Hi frankw1900; Re: "I remember reading the Dow Jones and AP wires every day from 62 onward ..."
Ooooh, you're getting kind of old.
Re: "what they were doing there was slipping 'advisors' into a different place and time and supporting a ruling religious minority."
This is a considerably better position than what we've got going in Iraq. In South Vietnam, a substantial percentage of the population supported us (the Catholics). One wonder if Kennedy's religion influenced any of his actions. But I do find it very heartening that you admit that the Vietnam war was badly run. What I expect to hear from conservatives is that we would have won it except that the Vietnamese had Jane Fonda.
Re: "They were doing it with the support of China and Russia."
The problem is that American soldiers are getting shot by AK-47s and RPGs. Iraq doesn't need China and Russia to provide these. They can get them from Iran, in the unlikely event that they ever run out of them.
Re: "In this case, the US hasn't yet made a case against itself in Iraq as a conventional colonial power like the British or French ..."
This argument has validity only in the limits of your own mind. The question at hand is what is in the minds of the Arabs. And with them, there is no question. They think that the US is a colonial power along with Israel. Your version of reality will not influence people in Iraq who have zero similarity to you. Hell, you could have said the same thing in Vietnam, that the US had no colonial ambitions. In fact, you just admitted that the Vietnamese transferred their war against French colonialism into a war against US forces. How hard is it for you to realize that the Arabs have transferred their war against Israeli colonialism into a war against the US?
Didn't you notice that 3000 people were f'ing killed in the WTC? Do you think the f'ing French did it??? No, of course the Arabs did it, and of course they're fighting us. Give me a f'ing break. You guys want to argue both sides of the case. But for you to argue that the Arabs don't see us a colonialist power is the height of blindness.
Re: "... despite the loud noises made by Shiite clergy jostling for position and the resistance of Baathists, the vast majority of Iraqis in the South and North and even in Baghdad have positive feelings towards the US."
It's cool that you're willing to admit that the US does have some problems, and that they spread over the entire length of Iraq, but you should look again at those reports of positive feelings. If the Iraqis truly have positive feelings about us, then why the f' is it that our troops are the ones getting shot at? If they loved us, why aren't the Iraqis the ones doing the combat patrols? Get a clue, the vast majority of Iraqis don't give a damn whether we're there or not, they just want a job and to be safe. And doesn't it worry you at all that the same people who now say that the Iraqis love us are the ones that (a) told you that Saddam had WMDs, (b) sent our troops into Iraq without a clue that the convoys were subject to ambushes, (c) thought that the rest of the world would sign up for the war, (d) are currently protecting our airlines by preventing US citizens from carrying nail clippers on aircraft, (e) have already tried to buy peace in the middle east for 50 years, and finally, these are the same humans that drug our butts into the Vietnam quagmire.. My question for you is simple. How bad does the news have to get before you admit that Iraq was a mistake? And how much worse than that does it have to get before you admit that we have to pull out? The bare fact is that our administration lied like a plank to get this war started, and they are giving nothing but rosy news now. As soon as an administration man admits that things aren't the best they've ever been, he gets fired. And the news media has been following along like a puppy dog, but is showing signs of turning around.
Re: "The Vietnamese parallel falls down also with respect to the support of outside powers for anti-US resistance. Certainly the Iranian Mullahs can send some aid to the Shiites they favour and the Syrians can attempt to aid the Baathists they can contact, but the inconvenience this will cause the US is nothing compared to what they experienced in Vietnam because of Chinese and Russian support."
The numbers are not on our side. Iraq now, is about twice as large as South Vietnam was then. What's worse the Arab nation (i.e. the collection of humans who speak Arabic) is now about 3x what the Vietnamese nation was then. In addition, at that time we had a much stronger stomach for taking casualties, what with the cold war and all.
But the most telling difference is that in Vietnam, the vast majority of the casualties on our side were taken by the South Vietnamese, not the US. Now that we're in Iraq, we have no allies. The Brits are too smart to ramp up the troop (i.e. target) counts like we're too stupid not too.
As soon as we get 50% more troops in Iraq, our death rate will increase by 50%. As those troops are ordered to present a more forward attitude, those troops will take correspondingly larger casualties. As the Iraqis learn to fight us, they will kill more of us.
Just like the Israelis, we are faced with a population of Arabs that mostly just doesn't really like us, but with a small percentage that is eager to gun us down. And just like the Israelis, we have no effective way of separating the fish from the water.
-- Carl |
