Geez, would you get your mind out of the gutter?
Guys, guys…gals, why bother responding to Stone, the Canadian uberman, when we all know that he’s simply parroting (as always) the latest talking points of the rightards. I mean, looke here and see if what he’s saying sounds familiar:
– highlights mine.
Nothing to see here, folks…move along please.
Nice to see some reporters (and one from Faux News no less!) call Sa…erm, Snow’s bullshit for what it is. Not to mention Pelosi’s shot right through the Bushit.
Just for Sam “The Man” Stone and his dogmatic brother in arms, Debaser – well, really, as members of the 101rst Keyboard Brigade.:
The War on Terror’s Grand Snafu
– highlights mine
Reality is a bitch, ain’t she, SamDeba? As is talking out your stereo assholes…
Those of you demanding an instant withdrawal need to at least consider whether this is going to be seen as a defeat for America in Southeast Asia. If so, are you willing to accept that? Do you understand what that will mean? It’s going to mean increased pressure on the U.S. from all quarters. A withdrawal from Vietnam is going to be seen around the world as a sign of major weakness, and every communist on the planet is going to do a little happy dance. The Viet Cong is going to flood back into South Vietnam. Russia and China will have a free hand to meddle in Vietnam. The Cambodians may wind up at war with someone.
Yeah, that’s actually pretty much the point. Losing the Vietnam war led to shitty outcomes for pretty much everyone except self-righteous Boomers.
Name some. In my view, it has in the long run made no difference at all.
Tell that to the people of South Vietnam. Tell that to the Vietnamese boat people after the war - two million South Vietnamese citizens fleeing the Communists, of which up to 1 million died. Tell that to the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who were executed when the North gained control over the south.
And of course, Pol Pot in Cambodia was greatly aided by the North Vietnam government and military which fought against the Cambodian government in the early 1970’s, paving the way for the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, and the subsequent horrific genocide of the middle class. Would the killing fields still have happened had South Vietnam won the war earlier?
After the U.S. withdrew, the Pathet Lao also overthrew the government of Laos, with the help of the North Vietnamese army, establishing yet another Communist country in the region.
To this day, Vietnam and Laos have remained economic basket cases, two of the poorest nations in Asia.
And China did, in fact, meddle in Vietnam. In fact, China and Vietnam went to war with each other in the late 1970’s, leading to hundreds of thousands of more deaths.
Other effects of the loss in Vietnam are harder to blame precisely on the war, but one wonders if the Russians didn’t see the American failure and loss of will to continue the fight as a signal that they would be unopposed if they invaded Afghanistan. The period immediately following the withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam saw increased adventurism from Communist countries throughout the world. Cuba stepped up its interventions in South America and elsewhere. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and meddled aggressively elsewhere.
And the loss in Vietnam may have contributed to the ‘malaise’ at home in the U.S and the subsequent stagflation that came of it.
I’d call all of that a pretty negative result of losing the war. Of course, since we can’t see the alternate history you can posit all kinds of alternate scenarios had the war continued or never been fought in the first place, but we have no way of knowing that.
:rolleyes: A failed occupation of a foreign country for ideological reasons is going to encourage another attempt to occupy a country for ideological reasons ? There’s a reason Afghanistan is sometimes called the Soviet’s Vietnam. If anything it was a warning.
:rolleyes: yourself. Vietnam was not a ‘failed occupation’. It was an attempt by the U.S. to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam by North Vietnam. The U.S. never intended to occupy a damned thing, and were never an occupying power in that country.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, on the other hand, was an attempt by the Soviets to occupy and annex that country. The only reason it’s called the ‘Soviet’s Vietnam’ was that it shared one single characteristic with the Vietnam war - in both cases, the superpowers ‘lost’. That’s about all they have in common.
Afghanistan was the war on terror because terrorists trained and were based there. We lost interest in it because there was nothing we wanted once we drove out the “terrorists”. The Taliban has been permitted to grow and impact the country again.
If you lived in Iraq it would be a war against the occupiers. When a country invades your turf ,you fight very hard. They wont quit because they have no place to go. It is their home.
If you lived in Iran would you see it as a war on terror next door.?
How about Saudi Arabia.? That is where the 911 terrorists came from and were funded. Do they see it as a war on terror.?
Defining it as a war on terror requires a very narrow self serving definition to justify your deeds. It is not even a war.