Hanoi agrees with Ron Paul

Ron Paul has routinely used the US experience in Vietnam as an example of how ending intervention in a sovereign nation's affairs led to far better results than the intervention itself.

As Paul contends, withdraw from Vietnam while bruising to the national ego, led ultimately to a unified country that today is a trading partner and an attractive potential economy for private investors. Our leaving did not lead to the "falling domino" theory that had communism overtaking the world as some warned.

Occasionally critics will point to the killing fields of Cambodia following the US withdraw suggesting that our leaving was the direct cause and implying therefore that we should not have left.

Of course if we had stayed there would be far more than 60,000 dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese. Most likely, were US forces still in Vietnam, it would remain a divided country which at best might eventually have come to a cease fire like North and South Korea.

Most Recently George Bush has trotted out the Vietnam example to defend our continued presence in Iraq. We can't leave Iraq says Bush because Iraq will become a modern day Killing Field.

As the Financial Times reports, Hanoi has struck back at Bush and apparently supports Ron Paul's assessment of the historical facts and the lessons to be learned from the Vietnam experience.

Hanoi is dismayed by President George W. Bush’s invocation of the
ignominious US withdrawal from Vietnam to explain the need to maintain
US forces in Iraq.

Mr Bush suggested that Washington’s withdrawal from Vietnam
precipitated a bloodbath in south-east Asia – including the Cambodian
Khmer Rouge genocide – an assertion many Vietnamese see as a gross
oversimplification of the region’s complex and tragic history, and
Washington’s own role in it...

Vietnam was “an unjustified and a wrong war in the first place so to
start analysing things only from the withdrawal of US troops is really
puzzling”, she said. “The root of the problem is not the withdrawal,
it’s the very fact of starting up the war in the first place.”

As I follow the debates, and consider Dr. Paul's foreign policy observations, I am convinced yet further that he is without a doubt either the only critical thinker in the field or perhaps the only candidate with a shred of intellectually honesty.

George Bush made hollow promises of a "humble foreign policy" during the 2000 presidential election. Might I suggest we need a foreign policy that is both humble and wise?