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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (19538)	7/27/2001 1:13:55 AM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

A nit perhaps, but clearly a very complicated nit to unravel. That is not hindsight, plenty of people saw it at the time. Ummm.... Vietnam was still pretty small scale in '63. There was that "domino theory" that would have made it much more difficult to pull out. You didn't want to be the President who lost Southeast Asia. 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? Nixon in the '60s? Hard to say. By the '70s a large part of the population thought it necessary- -but that was because they had traveled that long, painful road. 65,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of casualties. A fortune poured down an Asian rathole. But Goldwater may well have been the President. I don't see him pulling out at all. Some might say that it already has. How so? We are involved in no wars currently. I do like to try to spot the rough points coming up, so that I can shout about them while nobody listens. Did you acquire this masochism yourself or is it hereditary? :-) (I personally believe that they were defeated less by us than by the deficiencies of their own economic system). In the usual sense of the term, we did not defeat them. What Reagan's much-aligned "Star Wars" program did was FORCE them into an arms race with us. Their economy could not take the strain and cracked. Gorbachev's perestroika was supposed to restructure the Russian economy so they could compete. It spun out of control. 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 haven't heard of this plan. It certainly wouldn't work. The Chinese know they are not even close to be the military equal of the US and simply won't race.