I’m not sure that’s totally accurate
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Cite?
Strawman.
This assumes our ability to fix it. The track record of our occupation is that our efforts to ‘fix’ things have only made them worse.
If you’re a bull in a china shop, just because you can stay, doesn’t mean you can fix the damage you’ve caused. You may just wind up breaking more china.
OK, any Americans that a normal person would have ever heard of, aside from the wingnut right’s efforts to trumpet their message.
Ward Churchill is effectively one of yours, I’m afraid. He and his views are known outside a small circle of friends only due to the publicity afforded him by the denizens of Greater Wingnuttia.
And what importance does Ward Churchill have in this country? Is he running for office? Is he an advisor to any politicians? Is he invited to speak at political gatherings? How is Ward Churchill representative of anyone when nobody else cares what he says?
Kay.
If I understand history correctly, we were present in South Vietnam at the request of the South Vietnamese.
It’s possible I’m wrong, of course.
And you avoided the issue of Korea completely, which has a lot in common with Vietnam on the surface.
Also, just because I will keep saying this to you, you are wrong about Iraq. Sadly, I am also sure that the government will continue to screw this up until we are pulled out and the country completely collapses into tribal warlordism.
Endorsing Rudy Guiliani for President is pretty much the definition of being on the left.
We we propping up a corrupt dictatorship; there’s no way that the “South Vietnamese” could have requested anything.
I know almost nothing about the Korean War, so I’m not going to comment.
And in what way am I wrong ? And in what way could they have NOT screwed up, besides not invading in the first place ?
Vietnam had been one country. Most Vietnamese were opposed to being a French colony and various groups were resisting the French. The Communists were popular because they were one of the biggest resistance groups.
The Geneva Accords which recognized Vietnam as an independent country in 1954 set up two temporary divisions that were supposed to be rejoined after a 1956 national election. The communists groups were strongest in the more populous northern half of the country and took control there. The republicans and the monarchists were stronger in the southern half of the country.
But as stated above, there was a national election scheduled for 1956. The communists knew they would easily win the election - virtually everyone in the more populous north was a communist supporter and there was also a significant number of communist supporters still in the south. I’m not going to claim that the communists were pure-hearted but in this particular case they had every reason to support a fair election.
But the various groups opposed to the communists did not and the United States was one of these opposing groups. We could count the same numbers that the communists did and we knew that they would win the election. So in October 1955 a referendum was held in the southern half of the country. While the republicans probably would have won anyway, there is overwhelming evidence that they rigged the election results. The result was that the southern half of Vietnam was declared to be an independent country with a republican government. Both the communists and the monarchists refused to recognize the legitimacy of the referendum.
The United States however decided to recognize the referendum as legitimate and recognized the Republic of Vietnam as an independent nation. To the communists in the north, the creation of the Republic of Vietnam was an illegitimate secession akin to the Confederate States of America and the American response was equivalent to if the British had recognized Confederate independence.
FinnAgain, I was responding to this:
Notice that he didn’t say one person had been doing this. He said The Left had been doing it.
I wasn’t disputing that there are individuals like Ward Churchill in this country who are saying foolish things. But I’m saying that The Left has not embraced these people and these people do not represent The Left.
The Right cannot make the same claim. People like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Anne Coulter have said foolish things but that has not stopped The Right from embracing these people as their own.
And the idea that Pat Robertson is part of The Left? That’s one of the most foolish things I’ve ever read on this board.
Re: Vietnam:
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/index4.html
March 1973, the US leaves Vietnam
August 1974, Nixon resigns
January 1975, the North takes Phuoc Long and the US does…Nothing.
I do not get your Strawman quip - are you saying that we do NOT want to pull the troops from Iraq? I certainly would support any situation that would bring the troops home and end our game of foreign entanglements.
Finally, the Bull in the china shop is also keeping a pack of dogs at bay. When the bull leaves, the shop might just take MORE damage than the bull is causing. Can we now move on past this horribly tortured analogy?
And you responded by saying only religious conservatives had acted in such a manner. That explicitly doesn’t allow anybody but religious conservatives. Your rhetoric got away from you, right?
Nobody represents “The Left” or “The Right” or “the left” or “the right”, largely because that’d be a fallacy of division or composition, depending on which direction you were taking things.
Moreover, as either generalization is a linguistic fiction, it’s a bit hard for anybody to speak for it. To the extent that the Republican or Democratic parties have spokescritters, I suppose, you can say that someone is speaking for them. But that’s still only the official party platform, and I’d wager that not all Dems (politicians or party voters) take Pelosi’s opinions as gospel, right?
“The Right?” All of the people who you’d classify or who’d self-identify as being to the right of center? Us-Them politics is a bit silly, don’t you think?
Luckily I didn’t say it.
It’s not all about you Finn. Some of my responses are directed towards what other people in this thread are saying.
Kay.
Finn, could you elucidate a little more? Posting quotes with a single three letter comment makes it difficult for me to know what you’re trying to say. Does “Kay” mean “Okay, now I understand the point you were trying to make and I’m glad we were able to clear up this confusion” or does it mean “I’m posting the word kay as a sardonic comment on the line of bullshit I think you’re trying to pass on us”?
No, there is no way we could have. There is not even any way we could have established South Vietnam as a stable independent non-Communist state like South Korea.
We could have, maybe, if Bush had followed the State Department’s “Plan A” instead of the Pentagon’s “Plan B.” Or if he had left General Garner in charge post-invasion instead of replacing him with Paul Bremer. Once that was done, the war was irretrievably lost. But either way, domestic public opposition to the war as such (feeble as it was at the time) would have had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
For once, Der Trihs is right.
There is too much empirical evidence to contradict any hope of victory in Iraq. Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco Thomas Ricks asserts that the war was an incompetent, tactical blunder with a flawed plan from the beginning. It was a war based on bad intelligence and false premises. Public opinion is not the reason America failed in Iraq. It is Bushe’s failure fueled by serious errors within the larger bureaucratic system of government and the weak, ineffectual media.
Good one!
Of course they will. And already have. But maybe they won’t be able to anymore soon. It’s possible that, as the pendulum of power and corporate influence swings the other way we could see the Democrats whip out a stab in the back myth of their own. “We could’ve pacified Iraq and won the War on Terror, but Bush screwed it up so bad and the conservatives did everything in their power to make sure we couldn’t succeed.” Talk about karma.
Little Nemo did a good job of going over the runup to our invasion of southern Vietnam. Pretty basic facts, really.
Everyone needs to be more specific when referencing “the left” or “the right.” Do you mean the party? Party leaders (the head) or the body? The great mass of average voters? Some platonic ideal?
Since this is a pretty dull topic otherwise, going over concepts decades old, I give you Charlie Madison: