| To: TimF who wrote (148590) | 10/22/2004 7:37:17 PM | | From: GST | | | | | <There used to be a country called South Vietnam> It does not strike you as odd to refer to half a country as if there was no other half. Vietnamese wanted their country to be made whole again -- not an unreasonable ambition and something they achieved by driving us out of their country. |
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| To: cnyndwllr who wrote (148680) | 10/22/2004 7:37:43 PM | | From: Bruce L | | | | My Brother:
You are the consummate "armchair theorist", but what support do you have for the many allegations contained in this statement?
<<No matter how you turn it, it appears that the "enemy" in Vietnam was destined to win and our "protectorate South Vietnamese government" was destined to fall under the weight of too little popular support and too little commitment. >>
The South Vietnamese continued for more than 2 years after we left in April 1973. During that time, the South was calm, the South Vietnamese seemingly happy with their government and their lives. Polls at the time strongly indicated that they did not want to fall under the control of the Spartan North.
So where is your evidence?
Bruce |
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| To: TimF who wrote (148588) | 10/22/2004 7:41:07 PM | | From: GST | | | | <Should the children of wealthy families be able to evade serving in the military
Yes, as should the children of non-wealthy families, and in both cases they can evade serving in the military.>
Wealthy people do not need the crappy pay of a military job -- that "privilege" is given to people with few other financial options. Cheney dodged military service, but he does not mind watching your children die in military service in a war of his own making. We have a backdoor draft -- only the financially less well-off need apply. |
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| To: TimF who wrote (148589) | 10/22/2004 7:45:34 PM | | From: GST | | | | | We are only as alone as we chose to be in Iraq. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Albania and Eritrea -- wow. When you decide to something stupid, don't complain when others don't feel like joining in. You want to exercise leadership -- you want others to follow -- then do something intelligent. |
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| To: dumbmoney who wrote (148758) | 10/22/2004 8:41:46 PM | | From: Michael Watkins | | | | Absolutely - while Reagan always believed in dealing from a position of strength, in later years he became more accommodating, to the objection of the hardline wing. Perhaps he got tired of taking advice from the Central American-obsessed CIA Director Casey, not to mention other hard line hawks Perle, Kirkpatrick, and others.
Years later, Gorbachev told Maggie Thatcher that the push for change originated from within the Soviet Union itself:
The first impulses for reform were in the Soviet Union itself, in our society which could no longer tolerate the lack of freedom.... In the eyes of the people, especially the educated, the totalitarian system had run its course morally and politically. People were waiting for reform. Russia was pregnant. So the moment was mature to give possibility to the people. And we could only do it from above because initiative from below would have meant an explosion of discontent. This was the decisive factor, not SDI.
"Neocon" hardliners also forget to credit men like Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia (excellent beer), and Walensa in Poland: these were men leading endogenous movements and their sense of timing undoubtedly played a huge role in how events transpired.
Sure we need the times in context with the external pressures, including those sponsored by the US, but to me it seems only common sense that, and I think this is very important in the current context -- lasting change has to come from the people themselves. It can not be driven from the outside.
This is, in my opinion, a big lesson which the current administration has completely failed to appreciate. You can't force feed western democracy on a culture which, left to its own design, would not emulate ours. At least not in this decade.
This failure of the administration is not a "stumble", as some fervent Bush admininistration supporters would like to believe -- its an enormous blunder with long-reaching implications.
There is no magic fix that "Bush II" can apply like a bandaid in a second term. Its time to hand over the reigns, and the problems, to a different crew and give them the mandate and support to work through the process of first halting more damage, and then on to reversing the colossal mistakes made. |
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| To: Bruce L who wrote (148761) | 10/22/2004 8:49:57 PM | | From: cnyndwllr | | | | Bruce, re: You are the consummate "armchair theorist", but what support do you have for the many allegations contained in this statement?
<<No matter how you turn it, it appears that the "enemy" in Vietnam was destined to win and our "protectorate South Vietnamese government" was destined to fall under the weight of too little popular support and too little commitment. >>
.....So where is your evidence?
I guess I'll have to rely in part upon the poster who wrote:
From Bruce L:
So the South Vietnamese Army got used to the Americans 'holding their hands. This was a big part of their problem.
As to why the South Vietnamese Army in 1974 -1975 could not find "the courage or the means" to put up an effective defense against the NVA, the simple answer (AGAIN) is that the NVA were better fighters than those from the South; just as the Germans were better fighters than the French.
Your observation that the NVA were numerically inferior to the South Vietnamese is just FLAT WRONG. When the NVA broke through at Pleiku, they were lead by a regiment of HEAVY Tanks - supplied by the USSR. The SVA had nothing to match them.
But even if the SVA was superior in numbers and equipment to the NVA, what would this prove? The French and British in 1940 were superior in every category of armament with the sole exception of fighters.
MILITARY SUPERIORITY DOES NOT EQUATE TO MORAL SUPERIORITY IMO.
Message 20675681
That and the FACT that even with hundreds of billions of dollars of military aid, all the training we could offer, more than 50,000 American lives lost in the effort and every advantage that a country could reasonable hope for in terms of military support, the S. Vietnamese could not offer much of a fight. It's hard to get around that "armchair quarterback" truth. Ed |
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| To: michael97123 who wrote (148728) | 10/22/2004 10:37:50 PM | | From: stockman_scott | | | | This is an article from the American Conservative Magazine!!!
amconmag.com
Kerry’s the One
By Scott McConnell
There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.
Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.
I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.
But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.
If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.
November 8, 2004 issue |
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