnson had famously used referring to our having to win over "the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people." At the end of the film, running down the screen for minute after minute after minute, were the names of U.S. corporations that were doing business in Vietnam.

Now, I don't think that President Johnson was carrying on that war for business reasons, just as I don't think he was involved in his predecessor's assassination. While he was a pretty flawed character, there were limits to what he would do. I think he honestly believed in the rightness of his policy. But if there had not been that degree of American corporate involvement there, I wonder if it would have taken us so long to realize the dimensions of our mistake and our hypocrisy, and to disengage?

There are wars we have to fight, and there are ones we should never go into. Only right-wing thinking fails to detect the difference, and that is true whether those who engage in it are on the left or the right.

I will have more to say about LBJ and Vietnam.