That’s easy enough. The Bush Administration from the beginning was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq; and there was no exit strategy because they have no intention of exiting for the foreseeable future. It was supposed to be the indefinite puppet/oil reserve/military outpost of the US, and a springboard for further conquests.
It was a combination of two things. First, he had an exit strategy of sorts. We’d go in, we’d be welcomed as liberators, Saddam’s regime would be overthrown, we’d help them set up democratic institutions, and then we’d leave.
There wasn’t much of an actual plan for administering the country once Saddam was overthrown because the White House wouldn’t let it happen. Before the invasion, the Defense Department had actually created a working group to draw up plans for administration once Saddam was gone, but the White House ordered it stopped. They were afraid its existence would leak out and people would believe we were planning to go to war with Iraq. Since the White House’s official position at the time was that we just wanted Hussein to cooperate with the inspectors and turn over WMDs, the White House was afraid it would send a contradictory message.
The Vietnam War taught America that there are limits in the world. We can’t do anything and everything we choose to do just by choosing to do it. The Vietnam War taught us it is possible for us to fail and we benefited from the realism of that lesson.
We got a bunch of good movies out of the deal.
Plus Rambo. We got Rambo.
It’s hard to know what the Bush administration really believed. It said it expected that the Iraq War would be a cakewalk and we’d have no problems in the aftermath, but we can’t know if they really believed that was true or were just saying they believed it for public consumption. Maybe the Bush Administration expected the Iraq War was going to be an ongoing struggle and they thought they’d somehow benefit from that. But obviously they didn’t want to say beforehand that they expected we’d were walking into a prolonged war so they put out the “greeted with flowers” story to get us moving in the direction they wanted.
There was also the libertarian faction that believed that the magic free market would solve everything, and went out of their way to prevent Iraq from being governed. They slashed Iraq’s ability to regulate commerce & industry, slashed taxes, shut down or privatized industries run by the government (which helped massively increase unemployment), and forbade the puppet government from actually do anything to reconstruct the country. All the sorts of things the libertarians are always pushing for over here, but can’t get because they aren’t allowed to do it at gunpoint like they were in Iraq. Companies were supposed to rush into the new free market paradise they had created and turn it into a massively prosperous capitalistic utopia. The people who suffered and died in the process were of course expendable.
You’re entitled to your wrong opinions, but not to your wrong facts. U.S. intervention cost at least a million lives (more if blamed for Cambodia as many do); it didn’t save them. I’d provide cites but we know such are of no interest to you.
The Golden Triangle is the intersection of Thailand, Laos and Burma (not Vietnam which has borders with neither Thailand nor Burma).
I’ve little relevant expertise to answer your question (though I once slept with a girl who claimed to have slept with Khun Sa) … but my impressions are:
[ul][li] The world’s heroin center has shifted from the (once Khun Sa-controlled) Triangle to post-911 Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.[/li][li] Thailand has become less of a source for drugs than a destination.[/li][li] Thailand’s major illegal drug these days is methamphetamine, not heroin. It comes from Burma but doesn’t particularly need the mountains near the “Triangle.”[/li][li] Thai government has focused much energy on its War on Drugs. Several years ago I heard that the retail price of heroin had skyrocketed and was as (or more?) expensive than in U.S.[/li][/ul]
But if you take a trekking tour near Chiang Mai, I think there’s a pretty fair chance you’ll still be offered a pipe of opium. 
Vietnam was united despite the efforts of outside powers.
“Cost a million lives”: can you provide examples of how that many, or even close to that many, deaths were the direct result of US intervention, as opposed to North Vietnamese aggression? Oh, yes, you’re not gonna cite.
And of course, in order to make your point, you needed to ignore mine, which was that our presence in South Vietnam helped to at least postpone the mass slaughter that finally ensued when the North Vietnamese took over (as well as the subsequent genocide in Cambodia).
Just as Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, etc. were united in 1939-1940.
And of course Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Norway were recently freed colonial holdings, with a common culture and language who had been separated byntge superpowers.:rolleyes:
Vietnam was united up until 1954 and it’s been united since 1975. I don’t see how keeping Vietnam split into two countries for a period of twenty years was a cause worth two million people dying.
We’d have been better off staying out of it and letting the country reunite on schedule back in 1956. We could have let all the people in the south who wanted to leave come to America back then. They weren’t going to be killed by the communists if they were living in California.
And the United States didn’t stop the mass slaughter in Cambodia. It was Vietnam that invaded and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power.
What an excellent point because Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries had all been one country going back centuries only to be split into two separate countries when they kicked out their colonial rulers with the understanding that this would only be a temporary division with elections to be held in two years to unite the country. Only those elections were never held two years later because the leader in the south refused to allow them to take place because it was well known that the leader in the north would win by a landslide. So much so that the American president at the time said the ruler in the north would win 80% of the votes.
Oh wait, no, none of that is remotely true; you’re making a rather poor attempt to godwinize the thread.
That’s remarkably easy to provide:
You might want to climb down off that high horse of yours acting as if the US did diddly squat to prevent the Cambodian Genocide, considering that the US both backed the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia in the UN, cite
but also provided clandestine military aid to them, cite (warning, pdf)
Sure, the Vietnamese finally threw out the imperialists and freed their country.
Vietnam wasn’t free before and it isn’t free now. It’s just replaced one dictatorship with another.
I think he’s asking how many of those people would have died in the war anyway without us getting involved.
It’s a dictatorship - who knew.
The people have thrown out the imperialists. If the people want further change, they’ve shown they seem to know how, which may explain the free market reforms and private property initiatives.
Talking of freedom, check out #1 and #117:
http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate
What private property initiatives? Vietnamese dont own the land their sitting on, just some right to use it. But at any time the local or state authorities can revoke this right. Sure they have tried to create a market economy, improved some lives as you can find a few Bentleys around HCMC. If you follow the Bentley to their home, the other car they drive as a red license plate.