[Vision2020] Mass Slaughter in Vietnam?

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Some more really wild claims from down the hill, this time about Vietnam.  Where is the evidence for mass slaughter in Vietnam after we left?  Yes, many were sent to reeducation camps, and many of those fleeing lost their lives to pirates in the South China Sea.

More people are being killed, maimed, and born malformed by leftover munitions and Agent Orange than ever lost their lives at the hands of the Communist regime.  I would also hazard to guess that we killed more Vietnamese (at least one million) than the Viet Cong ever would have killed if we had not intervened.

Before we invaded Cambodia, the country was stable and ruled by Prince Sihanouk, who, along with his wife, are now King and Queen of Cambodia.  (When I was there in 2002, their pictures were everywhere.) Our invasion, plus support for right-wing thugs, alienated the people and forced them right into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. 

The Killing Fields are just as much our responsibility as theirs.  The great irony of course is that Communist Vietnamese troops defeated the Khmer Rouge, and the UN had one of greatest successes in making elections possible there.

The Johns Hopkins report on Iraqi causalities, which looked at every single death certificate (90 percent of households surveyed produced one), showed that a majority of deaths occurred by coalition air strikes.  This survey was done before the upsurge in sectarian killings, mainly in Baghdad.  Taking the low end of their estimates at 400,000 dead, it would take Shias and Sunnis a very long time to top Bush's slaughter.

Yours for accurate history,

Nick Gier