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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (48058)	9/30/2002 4:10:05 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi JohnM; I'll vote Democratic for the first time because I think Bush's foreign policy is horrible. Now in fact I believe that if Gore were in power our foreign policy would probably be just as bad. With Vietnam, for example, both parties did essentially the same thing: stupidly escalate a hopeless case when they were in office, and cravenly accuse the other side of appeasement (or of being the party responsible for losing XXX to the Communists) when they were out of office. The result was that they managed to talk each other into throwing away a shitload of people's lives. It was until recently my impression that the military, diplomats, and politicians were mostly optimistic about Vietnam. Since I started reading "A Grand Delusion", I've come to realize that all three had large numbers of people who were very pessimistic -- in private -- but optimistic in public. Basically, they sold a happy meal to the American public. The underlying error was the domino theory. The domino theory was wrong because it did not take into account historical, sociological and political differences between different nations. Instead, it assumed that all Communist rebellions were due only to Soviet Union influence, and glossed over the details of the individual countries. It was at best only an out of focus high level view, and at worst a sound-bite strategy. Since the public is inherently very undereducated, and unfamiliar with the details of, for example, land ownership in Laotian highlands, sound-bite strategies work well on them, and get politicians elected. Would the Democrats run a better foreign policy? No, they'd have done almost exactly what the Republicans did. The only differences would be over details like what union would represent the ineffectual government searchers at the airports. These are not significant differences. But at least with a divided government the debate is better, as one side is sort of forced to take the devil's advocate position. And since I believe that our best strategy now is to let history develop naturally, a divided government is better as it tends to lock itself up on pointless arguments (like what union the airport security people should belong to). -- Carl