I think this is too simplistic. Remember that America’s War in Vietnam was just the last phase in a long struggle: the Communists in control of North Vietnam killed 174,000 in the mid-1950’s just for the “crime” of being landlords; there would have been continuing deaths in the Civil War if America had not intervened. The alternative to American intervention would have been to let Communists destroy American allies in the South. It may not have been obvious that American intervention would lead to greater bloodshed.
Furthermore, the “domino” theory suggested that if the West appeared unwilling to defend South Vietnam, Thailand might be next. There were strong Communist insurgencies in several parts of Thailand. I’m not at all sure this theory was wrong.
Communist aggression was a major worry. World War II, the worst war in history, had occured because Hitlerite aggression had not been nipped in the bud early. American leaders did not want to repeat that mistake. Certainly there would have been continued bloodshed in Vietnam if America did not intervene. American leaders might have thought they were saving lives.
I’ve outlined a case for the Vietnam War, but it is probably also too simplistic. And it ignores the tragedy in Cambodia which is often blamed on America. My point is that America’s mismanaged War in Vietnam was not clearly wrong. One can fault many of America’s actions in Vietnam and, in hindsight, reject the entire program, but the decision to intervene was taken by sober intelligent men who thought they were acting in the best interests of humanity.
One might claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq could also be defended as a sober intelligent decision which proved wrong only in hindsight. I would disagree. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq was peaceful in 2002; indeed its biggest problem was sanctions affecting health and nutrition which had been imposed at the insistence of the U.S.A. Unlike Vietnam, which became peaceful a few years after America finally gave up, Iraq is a hornet’s nest 12 years after America attacked, and getting worse. The raw body count may be worse in Vietnam, but some sources estimate that American invasion cost over a million Iraqi lives altogether – and the total population of Iraq is just a fraction of Vietnam’s.
America’s demonstration of resolve probably did deter Communist aggression. The final effect of the Bush adventures isn’t clear, but doesn’t look good.
I do not claim that America’s action in Vietnam was absolutely correct. But the 2003 invasion was obviously much stupider and its motivates more cynical, IMHO.
Dumber, but I don’t think you can judge wars based only on the good intentions behind them. Vietnam was clearly worse, and it didn’t have to be. Getting involved first may have been a mistake, but the mistake was compounded by decisions to wage the war in unprecedented ways that were incredibly stupid, and not just in hindsight. Our “best and brightest” thought they knew more about waging war than the military leaders who beat the Nazis and Japanese.
Iraq was “peaceful” in 2002 because we enforced a no-fly zone over most of the country. Said zone being set up to stop the slaughtering of Shiite Arabs in the south and Kurds in the North.
That is not to say I think the invasion was a good idea-- I didn’t and I don’t. But I can’t see that the “peaceful Iraq” theory holds water. It was an artificial peace that would have crumbled as soon as we decided we were done enforcing it-- and we had no obligation to do so indefinitely. As in Vietnam, an Iraq revolution was inevitable, and there is no evidence it would have been any more peaceful than Syria.
If Iraq were the only thing Bush screwed up I might agree. Iraq might have killed ore people than the Great Recession, but the recession affected more people.
I lived during Vietnam. Actually, my draft lottery number was 11, so it was not just history.
Carter??? The nicest guy among them for sure, but best president? I think Clinton takes that cake. Sure he fooled around, but so did FDR.
If Iraq was peaceful or not, plenty of people doubted the WMD story - in fact most of the world, as shown by the Security Council non-vote. One could maybe excuse those who got us into Vietnam by noting that there hadn’t been a Vietnam before. In Vietnam we didn’t set up a government or social structure effective against a pre-existing enemy - in Iraq we pretty much created an enemy.
The costs of inspections, enforcing sanctions and no-fly were modest. The costs of establishing and maintaining a large U.S. Army in Arabia preparatory to the invasion were much higher and were frequently cited as a reason to attack soon – a rather circular argument for going to war.
I don’t have a cite, but I recall stories that Iraq was ready to be be more compliant, even planning to send Saddam into exile. The Cheney Administration sped up the invasion to ensure this would not come to pass. Fight my ignorance: any validity to that?
“But we couldn’t keep it up forever!” was the cheerleaders’ claim. Even though yes, we could. Our costs were relatively small, our casualties were zero, and you can extrapolate that number as long as you like.
That was the most disgusting excuse of all - that we couldn’t just keep the military on the edge of starting a war - as if we needed to let them go kill and bomb just to keep them from getting bored. Well, we could have brought them home too, but the cheerleaders didn’t consider that at all.
You may be thinking of an ultimatum made to the Taliban that we wouldn’t invade Afghanistan if they turned Bin Laden over. Obviously they didn’t, and it isn’t clear that they even physically could.
Iraq had become compliant in that they had let the UN inspectors go everywhere, and they were only about two weeks from finishing up without finding evidence of any WMD’s. Since that was Cheney’s primary pretext for the war, letting them finish and prove it false would have effectively prevented him from starting the war at all, so that required accelerating the timeline to prevent the possibility. Once it was started, the army completely bypassed all the alleged WMD sites and went straight for the Oil Ministry.
Suppose that Obama was a white Republican with exactly the same record. All here who support him would be calling for his impeachment, of that I am sure.
Between the gun running which resulted in hundreds of deaths, the IRS scandal, and a few more. Obama ranks near or at the bottom IMHO.
On the Iraq mess both are at fault to the same degree but each for different reasons.
I do agree with all on Bush invading Iraq which opened up a whole series of issues there and that was a huge mistake. However he did hand over a fairly stable Iraq and to that point Obama and Joe Biden pounded their chest and crowed big that was their success. However they squandered it and now the problem with ISIS is entirely Obama’s.
One of my pet peeves is how fluid the definition of “conservative” is, in tandem with the certainty that some people declare things to be “tru(ly) conservative”. Some of this is to be expected, since the definition can mean different, conflicting things when applied to economic, social and foreign affairs issues. But that can’t explain all of the ambiguity.
For some, the word “conservative” seems to just mean, “what I believe is right”. E.g., when Bush ran for president, he opposed steel tariffs. In 2002, he placed a tariff on imported steel. He lifted the tariff around two years later. This wasn’t just a flip-flop, it was a flip-flop-flip. But I had conservative friends who never criticized any of these positions, always finding some definition of conservatism that the new position agreed with. (E.g., opposing tariffs = free trade = conservative; supporting tariffs = helping the domestic steel industry = “America First!” = conservative). And this was always followed by the seeming axiom that whatever Bush had done, it was more conservative than what any Democratic president would have done.
In your post above astorian, it sounds like you’re advancing a new definition: “conservative” is the opposite of “Bush PAL”.
I submit that the opposite (sort of) used to be the convention: for a good part of the the Bush administration, if you criticized President Bush, you weren’t a conservative.. This changed when his popularity plummeted. At that point, the meme gained traction that Bush had done poorly, but that was because he hadn’t really governed as a conservative.
And I repeat, I think it is revealing that in this thread, people who describe themselves as conservative seem to be more willing to admit to Bush’s failings. It may mean that the events are far enough in the past to be discussed rationally.
Bush was a conservative, so I don’t think us conservatives can just blithely run away from his record. What made him so dissatisfying to conservatives was his priorities. In a pluralistic system like ours, no one gets everything they want. Bush tended to prioritize the war on terror over everything else, plus his own reelection campaign, which caused him to support large domestic spending increases. He tended to worry more about HOW domestic spending was done than the amount of money spent. It seems to be a Texas thing because Perry has the same philosophy. The problem is, liberals are right about that kind of stuff. Government should spend money and supervise the spending of money. Outsourcing that task doesn’t make things more efficient, it makes them LESS efficient, because the incentives are all the same but now you’ve got someone trying to make a profit too. It’s not about “private” it’s about competition. Competition is what makes the private sector more efficient, not merely the fact something is private.
It should be noted, although I’m sure everyone’s already aware, that Obama’s got two years left to sink to Bush’s lows. And right now, he’s starting to encounter a pretty hostile media. Chris Matthews called him “intellectually lazy”. Not GWB, but Obama. And Piers Morgan said that by throwing the intelligence community under the bus he had essentially committed “career suicide”, and that they’ll be leaking unflattering stories about him over the next couple of years. Then there’s the Panetta book that shows how the President as usual was complacent about the Iraq negotiations. So Bush may have started the war, but Obama may have found one final way to screw things up that Bush wouldn’t have thought of on his own.
And these are his FRIENDS saying this stuff. This administration really is following a very similar trajectory as the Bush administration. Obama can still pull this one out if he’s determined to be the worst.
Of course, that’s the thing about complacency and aloofness. If you don’t try to be the worst, you’ll fall short.
Look, I admit voting for Bush twice- partly because he’d been a decent governor, partly because the alternative (John McCain) was a guy trying hard to market himself as a liberal.
I merely ask again, WHAT did George W. Bush ever do that should make any principled conservative stand by him?
I concede, there are a lot of different factions within the GOP that call themselves conservative," and those factions are often at odds with each other. To some, “conservative” means certain stands on social issues. To others, it means being pro-business. To some, it means smaller government.
But no matter HOW you define “conservative,” I still can’t see how the Bush administration fits it. The Religious Right were his most loyal supporters, but what did they GET for their loyalty? I repeat, there was only ONE Cabinet member in 8 years who was a representative of the Religious Right- John Ashcroft. Given a choice, Bush appointed holdovers from the Ford or GHW Bush administrations.
And again, when given a chance to appoint Supreme Court justices, Bush tried to appoint a friend, NOT a conservative. I remember the arguments I had with liberals on this very board on this very subject when Harriet Miers was appointed. They were all 100% sure Miers was a faithful stooge of the Religious Right. I told them how wrong they were, but they insisted Bush had given the Religious Right a secret wink that told them she’d be a reliable conservative vote.
NOBODY believed that on the Right!
In practice, Dubya didn’t care about the social issues. He was a profligate spender. In short, he wasn’t JUST a disaster in general, he was a disaster for conservatives.
And by that admission, which I also agree 100% with, us conservatives admit that Bush was at least one of us enough that we take the damage for his failures. Just as liberals will bear the brunt of Obama’s failures whether or not they actually think he’s liberal.
Not everything that happens in the world is because of something a US president did. Bush invaded Iraq-- that war is his baby. But Malaki squandered the gains that had been made, not Obama. Obama got us out, pretty much on the same schedule Bush had laid out, and that’s what Americans wanted. To the extent that Obama screwed up on Iraq, it’s getting us back in. It’s entirely unclear that bombs are the answer to the problems with Iraq.
Including the day his aides had to make up a DVD to give him a clue about what Katrina was doing to New Orleans? The day the market crashed? (Well, admittedly the MBA and former CEO had no clue about that stuff.) The day he declared victory in Iraq just as things were going south?