Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "Since I made no such claim, and noting the non-sensical illogic of your statement, one would guess that your public display of lunacy forgoes any requisite confession to your state of mind."
Let me try it again, this time without the typo:
Hawkmoon, on the domino theory, June 16, 2003
And what happened? Cambodia fell, Laos fell, while Thailand fought for its life and survived only with massive US military aid. #reply-19034282
The domino theory was used to justify 50+ thousand US dead in Vietnam. That Cambodia and Laos fell cost us nothing. Our aid to Thailand was minuscule, both in lives and dollars, compared to our losses in Vietnam.
Re: "Can you even begin to accept that the N. Vietnamese aggressed against the newly created Laos, desiring to annex that country, or to at least make it a puppet state? Can you admit that upwards of 30,000 N. Vietnamese soldiers were stationed in Laos to protect the "Ho Chi Minh" trail, the only major supply line into S. Vietnam??"
Heck yeah, I can admit this. (Actually, I have no idea what N. Vietnam intentions were in Laos.) But so what? It's not the duty of the United States to go about righting every wrong that happens throughout the planet. Nor is it in our best interests to do this. And the facts of history are clear. Vietnam was not critical to the US.
We are not powerful enough to control what happens on this entire planet. Our military is powerful only in its ability to defeat conventional armed forces, it is useless in guerilla warfare. This is even more true now than it was during Vietnam.
So getting us stuck into hopeless land wars in Asia is not going to help any nation, Arab or American.
Re: "At least be objective enough to recognize that "insurgencies" cannot truly exist without external support from someone."
So if I come up with even a single example, you will admit that you're an idiot?
Re: "Even the American "insugency" against the British would have failed without French support."
This is a lie. By the time the French intervened (1778), the British were already well aware that the colonies were a quagmire. In fact, they'd already lost an army (of 7000) at Saratoga under Burgoyne. For that matter, US ships captured nearly 2500 British ships during the war, for losses of only 1323, and that was without any significant help from the French.
If the French had not intervened, the war would have continued longer, but the writing was already on the wall. The basic problem for England was that the US was too far away, and the inhabitants were too well armed to defeat. Sort of like Iraq is to us.
Re: "Only because the "dominoes" stopped falling after Cambodia and Laos. Thailand didn't fall and remained independent rather than becoming a proxy state of the Communist superpowers. However, had Thailand have fallen, Indonesia would have been next, and that would have imperiled Australia and the sea routes between the Indian Ocean and South China sea and Pacific."
So you're saying that the domino theory was correct because the dominoes could have kept on falling. Some logic.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Re: "It's like saying the course of WWII was not affected by the defeat of Erwin Rommel at El Alamein."
I'm not saying that the US was not "affected" by the loss of Vietnam. What I'm saying is that Vietnam was not critical to the US. There's a hell of a lot of difference.
It is a logical tautology to state that WW2 was "affected" by an event of WW2. What else could be true? But if Rommel had won at El Alamein would the Germans have won the war? Not a chance. Even if the Germans hadn't gone on the disastrous Russia adventure they'd have still lost the war. Except that Berlin might have been radioactive.
The fact is that a victor in a war only rarely wins every battle. The way that you most increase your odds of coming out successfully in the war is by carefully picking your battlefields to be the places where you can do the most damage to the enemy's interests at the least expense of your own.
And the war on terror is a battle for hearts and minds, not territory. In that, Iraq is a great setback. As you yourself admit, our failing to get elections going there is a disaster in itself. And every day that our soldiers strip search civilians is another day that the electorate becomes more disagreeable to us.
-- Carl |
