<p>You guys have it all wrong. Cheney is one of the worst Presidents ever. One of the qualification to being the worst President is to actually be President.</p>
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<p>Even Robert MacNamara, SecDef during much of that war, has admitted this. I don’t understand why it’s so hard for Americans, whose nation was derived from an anti-colonialist insurgency in essence, have such a hard time understanding this. The will of peoples to be sovereign over the affairs of their own locality over the long-term carries much weight in times of war. </p>
<p>Ho Chi Minh wasn’t another Maoist figure, up from the masses communist. He was in fact a Confucian bureaucrat gentry overlord, or mandarin, by family history. Unlike the Chinese, his were a people who had long thought of themselves as needing to unite to keep foreigners out of their affairs. Actually, even the Chinese Communists were more about nationalism in reality than communism. It’s just that the communists were the only ideological group who really had a non-racist doctrine that said that all people across the world were equal and should not be subservient to one another. If you had a basic allergy, as most people’s do, to being lorded over by colonialists, you would embrace an ideology like this too. See below for quotes by Ho Chi Minh. If he hadn’t been the agent of the death of so many Americans, I could view him as a kind of hero; it’s a tough one.</p>
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<p>Answer:
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<p>Pinkerton writes this in response to the State of the Union and calls Bush the Louis the XV of the US:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppin255065604jan25,0,2719215.column[/url]”>http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-oppin255065604jan25,0,2719215.column</a></p>
<p>Quotes from HCM:
“Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.”
“I only follow one party: the Vietnamese party.”
“You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.” (referring to France and America in their wars in Vietnam)
“It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery!”
"“It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me.”</p>
<p>Most incompetent president in my lifetime. Nixon was dishonest but not stupid.</p>
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<p>This sounds like it was taken directly from the 1960’s antiwar manifesto authored by Jane Fonda. Actually he was an agent of death to FAR more of his own countrymen than he was to Americans. He oversaw the slaughter and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of of his own people after we deserted them. Even today, Vietnam is rampant with human rights abuses. Some hero indeed. </p>
<p>The fact that this kind of sanitized, revisionist history still exists is because the left needs to cling to the false notion that their anti-war activity was based on noble intent and that they were proven correct. Unfortunately, this false sense of enoblement has carried forward to today’s anti-war crowd. Teddy Kennedy was asked if he was concerned about a “blood bath” if we got out of Iraq. His answer was based on the same erroneously viewed history that is a carry-over from Vietnam. He said, “I don’t think there will be a blood bath. The same people claimed that there would be a blood bath in Vietnam and look how that turned out.” Indeed, look at how that turned out. Ask the boat people (those who actually survived) if there was a blood bath in Vietnam after Congress pulled the funding that was allowed for in the Paris Peace treaty. We had successfully turned the war over to the South Vietnamese but then pulled all funding support from them while the Russians and Chinese provided full support to the North. The result was Ho Chi Minh (“George Washington”) massing an attack on the South and then laying waste to its people.</p>
<p>Thing of it is, Iraq is already going to be a bloodbath when we leave, no matter what. The only justification for staying in is to avoid what happened in the aftermath of Vietnam: refugees coming to the US to escape.</p>
<p>The right has to keep the war going, because constantly promising that success is just around the corner, the insurgency is in its last throes, etc., is the only way they can justify denying the refugees entry to the US after starting the civil war that displaced them.</p>
<p>If the pro-war crowd were really interested in stabilizing Iraq and preventing a bloodbath, the first they would do is call for security around the munitions dumps that the insurgents are using to get ammunition to kill our soldiers. But four years later, they leave these millions of tons in munitions unsecured, even though the Government Accounting Office reports that most of the 3000+ US casualties have been caused by these munitions.</p>
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<p>George Bush has already turned America’s back on the Iraq refugees. It’s a national disgrace. There are some 2 million refugees who have escaped to other countries since the war started – virtually the entire educated, middle class of Iraq. The United States accepted less than 300 last year. We have even turned our backs on Iraqis who have helped us, which is pretty much a death sentence in today’s Iraq.</p>
<p>I don’t think refugees coming to America is the reason George Bush is determined to continue the invasion of Iraq indefinitely. I don’t think he’s given a moment’s consideration to the refugees. If he has, he’s not mentioned it in any of his many speeches on Iraq over the last five years.</p>
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<p>Very slick. Not content with re-writing history (as in what happened in Vietnam), the left is now prognosticating the future with certainty. Of course if things do actually devolve into utter chaos as predicted by the intelligence community as well as people like John Burns, they already have their cover story: “this was destined to happen regardless of our getting out, so our hands are clean once again.” Very slick indeed, albeit a bit contemptible.</p>
<p>I can’t believe you typed that with a straight face, given how badly the right wing’s projections have gone.</p>
<p>All over in 6 months. Cost less than 100 billion dollars. All paid for by Iraq’s oil. No American casualties. A cakewalk. Down to 50,000 troops by now. </p>
<p>Yeah, you’re really a good judge of whose predications are likely to be accurate.</p>
<p>The right wing has no workable plan for preventing a bloodbath. If it did, securing the munitions dumps would be on it. All you have is the neocon pipedream that if you just close your eyes and wish hard enough, it will happen.</p>
<p>Except some of you don’t want it to happen. Some of you are just hoping to keep the war going long enough that the next President has to take the blame for the inevitable. Others of you are hoping this escalates into the US launching an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Middle East in order to confirm your hopes that we’re living in the End Times. Others of you are just looking forward with relish to borrowing as much as you can from China in the hopes of destroying our economy–and with it our democracy–once and for all.</p>
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<p>Of course there have been a multitude of human rights abuses – and deaths – in Vietnam that can be ascribed to the communist government. However, with 2 million Vietnamese dead during the Vietnam War, I would say that our hands aren’t exactly clean.</p>
<p>My point about Ho – and Mao for that matter – is that they both stood up for their countries and said that people from the outside shouldn’t govern them. But then, it is just as true, they both went on to be responsible for the deaths of many, many of their own countrymen. I view their nationalistic fight as heroic; I view their communist dogma-driven slaughtering of their own people as tragic. I can separate the two, though. For that matter, with respect to Mao, the Chinese can too. The official government line on Mao is that he was part good (in creating the modern nation of China) and part bad (in inflicting horrible dogma-driven policies on his country that drove death and famine).</p>
<p>You can try to pigeonhole my views as sanitation or as being “Jane Fonda rhetoric,” but I stand by what I said. I call upon you to go beyond a mere “communist-bad, we-good, conservative-good, liberal-bad” simplistic appraisal of this. There was no attempt to sanitize. People who viewed the Vietnamese and Asian communists solely as evil killers who represented a bankrupt governing ideology miss an important point about what motivated these people to do what they did, that’s all. They did represent a bankrupt ideology and they did inflict a lot of unnecessary death, but they were also standing up for themselves. What’s un-American about the latter?</p>
<p>I would like to have seen what would have happened if there were not barriers on our side to embracing these nationalist movements, but if we had instead seen them for what they were, movements primarily driven by an urge for sovereignty. Of course, in the Cold War, it was hard for us to see past our own assumptions about communist countries. If we could have, maybe they wouldn’t have been communist as long. Now, in my opinion, they are Communist In Name Only (CINO), and merely authoritarian.</p>
<p>Regarding Iraq, the blood bath is already happening, just perhaps with not such a quite feverish pace. Do you read the papers? Just pay attention to what Iraqis are doing to each other each day. </p>
<p>Yes, there will be more violent bloodbath, if we leave, in all likelihood. But this is likely to be as true 10 years from now as now (unless all the Sunnis have been killed off before then). We are in this position because of an ill-conceived war. </p>
<p>There is an argument, as well, that much of Iraq will be much more pacified if we left, that we are a destabilizing element. I am not counting on this to be the case, but there is a possibility that our exit would bring about more stability.</p>
<p>What is clear is that by staying, we are not getting closer to a better situation for Iraq whereby a stable, multi-ethnic government will take hold. Therefore, we should leave and stop having it be our problem.</p>
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<p>And FundingFather, it’s not just “the left” saying it. It’s many of the retired generals. You remember them? The guys who made correct predictions about all the things the neocons who never saw combat got wrong.</p>
<p>The one thing I don’t understand is how, after the neocons have been wrong over and over again, and the generals have been right–RWers still insist on believing the neocons over the generals. It defies common sense.</p>
<p>If you were building a subdivision, who would you hire as the roofing contractor? The guy who had roof after roof collapse due to his own inadequacies, or the guy who had dozens of roofs still standing.</p>
<p>This is why I have a hard time believing that the pro-war crowd is acting in good faith. I just don’t see how in good faith, you’d hire the guy with all the busted roofs.</p>
<p>“…another sadness is in the career of Colin Powell
He should have resigned instead of giving that speech to the UN.”</p>
<p>He lied in 1991 on national tv alongside Norman Schwartzkopf about the destruction of the Iraqi SCUD missile bases (they hadn’t destroyed a single one), and his U.N. speech was only another in a long line of lies and deceptions. He had a track record, and he did what he chose to do “in the interest of his country”.</p>
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This cuts to the heart of it.</p>
<p>A friend of my TheMom’s, someone very intimate with maladjusted personalities, speculates that Bush gave up the drinking but not the mental outlook or the behavioral modes. Certainly resonates with the truculent bluster and being impervious to external input.</p>
<p>In my more charitable moments, I can see Nixon as a tragic figure, though his imperial ambitions for the presidency, re-born in Bush via Cheney the midwife, rankle my soul. Still, there’s an almost Shakespearian dimension to him. In contrast, Bush is merely small and pathetic.</p>
<p>I wonder how long it will take the country to recover from him. My gut says that it’ll be at least two presidencies out. For the next, I’ll settle for stopping the on-going damage.</p>
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A kind of hero, indeed…
Just another in a long line of good-time shout outs to Ho Chi Minh. </p>
<p>This was of course very thoughtful; but why not put your voice to a purpose-- where it would really count: </p>
<p>Manuel Noriega <em>Inmate (ID # 38699-079)</em> is not due to step out of his current digs until September 9, 2007; he could use a little-o-dat love. </p>
<p>Giving absurd props to repressive thugs:
it’s not just for victims anymore.</p>
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<p>Ha. Well, don’t let my historical ruminations distract you from the matter at hand: Bush, failure or not, Iraq War. Discuss.</p>
<p>The rest is just academic, at this point, more or less.</p>
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<p>Given that addictive behaviors all pretty much present the same, I find that the whole Iraq debacle is very similar to what I’ve observed in compulsive gamblers.</p>
<p>Playing to lose: </p>
<p>No matter how much they insist they want to win, the gambler is basically self-destructive, and plays to lose. If he does win, he gambles away the money as quickly as possible. </p>
<p>We were winning in Afghanistan, and look how eager the administration was to throw that away, even let Osama bin Ladin slip away, for a fiasco in Iraq.</p>
<p>Look at how the administration hurt the war effort by refusing to plan for the occupation; firing competent civilian employees in the rebuilding (one of them the world’s expert in his area) in order to put in incompetent neophytes; creating an insurgency by disbanding the rank and file Iraqi army; and leaving munitions unsecured where they can be used to kill our troops.</p>
<p>Hatred of authority: </p>
<p>the gambler chafes under any kind of authority. Reminds me very much of how the neocons treated the experienced generals like garbage, “windbags of war”, etc.</p>
<p>It’s always just one more bet that’s going to turn the tide; riches are right around the corner: </p>
<p>six more months, 20,000 more troops, the insurgencies in its last throes, etc.</p>
<p>When things don’t go well, takes no responsibility for actions and instead blames others for not “thinking positively”, etc.: </p>
<p>If soldiers are dying from unsecured munitions dumps, the answer isn’t to secure the munitions…not to the neocon…the answer is to blame the Washington Post for reporting on the government study that discovered it. If only no one knew, everything would be fine. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p>Completely ignores history: </p>
<p>Just because he’s never been able to come out ahead of the bookies before, and doesn’t know anyone who has, is no reason to think he won’t this time, if you just “believe” in him.</p>
<p>Again, the adminstration completely ignored the lessons of history–that Iraq would be destabilized and erupt in sectarian violence if Saddam were removed; that the thinktankers have been repeatedly wrong and the “windbags of war” right; that no country has ever been able to stop a civil war another country by picking a winner and imposing a solution.</p>
<p>Reliance on magical thinking instead of concrete plans:</p>
<p>How do they know the surge will work (when two previous surges have failed)? Because this time, it “has to.”</p>
<p>Had we not had a president with a history of substance abuse, I don’t think we’d have gone to Iraq, and if we were, I don’t think we’d be playing to lose.</p>
<p>I’m not going to wade in on how ridiculous it is to have the “Bush is bad” thread reincarnating every other week. But I will say that I don’t believe any legitimate psychologist or psychiatrist would ever diagnose or label ANYONE they had not personally evaluated. So Themom’s friend has the right to her opinion but to imply that it carries any special weight is a joke.</p>
<p>It’s true…there sure are a lot of “Bush is bad” threads LOL!</p>
<p>I think Bush’s psychiatric condition is fair game, even for armchair shrinks. After all, Bill Frist diagnosed Terry Schiavo, without ever laying eyes on her. ;)</p>
<p>We’re not diagnosing Bush, sjmom, we’re discussing his behavior, and the behavior of those around him. </p>
<p>And his behavior regarding Iraq closely resembles the behavior commonly associated with addiction. I’m sorry if you find that difficult to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less valid.</p>
<p>“He lied in 1991 on national tv alongside Norman Schwartzkopf about the destruction of the Iraqi SCUD missile bases (they hadn’t destroyed a single one)”</p>
<p>So how exactly do you know that mini? I mean I know those Iraqis are supermen and much smarter than Amerikanskis but how do you know? Because Baghdad* Bob or his predessor said so?</p>
<p>*Baghdad Bob was the Iraqi government spokesman who assured the world the Americans were not in Baghdad in front of the cameras while over his shoulders American tanks could bhe seen.</p>
<p>“Again, the adminstration completely ignored the lessons of history–that Iraq would be destabilized and erupt in sectarian violence if Saddam were removed;”</p>
<p>Gee brilliant! Just out of curiousity though can you tell me exactly how many times in history Saddam was removed and Iraq erupted into sectarian violence? Was that 2 or 3 or 4 or more times? I thought this was the first but obviously I am wrong.</p>
<p>A better question is how many times are we going to die for the same ground? We have conquered Iraq twice now and if you neo-commies make us pull out we have to do it a thrid time. As far as I am concerned twice was too many, but hey you are the history expert.</p>