Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "Tell that to the 2 million Cambodians killed on the killing fields by Pol Pot's fiends."
The US should have intervened to prevent that horrible event in Cambodia. If we'd gone in, the people would have welcomed our troops with cheers.
Instead, we ignored it. Why?
Because we'd already gotten our fingers burned in Vietnam and the American people were unwilling to go back for more.
If all those fools had run the Vietnam conflict correctly (which would have been to cut a deal with the popular figure Ho Chi Minh so as to align him with the US instead of China), the US would have been in position to make a humanitarian move into Cambodia that would still be remembered in the area 100 years from now. We could possibly have influenced Ho Chi Minh to unify the country democratically instead of by military force. That would have contributed to a much earlier softening of his regime.
Instead, due to a simplistic foreign policy that assumed that all Communists were equivalent and directed by the USSR, we were in no position to get involved. Our foreign policy was simplistic largely because it was driven by US political concerns. Since any particular US citizen (like any particular citizen of any other randomly chosen country) is unlikely to understand distant foreign situations at much beyond the sound bite level (i.e. stuff like "tell that to the 2 million Cambodians"), the result was that the two parties beat each other over the head with sound bites.
My whole point on use of US military resources can be broken down to the simple point of this: We should help countries that are aggressed by other countries (like Kuwait was attacked by Iraq). We should help eliminate regimes that are hated by their people (like Cambodia or Afghanistan).
If we follow my guidelines, every war we get into will result in a foreign population cheering our soldiers (not the agressor population, like Germany in WW2, of course, but the freed populations like France). Instead, we got into Vietnam for theoretical reasons that were described at the sound bite level. It was a f'ing disaster.
By the way, if we hadn't already pissed in the Iraq pot, the people there would probably welcome US soldiers there for a liberation from Saddam, and I would be in favor of the attack, just like I was in favor of the attack against the Taliban.
-- Carl
P.S. I don't know any Vietnamese at the moment. I'm sure that most of the ones in the US appreciate our helping Vietnam, but those are mostly the ones that escaped the Communist regime. The fact of the matter is that it wasn't Chinese Communists that were sniping at and setting up booby traps for our soldiers down there.
I also have no doubt that some of the Vietnamese who fought us then have changed their minds since. But so what. This is now, that was then. |
