[QUOTE=Frank]
The hostages would have been on their way home even as Carter was being inaugurated for his second term?
[/QUOTE]
Then, or not long after. Or not long before. All it would have costed would have been money. Nothing else, because there was really nothing else to demand.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Of course we would have won. Just like we won the Iraq War within five weeks. But the effects on the ground would have turned out the same, only worse (Iran having four or five times the population of Iraq, and every bit as divided and turbulent).
[/QUOTE]
We would not have had the same goal, nor the same situation, nor the same invasion! Our goal would have been simply rescue and/or punishment. You’re comparing apples and staplers. A war with a valid, limited purpose to a war with an invalid, open-ended purpose. Sheesh, you don’t get to compare Bush’s lies and Bush’s war retroactively to every potential military action in our history, nor do you get to pretend that what is happening today would inevitably have happened 28 years ago.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Then, or not long after. Or not long before. All it would have costed would have been money. Nothing else, because there was really nothing else to demand.
[/QUOTE]
I have had, until now, no realization that you were so naive.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Nixon got away with a lot of criminal and possibly unconstitutional acts, such as the secret bombing of Cambodia. What Watergate was all about, was that he (or his supporters) cheated at the game of electoral politics, and that was one line that could not be crossed without consequences. Is it any different in the UK? (For that matter, I once heard a Brit say that if Watergate had happened there, with the parliamentary system, there would have been no hearings; Nixon would have resigned the moment the story broke. Not resigning would have been unthinkable and Not Done. Besides, he would have immediately faced a vote of no confidence.)
[/quote]
I actually believe that we did have something a lot more significant than Watergate in/around 1979 - our intelligence services ran amok, Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher barely scratches the surface.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
The really tragic – in the classical sense – thing about Watergate was that it was from Nixon’s and the Pubs’ POV completely unnecessary. Nixon would have defeated McGovern in a landslide anyway; by that time the voters were sick of the war, but they were also sick of the lefty counterculture with which McGovern was identified. But Nixon’s tragic flaw, his paranoia and persecution complex, could not allow him to tolerate even the bare possibility of defeat in 1972, and his subordinates were infected by that attitude.
[/quote]
I agree entirely.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Neither Ford nor Carter was spectacularly incompetent. Ford was simply negligible. Carter was brilliant – look at his handling of Israel/Egypt – but unlucky. He just had a lot of bad things happen on his watch; but it’s hard to see how anybody else could have handled them better, and it’s very easy to imagine how somebody else could have handled them worse. Why, we might have bombed Iran in 1979!
[/QUOTE]
I cannot deride Ford enough - he was a bumbling buffoon.
Carter was a nice guy, but he did not have the nouse to handle international relations. I hold him responsible for the Iranian revolution. SAVAK were doing sterling work, but American criticism undermined the Shah.
Also the Israel/Egypt stuff was on the cards far earlier on. The USA had some sort of plan to lock the ME in a triangle of Israel (technology), Egypt (manpower), Iran (cash) - and that was back when Nixon was wooing China. The idea was to set up a structure of mutual prosperity. Not a bad idea.
You’ve probably never heard of that plan, I only picked it up from an American ‘businessman’ who was ‘ex-US Diplomatic Service’ and was my uncle’s US representative. My uncle published a monthly dealing with the Far East (especially China) and was very well connected in diplomatic circles - which explains why this guy made an effort to get close to him. Some of the stuff he said was pretty interesting and he had access to some interesting technology. As I spent all spare time with my uncle and was being groomed to take over the business, I knew this guy pretty well - he certainly believed what he was saying.
[QUOTE=Frank]
We would not have had the same goal, nor the same situation, nor the same invasion! Our goal would have been simply rescue and/or punishment.
[/QUOTE]
Ah, well in that case, the invasion would have failed utterly. The hostages would have been executed. And then a great many Iranians would have died. And if it had the effect of destabilizing the government, civil war would have ensued and Saddam Hussein would have picked the carcass, starting with Khuzestan. Carter resolved the situation with no lives lost but those in the abortive rescue mission. That way was better.
[QUOTE=FRDE]
Carter was a nice guy, but he did not have the nouse to handle international relations.
[/quote]
“Nouse”?
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
“Nouse”?
[/QUOTE]
Look it up - learn British English
Hmm .. Google is useless on it
FYI it means common sense
[QUOTE=FRDE]
Look it up - learn British English
Hmm .. Google is useless on it
FYI it means common sense
[/QUOTE]
of course Google is useless, as will be any good dictionary. Because it’s spelled nous.
ETA: No, it doesn’t mean common sense – it means, as closely as we can express it in one English word, wit.
Nixon’s main problem was paranoia. His enemies list and all that.
In his heart, he was a moderate, but in practice he ruled like a czar during the revolution, all defense and no excape plan.
[QUOTE=Nametag]
of course Google is useless, as will be any good dictionary. Because it’s spelled nous.
ETA: No, it doesn’t mean common sense – it means, as closely as we can express it in one English word, wit.
[/QUOTE]
You are spot on about the spelling - how embarrassing !
As to the meaning:
nous n. (Gk philos.) mind, intellect; (colloq.) common sense, gumption.[Gk]
From the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
In British English ‘wit’ means humour or repartee - as in quick witted, although it can also mean intelligent - as in slow witted or ‘she quick wittedly put the child’s scalded hand under the cold tap.’
In this context, I used nous as meaning common sense.
I agree with **Moto ** that Carter’s election was a knee-jerk reaction to Watergate, but it resulted in almost nothing that wouldn’t have happened under another Republican administration. The biggest newsmaker out of the Carter years was the Iranian revolution and the kidnapping of U.S. Embassy staffers, and all of that would have happened anyway. Maybe Reagan would have gotten the nomination, maybe Rockerfeller, it doesn’t matter. Ford certainly wouldn’t have been a factor; he was a caretaker VP anyway, and if Nixon had slipped past Watergate, the Republicans would have continued to roll. Maybe Clinton would have surprised everybody in 1988 instead of 1992, then he’d have had to deal with Kuwait, and he’d have done the same thing Bush Senior did, and Bush Junior would have invaded Iraq four years earlier, and the towers would have still come down and we’d now be two years into a Democratic presidency, stilll unable to walk away from Iraq … so pretty much nothing would have changed except the names. When you stop and think about it, the “most powerful nation on Earth” doesn’t exert that much power. Stuff happens around the world regardless of what we do, not because of what we do.
[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
I agree with **Moto ** that Carter’s election was a knee-jerk reaction to Watergate, but it resulted in almost nothing that wouldn’t have happened under another Republican administration. The biggest newsmaker out of the Carter years was the Iranian revolution and the kidnapping of U.S. Embassy staffers, and all of that would have happened anyway. Maybe Reagan would have gotten the nomination, maybe Rockerfeller, it doesn’t matter. Ford certainly wouldn’t have been a factor; he was a caretaker VP anyway, and if Nixon had slipped past Watergate, the Republicans would have continued to roll. Maybe Clinton would have surprised everybody in 1988 instead of 1992, then he’d have had to deal with Kuwait, and he’d have done the same thing Bush Senior did, and Bush Junior would have invaded Iraq four years earlier, and the towers would have still come down and we’d now be two years into a Democratic presidency, stilll unable to walk away from Iraq … so pretty much nothing would have changed except the names. When you stop and think about it, the “most powerful nation on Earth” doesn’t exert that much power. Stuff happens around the world regardless of what we do, not because of what we do.
[/QUOTE]
Jeez, that’s as much as to say it doesn’t matter who we elect! Do you really believe that?
Here’s my biggest point.
Conservatism wasn’t guaranteed to win in the Republican Party, let alone the country. What Watergate did was set up Carter to win the presidency by a nose.
The following 1980 election was not a normal one. The domestic economic conditions were the worst our country had seen since the Depression, and in foreign policy we were staring down a horrendous Mideast situation and a Soviet Union that was on a new round of adventurism, in places as far flung as Afghanistan and Central America.
It is in these conditions that Carter lost. It isn’t so much that Reagan won as that Carter was in four short years totally discredited. Remember that in 1964, not that long before, Goldwater had been crushed with a conservative political platform. Americans wouldn’t have turned to conservatism in the interim without things going so wrong.
Mind you, I’m a huge Reagan fan. But if there had been no crisis in 1980, he would have had to build the movement for some time afterward without the benefit of the presidential bully pulpit. I don’t think we can underestimate that.
Without Jimmy Carter, there would have been no President Reagan, especially given his age at the time. Without Watergate, no President Carter.
These things are not preordained, and it would be a mistake to look at it that way. Both med were prepared to run in these turbulent times and made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves, especially in electoral politics. Reagan, of course, was considerably better at governance.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Jeez, that’s as much as to say it doesn’t matter who we elect! Do you really believe that?
[/QUOTE]
My view is that Clinton was CIA - one of the rare cases when they got things right.
[QUOTE=FRDE]
My view is that Clinton was CIA - one of the rare cases when they got things right.
[/QUOTE]
And W?
We had an economic crisis in 1980? Damn, you’d think I’d remember something like that. But let me look it up to refresh my memory. No mention in Wikipedia but everybody knows that a poor site for facts. Let me google “1980 economic crisis”. Here it is - no wait that was in Korea. And this one was in Poland. Nothing about an economic crisis in the United States. Wait, here’s one about economic crises in the 1980’s: the Mexican Debt Crisis of 1982, the Continental Illinois Bank Crisis of 1984, the Ohio Savings and Loan Crisis of 1985, the Stock Market Crisis of 1987. Wait a second, who was president then?
Okay, I’ll admit it - the economy was not great in 1980. But it certainly was not “the worst our country had seen since the Depression”. Unemployment had been higher under Ford and would be higher again under Reagan then it ever was at any point in 1980. The average unemployement rate in 1980 was 7.1%; in 1975 it was 8.5%, in 1982, it was 9.7%.
The inflation rate did hit a peak in 1980 at 13.58% - but every country had high inflation in 1980 when OPEC raised oil prices. The same thing had happened in 1974 when the inflation rate was 11.03%. Oil prices went from $3.89 a barrel to $6.87 in 1974. They went from $12.64 to $21.59 in 1980. The market price of oil goes up that much in a single year and you’re going to have inflation regardless of who’s president.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
And W?
[/QUOTE]
When Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he shared a house (lived with)with Strobe Talbott, the talented 25 year old who ‘translated’ Khrushchev’s tapes.
I’m pretty darn sure that the resulting book ‘Khrushchev Remembers’ (Little, Brown & Co 1971) is a fraud - it does not read right for an old guy, and the material was not new to me - anyway a 25 year old getting hold of the tapes and publishing an expensive book is rather implausible.
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Nelson_Strobridge_Talbott
|Strobe Talbott has been a friend and roomate of fellow Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton since their days at the University of Oxford. He is currently the president of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. He is believed to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Talbott was Deputy Secretary of State in 1994 and has also been linked with the Aspen Strategy Group and a former Aid Coordinator for the Commonwealth of Independent States.|
[QUOTE=FRDE]
When Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he shared a house (lived with)with Strobe Talbott, the talented 25 year old who ‘translated’ Khrushchev’s tapes.
I’m pretty darn sure that the resulting book ‘Khrushchev Remembers’ (Little, Brown & Co 1971) is a fraud - it does not read right for an old guy, and the material was not new to me - anyway a 25 year old getting hold of the tapes and publishing an expensive book is rather implausible.
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Nelson_Strobridge_Talbott
|Strobe Talbott has been a friend and roomate of fellow Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton since their days at the University of Oxford. He is currently the president of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. He is believed to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Talbott was Deputy Secretary of State in 1994 and has also been linked with the Aspen Strategy Group and a former Aid Coordinator for the Commonwealth of Independent States.|
[/QUOTE]
What’s that got to do with Bush?
Ok, thread drift - but I assume that your ‘And W?’ in #55 meant ‘And Why’
In #52 you said: Jeez, that’s as much as to say it doesn’t matter who we elect! Do you really believe that?
My post #54 was in reply
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Jeez, that’s as much as to say it doesn’t matter who we elect! Do you really believe that?
[/QUOTE]
Not the way you seem to mean it. Had the Republicans not stolen the last two elections, more than 3,000 American sons and daughters and untold Iraquis would still be alive, so in that case, yes it does matter. But no matter who was elected U.S. president, the Shah of Iran still would have been deposed, the Berlin Wall still would have fallen, the USSR still would have imploded, we’d still have global warming, Iraq and Iran still would have fought a bloody war, the WTC still would have collapsed in flames … and on and on. Except where he inserts combat troops, the U.S. president has almost no control over world events and not much over domestic affairs.