Submitted by Hayward Maberley, Feb 7, 2007 06:44

I have started reading Mark Moyar's "Triumph Forsaken The Viet Nam War 1954-1965." It is well written and researched using a wide range of resources. He has some cogent arguments to make, his main point being that Ngo Din Diem should have been left in power. That the coup leading to his and his brother Nhu's murder was a tipping point in the farrago that was to engulf Indo China. When I first pick up a book I scan the chapter headings then proceed to the index and the bibliography. There is mention of the election set up by Diem to oust Bao Dai as emperor and install Diem as President but no remarks on how fraudulent it was. That in the Saigon area he received more votes than there were enrolled voters, that people who tried to vote for Bao Dai wer beaten up. Also missing is the very plain fact that his brother Ngo Dinh Nu was the man running the opium trade in Viet Nam. Some of the funds generated by this drug trade were used to support the Can Lao movement. Opium and later the heroin produced from it was flown into Saigon from Laos and Cambodia in SVN Air Force transport under the command of Nguyen Cao Ky. This and much more has been covered in Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. The drug trade plus the black market in luxury goods and gold is not mentioned at all. Neither are the ghost soldiers on payrolls for the bbosting of commanding officers bank accounts. It will be interesting how the second volume of this history reads. This Viet Nam revanchism, I prefer the term to revisionism, is akin to the statement on how the USA "lost China" You did not lose China because it was not yours to own and the same may be said for Viet Nam. Australia unfortunately was also tricked into the same line of thinking. Our then Prime Minister, the mendacious Menzies had to cajole the SVN government into issuing an invitation to join the party! That is inspite of Diem not wanting to have any more foreign interlopers, as it appears from Moyar's book, he was having a lot of trouble with you Americans. As Georg Friederic Hegel said "All that we learn from history is that we do not learn from history" vide Iraq.

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