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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (322210)	11/21/2002 4:49:23 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "counting on the home grown opposition" >>> Why would I deny a well-known fact? >>> Do you deny that essentially we were sucked into picking up the remanents of the lost French war to recapture control of the last of their Asian empire after WW II? (The French spend most of the Marshall Plan money we gave them on their war in Asia... while Germany spent it's Marshall Plan money on rebuilding it's economy and infrastructure.) >>> You remember of course, that the Vietnamese fought stubbornly against the Japanese invaders all during WW II... and that after the war was over they expected their independence... not to regain their former status as colonial vassels in a French Empire. >>> You remember also that after WW II the U.N. tried to call for free elections in Vietnam - but we spiked the plan because we were aware that Ho was a 'national hero' for his fight against the Japanese, and would have won in a landslide? >>> Now, I'm a Capitalist, and I hate and detest the mindnumbing and total economic failure that totalitarian Communism is... but Vietnam is clearly one place where we abandoned our core principles of support for Democracy and self-determination in favor of supporting any Dictator - no matter how bad - who promised to stand against Communism in principle. >>> In hind sight, our national inclination toward strong defense and aggressive offense is proven fruitful... but our naive understanding of history and historical imperatives is proven laughably bad. 1) To not understand that the flawed economics at the heart of totalitarian Communism would ultimately cause these systems to fail, and collapse from within... is regretable, but understandable. For, who can flawlessly predict the future? (Still, to have had a little more faith in Capitalism, and the modern 'mixed economy', would have been nice.) 2) But to believe the 'dominos' lie: that 'all Communist States are brothers under the skin, and directed from a central command' was just plain ignorant... and betrayed the greatest of ignorance about history and the siren call of the modern national state. For example, China and Vietnam share a 1500 year history of conflicts. To think that suddenly the Vietnamese would be 'brothers under the skin' with Bejing was just ridiculous. 3) To think that the dominant historical trend of the first half of the 20th. Century (resistence to Colonialism, and the rise of nationalistic local powers) could have been easily opposed... just because we saw things in a different light... is hubris at best. >>> We saw things as a polar World struggle between Communism and Capitalism... while locally they believed it was an anti-colonial, nationalist struggle. >>> In the final analysis, it's always counterproductive to abandon one's own core principles for perceived short term gains... and it's unproductive to stand in front of the moving train that the rise of Nationalism and anti-Colonialism was.