<p>
</p>
<p>Get your facts straight - Biden doesn’t think he has a mandate to meddle in Iraq - however, he wants the int’l community to, at the very least, help create conditions were the bloodshed would be limited (much as it has done so in the Balkans).</p>
<p>Bedhead - that was pretty funny.</p>
<p>A country that has committed genocide and admits killing a half a million children, with upwards of 1,650,000 dead in total and created two million refugees has no moral basis for intervention other than to pay reparations - large ones - for several generations.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, if you would look at your history you would see that we were effectively out of Vietnam by 72 and fully out in early 73. We also had given S Vietnam our word that should the N Vietnamese violate the treaty that we would respond. Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress made that response impossible with the Case-Church Amendment, specifically forbidding any more troop involvement. They then cut off all funding of the S. Vietnamese. </p>
<p>Seeing an opportunity to re-start the war, the N. Vietnamese attacked Phuoc Long Province in December of 1974 to see what the US would do. Having our hands tied by Congress, the US did nothing and the N. Vietnamese began a Soviet-backed full-scale attack on the South in March of 1975. Without US funding that was promised and allowed for in the Paris accords, the S. Vietnamese army collapsed, leading to more bloodshed in the next couple of years than in the previous 10.</p>
<p>But, if you want to carry on with your smug view of history, be my guest. When you are the one who writes the history (at least in your own mind), you can write it in any way to ease your conscience - just like I’m sure that if the US withdraws from Iraq and the serious bloodletting begins, the left will write a history that pats themselves on the back for “stopping an illegal occupation” … consequences (human and geopolitical) be damned.</p>
<p>
For want of a wire transfer, a war was lost…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>At least in my own mind? Anybody who knows the history of the region and our foreign policy in depth is with me in a large majority in seeing the truth largely as I stated it. There is now a move afoot to cast Iraq in the same light; as a war in which we might give up too early (so the spin goes, just as we did in Vietnam). The real catastrophe – and parallel – was getting into Vietnam and Iraq in the first place. Delaying the inevitable does not change the inevitable.</p>
<p>Staving off the inevitable, at cost to the lives of the “grunts” (those Americans who unlike George “National Air Guard” Bush or Dick “Five Deferments” Cheney actually have to pay for the situation with their blood) does not change the inevitable. We were on the wrong side in Vietnam; we were fighting a war of fruitlessness. We were against a national cause. We could eradicated the Vietnamese down to the last 10 and then we would have found, most likely, that those last 10 were all against us. This was the failure of winning the “hearts and minds.” It has all undergone a lot of revisionism from a bunch of chickenhawks who never had any skin in the game and who think we are omnipotent. Well, look below to see what someone said, someone who had some skin in the game and really knew what was going on:</p>
<p>"The truest understanding of Vietnam comes from an American (British) hero who valiantly fought there and who also saved thousands on 9/11:</p>
<p><a href=“http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/voice_prophet[/url]”>http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/voice_prophet</a></p>
<p>We are a mighty powerful nation, but we are not omnipotent and in the end we don’t win against “national morality.” '</p>
<p>^^^^
(cont. from last post)</p>
<p>It depresses me to think there are people like you who are so easily led astray from understanding the truth; we have to be intelligent and strategic and not every nation views its situation through the same lens that revisionist neocon chickenhawk historians do. I chatted with my uncle who for awhile ran interrogation for the CIA in Saigon during the war and told him about the move afoot to suggest that we could have won the Vietnam war. He scoffed, Republican that he is, and said that people who thought such things were idiots. He, who had spent several years confronting exactly what was in the hearts and minds of both our enemies in Vietnam and our friends. Idiots, he said.</p>
<p>Don’t forget Mitt “Missionary Position in France” Romney and his My Five Son’s who would rather someone else do the fighting for them.</p>
<p>Fundingfather is essentially correct - the U.S. did not lose the war, the Vietnamese won it.</p>
<p>“We were on the wrong side in Vietnam; we were fighting a war of fruitlessness. We were against a national cause.”</p>
<p>A national cause? How pathetic! A “national cause” should not have to execute hundreds of thousands to force its views on the people. A national cause should not have to force millions into re-education camps (with many thousands of them subsequently dying) to help them “see the error of their way”. A national cause does not have hundreds of thousands flee on boats (with hundreds of thousands drowning) to get away. You have bought into the Jane Fonda view of Vietnam. Sad.</p>
<p>Here is a view of how the “national cause” treated its fellow citizens from a report in Newsweek, 1982 by human rights advocate and former war protester Ginetta Sagan:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some “national cause”.</p>
<p>well, its a good thing its working so well in afghanistan:</p>
<p>from the Daily Record:</p>
<p>FEARS OVER HUGE AFGHAN HEROIN CROP
DRUG workers are bracing themselves for a huge flood of heroin into Scotland after a record poppy crop in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>The UN are this month expected to reveal the Afghans have broken last year’s record harvest.</p>
<p>and because we are so desperate to get people to fight this inane war in Iraq:</p>
<p>CBS) U.S. Army Sgt. Juwan Johnson got a hero’s welcome while home on leave in June of 2004. </p>
<p>“Not only did I love my son - but my god - I liked the man he was becoming,” his mother, Stephanie Cockrell, remembers. </p>
<p>But that trip home was the last time his family saw him alive. </p>
<p>When Johnson died, he wasn’t in a war zone, he was in Germany. </p>
<p>“He had finished his term in Iraq,” his mother said. “I talked to him the day before his death. He said, ‘Mom, I’m in the process of discharging out. I’ll be out in two weeks’.” </p>
<p>On July 3, 2005, Sgt. Johnson went to a park not far from his base in Germany to be initiated into the ‘Gangster Disciples,’ a notorious Chicago-based street gang. He was beaten by eight other soldiers in a “jump-in” - an initiation rite common to many gangs. </p>
<p>“My son never spoke of joining a gang,” Cockrell told CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras. </p>
<p>Johnson died that night from his injuries. His son, Juwan Jr., was born five months later. </p>
<p>“I feel like I didn’t prepare him enough to deal with this and I should have,” his mother said. “But how would I have known there were gangs in the military? I could have had that talk with him.” </p>
<p>Evidence of gang culture and gang activity in the military is increasing so much an FBI report calls it “a threat to law enforcement and national security.” The signs are chilling: Marines in gang attire on Parris Island; paratroopers flashing gang hand signs at a nightclub near Ft. Bragg; infantrymen showing-off gang tattoos at Ft. Hood. </p>
<p>“It’s obvious that many of these people do not give up their gang affiliations,” said Hunter Glass, a retired police detective in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Ft. Bragg and the 82nd Airborne. He monitors gang activity at the base and across the military. </p>
<p>“If we weren’t in the middle of fighting a war, yes, I think the military would have a lot more control over this issue,” Glass said. “But with a war going on, I think it’s very difficult to do.” </p>
<p>Gang activity clues are appearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. Gang graffiti is sprayed on blast walls – even on Humvees. Kilroy – the doodle made famous by U.S. soldiers in World War II – is here, but so is the star emblem of the Gangster Disciples. </p>
<p>The soldier who took photos if the graffiti told CBS News that he’s been warned he’s as good as dead if he ever returns to Iraq. </p>
<p>“We represent America – our demographics are the same – so the same problems that America contends with we often times contend with,” said Colonel Gene Smith of the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/eveningnews/main3107316.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3107316[/url]”>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/eveningnews/main3107316.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3107316</a></p>
<p>and btw, our military leaders, who lied to the American public for years during vietnam</p>
<p>and as for that last quote, well, yes horrid, have we been that much better lately?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Don’t you know American history, FF? Are you really that “head in the sand”? In this country, we fought a war of national cause called the Civil War and it killed 600,000 give or take and during the course of this war nearly 1 million people died. Last time I checked we considered it one of the most momentous turning points in our history, in OUR national cause. Because civil wars are essentially that, one group killing another group made up of fellow countrymen/women to achieve a certain polity. And it at root was about one group “forcing” its views on the other. Don’t be naive. And don’t tell me you don’t think the national cause of our fight in the 1800s was also morally bankrupt, though it resulted in the deaths by violence and execution of hundreds of thousands of us.</p>
<p>Jane Fonda: cheap rhetorical trick on your part, trotted out to associate me with someone who many Americans view as a traitor. Actually, I invoked my uncle who, unlike George Bush or Dick Cheney, actually served in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Now, I happen to agree with you that communism is a bankrupt ideology that had to resort to a lot of cruel tactics and cruelnesses to no useful end. But what you studiously avoid observing is that Vietnam war was, for the Vietnamese, primarrily a war of indepence and sovereignty, like our Independence War, though the new regime applied an ideology that you and I would find bankrupt. It was a war of national cause. And like one of our great wars of national cause, it was a bloody horrible thing in terms of lives lost. </p>
<p>I do wonder, though, if we hadn’t intervened whether that war would have gone much quicker and been much less bloody for the Vietamese than it was. By the time we intervened, they had vanquished the French; all they needed to do, absent our presence, was consolidate their governance over their own people. It is quite likely that they would have early had a ruler like Deng Xiao Ping in China who was an early revolutionary and realized quite early that what its economy really needed was a good dose of capitalism and openness to the West.</p>
<p>Simple question: how many people from the South were executed, forced into concentration camps and died fleeing the tyranny of the North after the Civil War? For you to equate the NVA to the Union is beyond ridiculous.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Before you suggest thinking akin to that is “beyond ridiculous,” mull that a fair number of Americans probably view it as not that much different. I certainly don’t hold that view; I was directing my argument towards your rather naive assumption that a war of national cause would be clean and bloodless, which was the effective jist of post #249 by you.</p>
<p>Those who consider our most deadly War, not Civil but of Northern Aggression, see the actions of the North as being something like this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Now, you were the one that implied I might have seen some moral equivalency between the Union Soldiers and the North Vietnamese Army. Poppycock. I never said that. Nor do I come close to believing it. The goals being fought for were vastly different, at least in terms of governing principles underpinning them.</p>
<p>But in Vietnam, it was their fight, for their national supremacy and the development of their national polity. Can you imagine why Ho Chi Minh, from a Confucian scholar gentry family, would have become a communist? Think about it. How about because the Communist Party of the 1910-20s and thereabouts when he was forming his political convictions was the only one that stated in their platform that yellow and other “colored” people should be self-governing and have full sovereignty within their national territories? </p>
<p>Here’s a snippet from Ho’s life and his attempts to secure sovereignty for Vietnam:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>After that, thus spurned Ho went on to fully embrace communism, and eventually in his name those atrocities you cite occurred. What a travesty. What a useless, cruel, misguided, horrible thing communism in Asia was! How many people were killed in the ways you underscored?! I wonder if it all could have been avoided by a different answer from Woodrow Wilson and the Western powers in the late 19-teens. What do you think?</p>
<p>Vietnam was a war of national cause, foremostly.</p>
<p>Phew: now that fatuous revisionisms about Vietnam have been set aside, just as they were being employed to suggest that Iraq would be “like Vietnam” and it would all be the fault of people who wanted to leave just as we were on the verge of a marvelous victory, here’s some sober reporting from the war-torn land:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/09/AR2007080902412.html?hpid=topnews[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/09/AR2007080902412.html?hpid=topnews</a></p>
<p>I would say this should help put to rest notions about a lot of progress in Iraq or that things are really looking up…</p>
<p>So we stay in Iraq till everyone in Iraq loves one another…I don’t know how we do that</p>
<p>"Simple question: how many people from the South were executed, forced into concentration camps and died fleeing the tyranny of the North after the Civil War?</p>
<p>You don’t really want to count, do you? Not with 3 1/2 million Vietnamese killed by the hostile aggressive invaders there, and 1,650,000 dead in Iraq so far as a result of the action of the U.S., or the two million refugees created thus far. </p>
<p>The toll in Iraq makes Darfur look puny.</p>
<p>“Not with 3 1/2 million Vietnamese killed by the hostile aggressive invaders there, and 1,650,000 dead in Iraq so far as a result of the action of the U.S., or the two million refugees created thus far.”</p>
<p>I’ve seen estimates of the hostile aggressive invaders from North Vietnam having killed as many as 3 million after we left and they had taken over, but if you say 3.5 million perhaps you have better sources. </p>
<p>However, your sources for the Iraq death toll are highly exaggerated, but certainly may reach that level if you have your way and we get out too quickly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you are talking about the US, the whole genocide comment is way off base.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To many Viets, it was a war against foreign interlopers.</p>
<p>You keep bringing up the South Vietnamese govt. and military as if they were something which warranted support they werent, both were seen as hopelessly corrupt institutions and lacked much support from the South Vietnamese populace.</p>
<p>And yeah, the cleansing that the North Vietnamese did upon obtaining victory was horrendous, but its not like the US-backed Diem didnt have his hand in atrocities either with his private army and secret police.</p>
<p>Plus, it was the US, along with the PRC, which supported the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese.</p>
<p>If an outcome is important to you, you measure it. </p>
<p>The administration doesn’t measure Iraqi civilian casualties accurately, and when the failure of the power grid (and with it, water and sanitation) put people’s lives at risk, the administration just stopped reporting the # of hours of electricity.</p>
<p>So I find it very hard to believe that fear of civilian casualties if we leave is much of a factor in the decision making process. It’s not how human institutions work. If you own a company and you want to improve your safety record, you keep precise counts of injuries and even near-misses. And you certainly don’t stop counting when the #s make you look bad.</p>
<p>Not to mention the obvious: that we would have considered the question before we invaded, rather than after.</p>
<p>“If you are talking about the US, the whole genocide comment is way off base.”</p>
<p>Why? The Clinton genocide specifically and knowingly targeted a civilian population, especially the young, in a concerted policy that resulted in a million dead, to weaken the population’s resolve to resist. Would you like me to cite the specific Geneva Convention on genocide that several members of European governments were planning to charge Clinton with before the International Court of Justice?</p>
<p>Or would you like me to cite Denis Halliday, former Asst General Secretary of the United Nations and UN Humanitarian Aid coordinator in Iraq until 1998? Or would quoting Madeleine Albright be enough?</p>
<p>The number of civilian casualties under Bush still pales in comparison to Clinton’s (even putting aside the mass casualties from the Christmas bombing of 1998, after Clinton threw the weapons inspectors out of Iraq because they wouldn’t go along with the Clinton/Tenet Big Lie), but it’s getting closer.</p>