It would be a difficult (not impossible, but difficult) sell. Yes, Bush did screw it up and the conservatives did do everything in their power to make sure we couldn’t succeed, but you can’t base a case for stab-in-the-back disloyalty just on that, only for incompetence. Furthermore, that line of argument – "We could’ve pacified Iraq" – implicitly assumes the Dems, somewhere along the line, had some constructive suggestions about how (as opposed to whether) to conduct the invasion and occupation, which might have worked if W had not ignored them. But they never did, AFAIK. The generals did, perhaps – at the start, many insisted it would be impossible to pacify the country with fewer than 400,000 troops. (Those generals have by now all been cashiered.)
I think I’m seeing a trend among conservative blogs that might support the OP. I’ve seen many, MANY more upbeat posts in those places saying that WE ARE WINNING IN IRAQ RIGHT NOW - that things are objectively getting better, even that Al Queda in Iraq is defeated (although that might be a quote from someone being reported). Things like falling casualty reports over the past month and propaganda like this photo are making heavy rounds.
So, if BG is right, this might be the foundation for an effort like he describes. (Not necessarily deliberately, of course, but still.)
This has…nothing to do with the eventual cessation of U.S. aid to Vietnam.
You’re apparently relying rather heavily on an article by an intern. But quote what part you’re citing it for, so that I may rebut more precisely. I refuse to play guessing games about what text at a link you believe supports your position.
Few figures of any importance want us to “simply load-up every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine and br[ing] them home today.” That’s what you suggested would lead to all sorts of bad stuff, and it’s a strawman because few war opponents want to just pick up and walk away overnight.
It was a pretty simple and straightforward analogy until you got your hands on it.
Besides, that’s nothing but speculation. (Whatever you mean by your extension of the analogy, and I’m honestly not sure. It’s a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs.) We KNOW what our track record in country has been.
Why not? And “establishing South Vietnam as a stable independent non-Communist state” would be winning the war.
Because the SV regime neither had nor deserved enough popular support to make it viable. We’ve gone over this in this thread.
North Vietnam was pretty much committed to re-occupying the south. So the only way that the Republic of Vietnam could have been a stable state would be if North Vietnam was itself defeated and occupied or if the Republic became a permanent garrison state constantly fending off attacks from the north. If we had tried to occupy the north directly, the Chinese would have sent their army in like they did in Korea. And as the quick collapse of the Republic after our withdrawal showed, the south did not have what it took to hold off the north on its own. So while we had the ability to keep fighting in Vietnam indefinitely, we never really had the option of winning.
Right, I know all the history you laid out. But something very similar had happened in Korea. There was an agreement that Korea would be unified and independent, it ended up partitioned with a Communist government in the north and a non-Communist government in the South. Plans were drawn up for elections, and canceled by the South when it looked like there would be a Communist victory, and the North invaded the South looking to unite the country under Communist rule.
And fifty-seven years later we’re still there in Korea. Should we also have kept troops for five decades in Vietnam? Should we be making plans to do it in Iraq?
You’re injecting way too many facts into this. Dolchstoßlegende literally translates to “dagger stab legend.” Socialists, communists, and Jews didn’t undermine Germany’s WWI war effort. It’s propaganda. The main problem with my idea is that the Dems would have to get the media on their side, organize, and project a united story – a questionable premise. But if the GOP’s poor fortunes continue and the Dems become the big dog on the block with the establishment, who knows?
As for the OP, again, we don’t even have to ponder. It happened for Vietnam and that rhetoric continues to this day. It’s already happened for Iraq, although sometimes stated as a conditional or insinuated. I’d love to see a page which archives all the good ones over the years. It’d be a great laugh.
For example, here’s an average one by Karl Rove:
Also, here’s a fun cartoon. I still prefer the original, just because the knife is so large.
Or, it could be just ordinary light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel denial, like we’ve getting regularly for the past four years and more.
The actual event was hardly “similar” in any substantial manner.
In Korea, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. each suppressed the indigenous independence movements, (the U.S. by simply overriding their demands, the U.S.S.R. by outlawing them and demanding that those in the South be disestablished). There was never a single, unifying vote scheduled–only a vague statement originating out of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences that the Allies would hold Korea as a trusteeship until 1950. When, in November, 1947, the UN declared that a nationwide election should be held, the Soviets prevented the UN ministers from entering the North and immediately organized an altrnative government. By the Spring of 1948, the North and South had each been sufficiently “turned” by their military overlords that they both organized separate governments. One might say that the South “went first” in the sense that their separatist elections were carried out a few weeks earlier, but there was no action in which the South, fearing a Communist victory throughout the country, cancelled the unifying election.
In contrast, the Vietnamese Communists were the principle force for independence for thirty years, finally ousting the French–and including many members in the South. Ho Chi Minh actually disbanded the Communist Party for a brief time following WWII when he thought that its presence might be a barrier to recognition of an independent Vietnam, He reestablished it when he recognized that he needed its organization to carry on the fight for independence, since the French were not going to “give back” their colony.
Diem was not any sort of proponent of independence, and was imposed by the U.S. as a “local” figurehead when the decision was made to ignore the Geneva agreement for a nationwide election.
The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. carried on the decades old tradition of paternalistic meddling in Korea that had been carried on by the Chinese and the Japanese, but there was no organized independence movement and there was no case of the South abandoning an agreement in order to consolidate its power while the North sought genuine elections as happened in Vietnam.
Superfluous
We’re still there in Korea, but our soldiers haven’t done any real fighting since 1953. We’re still in Germany, since 1945.
In each case, our military was there to prevent an external threat. Since we have unleashed a multi-sided civil war in Iraq and there is no aggressor outside Iraq that seeks to invade, we will never have an external threat against which to defend and we will always be the occupying force against which all the factions may unite.
Well, don’t forget Iran. And, as I have argued before, it might be better for all concerned to let the Iranians have Iraq as a recognized sphere-of-influence. In fact, maybe we should . . . quietly encourage them. “OK, guys, we admit it, we’re beaten. Us poor infidels just can’t cut it here in the Heart of Civilization. But you’ll do better! They all love you, even the Sunni and the Kurds! Go on! They’ll greet you with flowers! And remember the letter ‘V’! ‘V’ for Victory! [snerk, heh-heh, snerk]”
Iran has not shown any interest in conquest. I see no reason to suppose they will decide to invade another country until there is a significant change in the attitudes of the people and leadership. (They have demonstrated aggression against ideological enemies, but not a desire for conquest.)
You do not think that Nixon resigning, costing the South Vietnamese their biggest proponent, had ANYTHING to do with the cessation of aid?
The timeline that I quoted was there because there are many people under the age of 50 who fail to realize that the US left military left Vietnam long before the choppers were pulling people off of the embassy.
I did quote the summary. It stated clearly that many historians (she is citing others there - a standard thing to do in academic texts) consider the cessation of US aid to the South Vietnamese government to have been a key driver in the government’s eventual fall. If you choose not to read the quote, nor respond to it, nor cite an opposing opinion, that is not me playing games. The article I linked to has a couple of footnotes, one is to this book:
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-1302-7
That is not what I meant (everyone leave overnight). I was stating that if the bull left the china shop (to use your poorly thought out analogy), it would not solve the problems.
The analogy is poor, and is a meme that keeps the discussion from working. when one uses the “bull in a china shop” analogy one is arguing that simply removing the bull will end the damage. It will NOT end the damage. The damage will quote probably get much worse. The US is not the bull, in that we are only a damage dealing instrument that does no good. Iraq is not a china shop, in that it was a wonderfull, fully functioning location prior to our arrival. The analogy over-simplifies (as analogies are wont to do), and worse it glosses over other factors.
Perhaps. But at least there is a possibility of the damage stopping someday once we are gone. It never will while we are there.
We’ve probably done some good by accident; the bull may have stepped on the occasional cockroach. That doesn’t mean that our influenece is not overwhelmingly destructive. And no one has claimed Iraq was “wonderful” before us, but it did function, and it was much better off before us. Like it or not, Saddam, the brutal, self centered, evil dictator - did a better job running Iraq than we have. His Iraq was more prosperous, more orderly, more tolerant, and had more potential than the hellhole we’ve created. Not because he was wonderful, but because we are just that bad.
If anything, the analogy is too kind to the US; since a bull isn’t there on purpose to smash things. It isn’t motivated by greed and malice. This situation is more like a bunch of thugs invading a china shop and smashing it up, beating up the owner, robbing the cash register, and raping his wife. Getting rid of the thugs is more important than worrying about a few more plates being broken in the process of subduing them. And you sure won’t stop the damage until you’ve done that.
Not if we’re able to win over the Iraqis and destroy or neutralize those groups that hate us.
:rolleyes: And maybe they’ll all spontaneously turn into puppies too. The majority of the Iraqis hate us, and considering what we’ve done to them, we could turn Iraq into a paradise and they’d still hate us. They should hate us; we’ve worked hard to deserve it. I cannot imagine what would “win them over.”
And killing the Iraqis who hate us would involving killing the majority of the population, which would then lead to killing almost all of the survivors since then they’d hate us too. If genociding the Iraqi population qualifies as winning, then yes, we can win by killing Iraqis.