Viet Nam is not Iraq?

[rfgdxm]

@Ryan_Liam

Sure they don’t :rolleyes: Heaneyland!: And the cardboard was made by 5-year olds in a Vietnamese sweatshop

What is it with some people on this board? Do you just think the US is the embodiment of evil for everything? Get over yourselves!

That URL didn’t work here. Maybe the US isn’t quite as evil as Vietnam. I’m just ashamed to be a US citizen.

[blowero]

@New Iskander

If only he used strictly the noble cause of liberation and didn’t talk about WMD threat, everything would be just. But he didn’t, so the invasion isn’t just.

Wrong as usual. For the millionth time, unilateral invasion for the purpose of regime change is strictly illegal under international law, and Bush knew that. It would absolutely in no way have been “just” to use that justification. It’s not a case of “Gee, if only he had used the ‘liberation’ justification in the first place”. He couldn’t have used it, because it’s not valid. It’s not an accident that they pushed the WMD/self-defense angle.

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

The Vietnam (not Viet Nam) War was a waste of the lives… because of all the fighting and dying. And the Vietnam War did not hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union appreciably…

As for the Cold War itself, it was not noble and America’s conduct in it was not honest. It led us to do really horrible things, like sponsoring the 1974 coup in Chile in which an elected Marxist president was overthrown by a brutal and murderous military dicatorship. And then there’s our conduct in El Salvador, Nicaragua and – too many national shames and disgraces to list. The world would be better off if the U.S. had stopped at guaranteeing the safety of Western Europe and never tried to engage the USSR in an arms race or a contest for global leadership – better off, even if the USSR still existed today.

This is exactly like saying that all we had to do to win the Cold war was to avoid joining any gruesome battle. But you think you are consistent, because you believe that Cold war shouldn’t have been fought at all. The only inconsistency is that you state US had to guarantee “the safety of Western Europe”. But why was such a guarantee necessary? Perhaps because USSR started taking over Eastern European countries by force in late 1940-s? Culminating in the attempt to blocade West Berlin and take it by force, remember? Perhaps that’s why it was necessary to declare a Cold War and take a stand, starting with West Berlin airlift? Wars are declared to mobilize people. Perhaps USSR creeping aggression was serious enough to justify a call to war back then?

“If only we did nothing, USSR would eventually implode just like it did!”

You got anything at all to support that? If we didn’t join any battles, we still would win the war?

“All we had to do was to keep Western Europe!” Well, may be India, too. Also Middle East. And parts of Africa, together with parts of South America and Micronesia… some little countries here and there… See, simple enough!

@BrainGlutton

You could make a case that the Vietnam War was a front in the global struggle against Communism. You cannot make a case (unless you’re a shameless liar like the neocons) that our invasion of Iraq was part of a global struggle against terrorism, proliferation of WMD’s, or anything else.

Yes, I can make a case, I just can’t prove it to you, because you shut your mind and call me a “shameless liar”.

Few more little things…

@BrainGlutton

Nixon, it is now known, lied when he ran on a peace platform in 1968; he never intended to end the war on any terms that could not be considered an American victory.

Except he was the only one who did. Same principle of denying reality on your part. Whatever Bush does is evil, because his motives are evil, by definition.

@BrainGlutton

The Vietnam (not Viet Nam)…

Viet Nam is how Viet people say it.

[New_Iskander]

@NattoGuy

…You can go there now and see that for all practical purposes, Viet Nam’s economy is a strange hybrid of capitalist and communist that is more free market in nature… The people are clearly Vietnamese first and communists second, so it was really not a war against communism but a war against the Vietnamese.

You can also go to any Vietnamese community in US, and find yourself among the most virulent anti-Communist people anywhere. Those are the people that managed to escape Viet Nam before US withdrawal or later, on makeshift rafts across the open ocean. They are Vietnamese first and anti-Communist second. They wanted nothing else except to live in their own country, which used to be South Viet Nam. Their only crime was a refusal to live under Communist regime. Do you know how many of them didn’t make it?

@NattoGuy

So by that summary, Viet Nam was the wrong war. It was a war against people who had Vietnam’s best interests in mind, and had no aspirations of world domination.

No, they had Communism best interests in mind, and didn’t hesitate to massacre their own people to advance those interests. You think US commited atrocities? Check what the other side has done…

@NattoGuy

But it was for the right reason, to counter the expanding threat of Soviet and Chinese communism.

Finally, you are on the right track.

[New_Iskander]

@Quint

Well, found here, from the Sept. 3, 1967 New York Times:

That only proves that we can lose, not that we are wrong.

[Ryan_Liam]

@rfgdxm

That URL didn’t work here. Maybe the US isn’t quite as evil as Vietnam. I’m just ashamed to be a US citizen.

Then leave, or become another Alec Baldwin, my new buzzword for hypocrite.

[Loopydude]

@BobLibDem

Iraq has taken one step toward a better, freer society. Whether it gets there or not is anyone’s guess. Even if it does, one can question whether the end justifies the means. The means were that the US government used military force in an irresponsible manner, killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and is committing war crimes by torturing captured suspected terrorists. One can applaud the courage of the Iraqis in voting and wish them well without then concluding that the invasion was justified. It was not.

I don’t think there is a more succinct or cogent way to summarize the reality of the Iraqi war thus far. Thank you.

[rjung]

@Ryan_Liam

Then leave, or become another Alec Baldwin, my new buzzword for hypocrite.

I was wondering when we’d finally get an “America, love it or leave it” retort from the Usual Suspects™.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

Of course not. Bush knew how to get out of Viet Nam.

[Ryan_Liam]

@rjung

I was wondering when we’d finally get an “America, love it or leave it” retort from the Usual Suspects™.

Well when the general consensus is ‘I hate to be American because its an imperialist warmonger’ and ‘I hate America and its institutions, but won’t do anything to change the system because I’m errr erm, too important for those Imperialists’ It had to be said.

Of course not. Bush knew how to get out of Viet Nam.

Yeah :dubious: when he was 25.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

This is exactly like saying that all we had to do to win the Cold war was to avoid joining any gruesome battle. But you think you are consistent, because you believe that Cold war shouldn’t have been fought at all. The only inconsistency is that you state US had to guarantee “the safety of Western Europe”. But why was such a guarantee necessary? Perhaps because USSR started taking over Eastern European countries by force in late 1940-s? Culminating in the attempt to blocade West Berlin and take it by force, remember? Perhaps that’s why it was necessary to declare a Cold War and take a stand, starting with West Berlin airlift? Wars are declared to mobilize people. Perhaps USSR creeping aggression was serious enough to justify a call to war back then?

The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe at the end of WWII and stayed there, partly out of an ideological commitment to spreading Communism, but mainly for their own security. It was unjust, of course, but the Russians’ famous national paranoia is at least understandable, for a country that has been invaded from the West multiple times in its history (by the Poles, the French, the Germans, the Germans again). They wanted a secure, defensible zone of buffer states. But the anti-Soviet propaganda from the '50s, that the Soviets had plans to conquer the U.S. and had planned that since the time of Lenin, was pure bullshit. We didn’t have to rise to the bait, we didn’t have to embark on an arms race designed to drive the USSR into bankruptcy or to send our troops all over the world to quash Communist rebellions. If we had not fought the Cold War, Russia and Eastern Europe might still be Communist, but Western Europe and the U.S. would still be safe – and all would be more prosperous, not having wasted so much of their national wealth on military establishments and WMDs.

@New Iskander

“If only we did nothing, USSR would eventually implode just like it did!”

You got anything at all to support that? If we didn’t join any battles, we still would win the war?

I said only that if we had done nothing in Vietnam, the USSR would have collapsed when it did.

OTOH, if we had not fought the Cold War at all, the USSR might still be there – not an unacceptable state of affairs. And by now it might have liberalized its economy to survive, as China has.

@New Iskander

“All we had to do was to keep Western Europe!” Well, may be India, too. Also Middle East. And parts of Africa, together with parts of South America and Micronesia… some little countries here and there… See, simple enough!

None of which were ever threatened by Soviet aggression. They did have their own home-grown Communist movements – but Communists have as much right as anybody else has to organize and agitate and even to revolt.

@New Iskander

Yes, I can make a case, I just can’t prove it to you, because you shut your mind and call me a “shameless liar”.

I only called the neocons shameless liars, and stated you could not make a case for Iraq being a necessary front in the “War on Terror” without lying like they do. A perfectly acceptable forensic tactic which does not constitute a direct insult in violation of Board rules. And neocons not only are liars, they subscribe to an ideology that justifies and even mandates lying. In the June 2004 issue of Harper’s, Earl Shorris published an article: “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception.” His thesis is that the worldview of the neocons is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and ‘60s (and on whom The Master wrote a column in 2003 – http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031212.html). Strauss’s thesis is that all great philosophical texts contain “hidden meanings.” Philosophers and intellectuals cannot and should not write clearly enough say what they really mean – cannot because it is too dangerous (Strauss was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, which experience influenced his thinking all his life), and should not because true wisdom is the proper province of an elite. Strauss was also an aristocratic elitist and a natural-law theorist. From Shorris’ article:

WISE MEN TELL NOBLE LIES

The President of the United States told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. His secretaries of defense and state made the same assertions. They claimed to be telling the kind of truth that enables good countries to go to war against evil ones. . . .

One of the great services that Strauss and his disciples have performed for the Bush regime has been the provision of a philosophy of the noble lie, the conviction that lies, from being simply a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy. The idea’s provenance could not be more elevated: Plato himself advised his nobles, men with golden souls, to tell noble lies . . . to keep the other levels of human society (silver, iron, brass) in their proper places, loyal to the state and willing to do its bidding. Strauss, too, advised the telling of noble lies in the service of the national interest, and he held Plato’s view of aristocrats as persons so virtuous that such lies would be used only for the good, for keeping order in the state and in the world. He defined the modern method of the noble lie in the use of esoteric messages within an exoteric text, telling the truth to the wise while at the same time conveying something quite different to the many.

For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that “free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction,” this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon.

ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

William Kristol has written that "Strauss, by way of his students, is in large part responsible for making the thought and principles of America’s founders a source of political knowledge and appeal, and for making political excellence more broadly a subject of appreciation and study. America’s founders thought it self-evident that all men are created equal, and yet increasing inequality has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration, as it was of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Donald Rumsfeld’s primary task under Ronald Reagan was to rid the country of the Great Society programs of the early 1960s. Irving Kristol, an early Straussian, advised Reagan and Rumsfeld and their staffs of the need to stop coddling hungry children, educating the poor, and helping the aged, the infirm, victims of prejudice. The current Bush Administration works more boldly toward inequality. It has adopted a tax system suggested by Grover Norquist, another Straussian, a man who publicy compared the inheritance tax to the Holocaust.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the Great Books Program, said, “The best education for the best is the best education for all.” In 1959, Strauss wrote that “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” In one sentence he had stated his elitism and his distaste for what he called the vulgarity of democratic society. Three years later he made the ruling elite permanent: “We must not expcet that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and privilege of a minority.” Arrogance follows elitism. It leads to cruelty, the capability, even the desire, to use people, to make them into things. No follower of Strauss can agree with Kant’s description of human dignity: man is not a means but an end in himself. The Straussians assign dignity to the few, and those who are deprived of dignity cannot pursue happiness. The study of Strauss’s work does lead to thinking about the Founders: not how they would agree with Straussians but how they would oppose them.

DEMOCRACY IS THE RULE OF THE UNWISE OVER THE WISE

Plato believed that the wise should rule – and who could quarrel with that? But who then decides among competing wise men, and what should be the limits of the wise statesman’s power? It is instructive to listen to Strauss: “It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects.” Strauss explains that this would result in the subjection of what is by nature higher to that which is lower. His reading of Plato comes down to this: true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs. Seen in this light, the Bush Administration’s public claim to be bringing “democracy” to Iraq, all the while working to ensure that elections do not take place, takes on new meaning.

NATURE ABHORS A CONTRACT

Long before the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration – goaded on by Wolfowitz, Kristol, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and others on the right – had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. Bush seems to have had a personal vendetta, but the others had more philosophical reasons. There was nothing Machiavellian about the attack. It was based on principles the planners derived from natural law. One suspects that President Bush, with his simplistic messianic mind-set, was attracted to this line of reasoning: The natural law in the very heart of human beings, the innate ability to know right from wrong, took precedence over mere convention. And so the Bush regime flouted the contract that was agreed to when the United States joined the United Nations; it flouted the U.S. Constitution, which is also a contract, by attacking without the required declaration of war by Congress; and it disregarded the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in other secret detention camps around the world.

The administration’s wise men held up Strauss’s version of natural law as the model, dismissing contracts as mere laws of men. Natural law, interpreted by Bush’s “wise counsels,” gave the President permission to launch a pre-emptive war through an appeal to the higher power. Natural-law theory assumes that men seek the good and that by asking the perennial questions – what is virtue? what is justice? – they will come to wisdom. Straussians, like Kristol, hold that the Founding Fathers espoused natural-law theory, saying that natural law was both divine and self-evident. But the Founders were concerned with inalienable natural rights. After much debate in their convention, they wrote a contract.

@New Iskander

Except he [Nixon] was the only one who did [lie].

Johnson lied egregiously about the Tonkin Gulf incident.

@New Iskander

Viet Nam is how Viet people say it.

And the Japanese call their country Nippon, the Chinese call their country Zhongguo, and the Germans call their country Deutschland; but none of those are acceptable usages when writing in English.

[rjung]

@Ryan_Liam

Well when the general consensus is ‘I hate to be American because its an imperialist warmonger’ and ‘I hate America and its institutions, but won’t do anything to change the system because I’m errr erm, too important for those Imperialists’ It had to be said.

Nonsense – the people who were working for change were simply outvoted (barely) by the folks who got frightened at the idea of legalized gay marriages.

As for the imperialist warmonger charges, let’s remember that we did invade Iraq on false pretenses, we did torture prisoners in our care, we are holding thousands of prisoners indefinitely without charges, we are building permanent bases in the nation, and we’re about to appoint as Attorney General a guy who thinks the Geneva Convention is “quaint” and spends his weekends thinking up new ways to justify torture. :eek: That’s not exactly my idea of what a “Land of the Free” or a “Nation of laws” is about, sorry.

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe at the end of WWII and stayed there, partly out of an ideological commitment to spreading Communism, but mainly for their own security. It was unjust, of course, but the Russians’ famous national paranoia is at least understandable, for a country that has been invaded from the West multiple times in its history (by the Poles, the French, the Germans, the Germans again)…

Soviets did exactly the opposite to what US done in Iraq: they quashed free elections and replaced democratically elected officials with Communist puppets in all East European states, starting with Poland in 1947 and finishing with Chechoslovakia in 1949. After that they beseiged West Berlin.

If you want to lend understanding to paranoia, go ahead. What about the Poles, who were invaded practically every year, and on bad year twice, would you like to understand those people?

[Ryan_Liam]

The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe at the end of WWII and stayed there, partly out of an ideological commitment to spreading Communism, but mainly for their own security.

Emphasis on these words,

partly out of an ideological commitment to spreading Communism

and this,

But the anti-Soviet propaganda from the '50s, that the Soviets had plans to conquer the U.S. and had planned that since the time of Lenin, was pure bullshit

And this, to strengthen my case.

Wikipedia

Either way, socialism cannot survive in one poor underdeveloped country alone. Thus, Leninism calls for world revolution in one form or another.

In addition, Leninism holds that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means

Leninism

It was unjust, of course, but the Russians’ famous national paranoia is at least understandable, for a country that has been invaded from the West multiple times in its history (by the Poles, the French, the Germans, the Germans again). They wanted a secure, defensible zone of buffer states.

Oh yeah, quite understandable :rolleyes: even though various communist parties in the West were quite strong because of Soviet domination, such as Italy, Greece (which started a civil war) France, and the UK?

Even if the Soviets needed a buffer, they didn’t need as many states anyway, they don’t need Hungary to defend the Soviet border, Romania does that for them.

We didn’t have to rise to the bait, we didn’t have to embark on an arms race designed to drive the USSR into bankruptcy or to send our troops all over the world to quash Communist rebellions

I bet good money that the South Koreans would see fault with this. We didn’t rise to the bait, we merely tried to save lives, you know remember the 2million who were threatened with starvation in West Berlin, or how Cuba stationed Nuclear missiles from the USSR?

Arms race squandered money? The greatest percentage of GDP we used to contain the USSR was no more than 8 percent of all Domestic Gross, compared to the Soviets bankcrupting 50% its pretty clear that us driving up the stakes forced them out the game. They lost, deal with it.

If we had not fought the Cold War, Russia and Eastern Europe might still be Communist, but Western Europe and the U.S. would still be safe

Compared to all of Europe now?

all would be more prosperous, not having wasted so much of their national wealth on military establishments and WMDs.

I could agree if it were the case of Russian Communism, which wasn’t so much imposed as was a national revolution, but in Eastern Europe its a different case, you couldn’t keep those people locked up in an ideology they didn’t want, they were going to rebel again sooner or later, better sooner.

OTOH, if we had not fought the Cold War at all, the USSR might still be there – not an unacceptable state of affairs. And by now it might have liberalized its economy to survive, as China has.

Why are 12 republics gaining their independence from the remnants of the old Imperial Russian Empire an ‘unacceptable state of affairs?’

None of which were ever threatened by Soviet aggression. They did have their own home-grown Communist movements – but Communists have as much right as anybody else has to organize and agitate and even to revolt.

Yeah they do, doesn’t make it right though.

I only called the neocons shameless liars, and stated you could not make a case for Iraq being a necessary front in the “War on Terror” without lying like they do.

Unlike Communists?

A perfectly acceptable forensic tactic which does not constitute a direct insult in violation of Board rules. And neocons not only are liars, they subscribe to an ideology that justifies and even mandates lying

Capitalism? Great another whine on about Bush. Get over yourself. We understand the socialist tendencies you portray, and how it could of worked if those pesky Conservatives in the West hadn’t been intent on destroying Communism and the Soviet Union, it could of worked!

The world is a better place without the Soviet Union, and the fact a democratic power is at the top of the table, is even better.

[Renob]

@BrainGlutton

OTOH, if we had not fought the Cold War at all, the USSR might still be there – not an unacceptable state of affairs.

Except for the millions of political prisoners who perished under the Soviet system. Besides the mass murders, political represstion, and devastating environmental damage, the USSR was great!

And neocons not only are liars, they subscribe to an ideology that justifies and even mandates lying. In the June 2004 issue of Harper’s, Earl Shorris published an article: “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception.”

Shorrin doesn’t know the first thing about Straussians. As someone who studied under Straussians and who has read some Strauss (although I don’t subscribe to the Straussian worldview), it is clear that Shorris has no idea about what the man actually thought. Especially telling is his discussion of the “Noble Lie,” which he twists to mean that Strauss advocates leaders lying to their people. If you believe this, you either haven’t read much Strauss or you’re purposefully twisting his words. The popular misinterpretation of Strauss propagated by hacks like Shorris is completely wrong.

[Ryan_Liam]

Rjung

As for the imperialist warmonger charges, let’s remember that we did invade Iraq on false pretenses, we did torture prisoners in our care, we are holding thousands of prisoners indefinitely without charges

Yep all bad, doesn’t make us Imperialists, we treated Japanese and German citizens badly in World War two, we were Imperialists then?

We are building permanent bases in the nation

And? There are bases in my country as well, but I don’t particulary feel ‘oppressed’

We’re about to appoint as Attorney General a guy who thinks the Geneva Convention is “quaint” and spends his weekends thinking up new ways to justify torture. That’s not exactly my idea of what a “Land of the Free” or a “Nation of laws” is about, sorry.

Yet, you still are free aren’t you? People thinking, and people doing are two different things, one doesn’t necessarily lead to another.

The Geneva convention applies to nation states only, not organisations with no statehood.

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

If we had not fought the Cold War, Russia and Eastern Europe might still be Communist, but Western Europe and the U.S. would still be safe – and all would be more prosperous, not having wasted so much of their national wealth on military establishments and WMDs.

Ah, yes, that reminds of battles we didn’t join:

• Hungary, 1956

• Chechoslovakia, 1968.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

Ah, yes, that reminds of battles we didn’t join:

• Hungary, 1956

• Chechoslovakia, 1968.

Are you suggesting NATO could have intervened in either situation without turning the Cold War into a Really, Really Hot War?

[New_Iskander]

Simply reminding you how life was behind the Iron Curtain.

[Quint]

@New Iskander

That only proves that we can lose, not that we are wrong.

When I brought up the elections in Vietnam I wasn’t making a comment as to the rightness or wrongness of anything. It was to counter your initial statement:

@New Iskander

Free elections took place in Iraq last Sunday, but some people are still not happy.

For those people, Iraq is still a “quagmire”, still a “wrong war”, still “another Viet Nam”.

Well, there was a vote in Vietnam and people thought it meant the start of something good. I suppose it was, but in the long run Vietnam was still a disaster. There has been a vote in Iraq and people, notably yourself, are claiming it means that Iraq is not a “quagmire”, not a “wrong war”, not “another Vietnam”. But as history shows, those people may well be wrong. The elections definitely do not prove that Iraq is “not a quagmire”, and do not eliminate the possibility that in the long run the war may be a disaster.