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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (19535)	7/26/2001 9:55:28 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Vietnam was a nit when it was handed to JFK and then to LBJ. A nit perhaps, but clearly a very complicated nit to unravel. That is not hindsight, plenty of people saw it at the time. But I think a good argument can be made that it was not. I think the odds of avoiding that escalation would have been improved (although by no means reduced to zero) if a Republican had succeeded Kennedy. Why? Because LBJ was subject to the "soft on Communism" charge if he pulled out and he knew it. All Democrats were. In general, Republicans cannot be painted with that brush. A good argument, perhaps, but I think less than decisive. Was it the man, or the time, or both? Certainly Nixon was able to disengage in the early '70's, but would he have been able to in the early '60's? Would he have wanted to? I would guess not. Politicians do influence the political zeitgeist, but to a larger degree they are influenced by it, and in the early '60's the nation was still in the grip of an aberrant emotional frenzy that placed an ideological construct above the national interest. I'm not sure anyone would have gone against it at that time. And now that we've "defeated" the USSR, I think our current hubris is going to lead us into another quagmire. Some might say that it already has. My own interest in history is not in finding errors to lay at the doorstep of "liberals" or "conservatives", which is a silly practice, really, especially since the definitions of those terms change so fast that those we blame for the errors of the past may have nothing in common ideologically with those that carry their brand now. I do like to try to spot the rough points coming up, so that I can shout about them while nobody listens. I see a potentially nasty rebound to the notion that we "defeated" the USSR (I personally believe that they were defeated less by us than by the deficiencies of their own economic system). I think that there is an idea in the Bush camp that we can and should "defeat" China in the same way and using the same tactics as we used to "defeat" the USSR. I think this notion is based less on any real threat posed by China than on the visceral desire to match the previous generation by duking it out with "the enemy" and prevailing. I do not think that this is a very good idea.