<waiting patiently for Godwin’s Law to once again be illustrated by Der Trihs>
< unsurprised to see an attempt to use Godwin’s Law to silence others >
OK, I didn’t understand that you were using that quote as evidence. I mean, she’s saying that other people say that the U.S. aid cutoff caused the fall of Saigon, without even naming who. She’s not claiming it as her own assertion, at least in that quote.
The book in the footnote is published by Arlington House, which was Regnery before there was Regnery. It’s called Betrayal in Vietnam. Real scholarly.
Anyhow, the legislation cutting off future aid wasn’t passed until December 1974. According to Wikipedia, the text of the legislation read “that after June 30, 1976, no military assistance shall be furnished to South Vietnam unless authorized under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 or the Foreign Military Sales Act.”
Call me dense, but I don’t grasp how a cutoff in aid that didn’t take place until long after the fall of Saigon could have caused the fall of Saigon.
I completely agree with that.
No, I’m not arguing that. I’m just arguing that once we’re out of there, the damage that we’re doing will cease. And we’ve done plenty, and opened the floodgates of much more.
Wonderful? No. But it was functioning. People had jobs, went to school, had water and electricity, walked the streets in safety, lived their lives, raised children. If you didn’t speak out against Saddam, you weren’t likely to have bad shit happen to you.
Now you can get shot for being a Sunni or a Shi’ite. If you’re a Sunni and married a Shi’ite, or vice versa, five years ago when nobody thought twice about doing so, there are people who will make you, at gunpoint, abandon your spouse. Your destiny is in the hands of armed militias - used to be different ones on different days, but it appears that the Shi’ites have pretty much won the Battle of Baghdad.
OK, not a china shop. A bull in the fucking Pottery Barn. Ain’t it great how much broken crockery we own? More of it all the time. We don’t know how to fix it, but we own it.
I’m just wondering if the disaster we are in will be enough to make us swear off military intervention…it DOESN’T WORK! I’m sick of it-after Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq-isn’t it enough! Of course, the fall of Musharraf (Pakistan) will trap us in Afghanistan-wonder what future historians will make of the whole sorry mess. :smack:
Sometimes it does. When Clinton promised the Albanian Kosovar refugees, “You will go home, safe and free,” he applied military force and made it stick, without the result backfiring on the U.S. in any way. (It did backfire in that there were some counteratrocities and ethnic cleansing by Albanians against Serbians, for a short while on a limited scale, but any disinterested third party would say even that was preferable to the grisly alternative.)
Military intervention is like major surgery: Sometimes it helps, but in view of the cost and damage, it should be done only as a last resort, after all alternative treatments have been ruled out or exhausted, after you’ve established that not treating the condition at all is not a viable option, and always make sure you get a second opinion.
That was not done in Iraq.
<not surprised to see Der Trihs act like he’s oppressed>
To answer the question about Robertson
So now, since God his withdrawn His protection for our sins, it’s up to Rudy instead.
We’re fucked,
You are correct but its worth pointing out though that while not a complete cut-off, the level of aid actually provided to the South Vietnamese was substantially reduced in 1974, by around a third if memory serves me rightly. This was certainly a contributing factor in reduced South Vietnamese military capacity but the prime reason for the collapse was nothing more then the ARVN was poorly led and motivated and no level of military aid was going to save it from its more cohesive enemy. SVN just wasn’t viable without direct US combat involvement.
Der Trihs and Sitnam, quit sniping at each other or go open a Pit thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Technically the war in Korea is still going on. There are a million troops there who still remain on battle alert. Patrols are sent out to watch the enemy, shots are still occasionally fired, and people are still occasionally killed. I’ll grant that things are cooler since the 1953 ceasefire but I’d hardly describe it as peace. And it’s not a model I’d like to see us emulating elsewhere - I’d hardly want to tell the troops now serving in Iraq that their great-grandchildren will someday be serving in the same places but by then the odds of them getting killed will be much lower.
So, is our fate to be endlessly involved in wars around the world? Destroying our economy, and killing our young people? Great future ahead-why can’t we just stay out of these places for a change?
That would be fine with me. Not only would I be happy to see fewer of our young people get killed, but I’d like to see us kill fewer people elsewhere around the world.
There used to be T-shirts and bumper stickers that said: “Join the army: travel to exotic, distant lands, meet exciting, unusual people, and kill them.”
It’s all too true nowadays. I might should check the Northern Sun catalog and see if they’re still selling those.