The Republican Airline Pilot a paradox?

[bart]

Yeah, but Kerry knows how to knock down the rich dames.

My old man always said: "you can make more money in thirty minutes than you can in a whole lifetime."

 

[46Driver]

When we made the decision to intervene in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was not in Vietnam, nor did it enter Vietnam during the course of the war.


However, the Soviet Union had managed to extend communism to China, North Korea, etc and was spreading wider. There were certainly communist "advisors" and supplies in North Vietnam.





There is and there was never any "South Vietnam". That was an invention of foreigners, imposed by force against the will of a majority of the Vietnamese people. That is not my opinion, that is history.


The same can be said of North and South Korea.




Communism died in spite of the Vietnam war, not because of it. Communism is not a political system, it is an economic system. It is not a good economic system and that is partly why it failed. It imploded on itself, not because of any miracle that we performed, but because it was being imposed, against the will of the people, by a corrupt and totalitarian political system.


Communism is the desired end state of Marx's economic system and true communism could not be implemented until the entire globe had rid itself of capitalism. As long as the West remained outside the sphere of Lenin, then communism could not succeed.




It will be hard to convince me that the policy of the United States should follow in the footsteps of the British Colonial Empire. Not in Iraq or in any other part of the world. For my money, the British Empire ranks among the greatest rapists known to modern man. I am happy that the sun has finally set on the British Empire, and I do not want my country the United States of America to emulate any of those policies, whether espoused by Churchill or any other Briton.

They are indeed responsible for most of the mess that we call the Middle East and the best thing we can do, as far as I am concerned, is to forget their legacy of imperial hegemony and adopt a policy of our own making that is devoid of that heritage.




Britain is also responsible for the Magna Carte as well as having counted among its offspring the successful nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the United States. Out of all the global empires of the last 2000 years, I believe the British left the greatest legacy.





I do hope that I won't see any more militaristic adventures. That almost sounds like you are advocating a war against Islam. I advise caution. However, I agree that religious fundamentalism, is a threat of monumental porportions. That holds true of Christian fundamentalism as well as Islamic fundamentalism. Let us not forget the Crusades of the Spanish Inquisition.


Fundamentalist Islam already considers itself at war with the West in general and the US & Israel in particular - there is no middle ground.






We would have the world's leading nations all on our side and we would be seen as doing something in the tradition of our country's willingness to help the oppressed


Are you saying the people in Iraq were not oppressed??????





Instead, we have alienated our friends, damaged our credibility, and further incensed our enemies. Bad policy and pi$$ poor execution.


Follow the money. France, Germany, and Russia all benefited heavily from Saddam - and many were paid off by him to insure their support. Sometimes you have to do the right thing even if it is unpopular.

 

[Snakum]

Noone has ever been able to defeat or wipe out any "religion"

Oh yes they have ...

A couple thousand years ago Buddhism was the religion of the area now known as India, but was completely wiped out by invading Moslems. It continued only in very small, isolated pockets, but has been, for all practical purposes, eradicated in the land of it's birth, and is only now making a comeback as the Harijan convert from Hinduism to escape limitations of the Caste system.

Minh

 

[surplus1]

Oh yes they have ...

A couple thousand years ago Buddhism was the religion of the area now known as India, but was completely wiped out by invading Moslems. It continued only in very small, isolated pockets, but has been, for all practical purposes, eradicated in the land of it's birth, and is only now making a comeback as the Harijan convert from Hinduism to escape limitations of the Caste system.

Minh

My history book tells me that while it is true that the Muslims attempted to wipe out Buddhism in India circa 1193, by that time Buddhism had spread all over the far east, to China, Nepal, Tibet, Japan, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. Therefore, the Muslim invasion of India did not even come close to eradicating Buddhism as a religion.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Try again.

 

[Snakum]

In India, Dippy ... I said 'In India' ...

"What a maroon!"

Minh

 

[Timebuilder]

With all due respect, that flies in the face of history. When we made the decision to intervene in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was not in Vietnam, nor did it enter Vietnam during the course of the war.

I think that what was meant was that communism was taking a foothold in Vietnam, and without the benefit of hindsight that we now enjoy, many in the US thought it was necessary to try and contain that spread. In those days, images of Joe Stalin and Mao were frightening indeed, and one needed to look back less than two decades to remember the horrors of WWII, making the spread of communism frightening in a very similar way.

We did not agree with that treaty and we intervened to support an illegal government in "South Vietnam" and devide the country into two. The Vietnamese chose to resist and I think they were right to do so.

Actually, the South Vietnamese, however they came to be known in that manner, asserted that this election had been engineered by the nationalists to obtain the desired result, which is easy to do in an undelevoped coutry. We provided advisors to the South, which snowballed in short order into fightiing the nationalists, then taking on the name "Viet Cong". I think it is a little unrealistic to say "The Vietnamese chose to resist" as if to say that the entire penninsula was acting against an invading US army. In fact, we were acting in support of those who wanted to remain free of a communist dictatorship that was quickly developing in Hanoi under Chinese communist influence. The Gulf of Tonkin fiasco was seen by the administration as a necessary tool. I don't agree with that, personally. Then again, I too have the benefit of hindsight.

Our military intervention accomplished nothing other than the killing of thousands of American youth, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, the division of our own country and the loss of great treasure. It was wrong then and it remains wrong today.

What we were wrong about was our underestimation of the communist influence, and the determination of the Chinese to extend communism into Vietnam along the Ho Chi Mihn Trail. In a conflict where everyone can look alike, where only the NVA regulars had consistent uniforms, we needed to do a better job in controlling ingress to the South. We didn't. Instead, we took the same hill several times, and sought to see body counts as an indiction of "winning" when we didn't have the political will to really win. What is wrong is the sacrifices we made in our blood without being willing to get the job done.

While our goals were indeed laudable, we needed to make a realistic assessment of the situation and withdraw if we were unwilling to win. That is perhaps our greatest mistake.

Brother has fought against brother and countries have been divided for eons. This is not a reason to think that it is never advised to engage in these conflicts. In fact, one can say that our resistance (if you will) against the British crown was similar to the struggle of free Vietnamese against the growth of communism and its influence. We cannot look at such struggles as static entities without considering the reasons an motivations of those invovled in the conflict. If the Viet Cong meant to impose a communist dictatorship on free people in the South, then they cannot also be "freedom fighters" seeking to expel an "invading" US force. Similarly, if Iraqi insurgents seek to drive out the US and return a Bathist regime of terror and torture, they cannot be described as freedom fighting nationalists, either.

You have to look at the big picture. Freedom is a worthy goal. Three decades later, we cannot say that Vietnam would be the country it is today without French and American influence. That would require the ability to see an alternate timeline. We can easily see now, from our present day perspective, that Vietnam could have been handled far better than it was.

We can, in addition, say that Iraq would still be a place of torture and mass murder were it not for the action we are taking there right now, finishing the job that we left unfinished when we took Sadaam at his word as a part of the ceasefire agreement.

We cannot say precisely what positive message of freedom that will spread throughout the arab world as a result of the toppling of Sadaam, but we can clearly see it is better than the alternative.