Blunders to prove costly

[unhappycamper]

Blunders to prove costly
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Michael DeGolyer


President GeorgeWBush recently compared retreat in Iraq with the US withdrawal from Vietnam. That defeat put Hong Kong in difficulty when refugees began pouring onto our shores.

Eventually the Vietnamese boat people became the source of a billion- dollar, never-paid bill for associated costs. And it brought about the forcible return from our refugee camps of those who had nowhere to go back to Vietnam only 10 years ago.

We felt effects of America's last defeat for more than 20 years. Will we escape pain this time because we are further away?

Don't bet on it. More likely than feeling it less, we will feel it more.

When South Vietnam "fell" to the communists in 1975, China was in the last throes of the Cultural Revolution. But by the time the Vietnamese refugees became a flood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mainland had begun to open up and Hong Kong commenced its generation-long rise to becoming a global business center on the back of a rising China.

Indeed, that billion-dollar refugee bill paled in comparison to the beneficial effects the ending of the war brought.


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