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Politics : THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scoobah who wrote (391)	11/13/2003 9:36:00 PM
From: Sidney Reilly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2164

My first thought is McCain would be a good man. But I'd have to look at his CFR ties and see who he gets his marching orders from or if he is independent of the New World Order crowd.

To: Scoobah who wrote (391)	11/14/2003 12:04:22 AM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 2164

McCain supports John Kerry in 2004. he just won't publicly say so, except to compliment John and diss Howard Dean. McCain and Kerry are close friends and McCain secretly despises Bush.

To: Scoobah who wrote (391)	11/14/2003 7:29:21 AM
From: John Carragher	Respond to of 2164

I believe McCain mentioned he no longer has any interest in being president.

To: Scoobah who wrote (391)	11/15/2003 11:56:48 AM
From: Sidney Reilly	Respond to of 2164

Senator McCain makes speech to Council on Foreign Relations. Watching Iraq, and Seeing Vietnam By CRAIG R. WHITNEY Published: November 9, 2003 Associated Press Ferrying troops in Baghdad looks much as it did in Vietnam. But the battle is different in many ways. Quagmire," "attrition," "credibility gap," "Iraqification" — a listener to the debate over the situation in Iraq might think that it truly is Vietnam all over again. Bombings in Baghdad and Falluja and hit-and-run guerrilla attacks on American convoys resemble attacks four decades ago, when Vietcong terrorists and guerrillas were trying to shake the faith of the South Vietnamese in the Saigon government and discourage further American involvement. Instead, President Lyndon Johnson sent half a million men, shuttling them into battle in aircraft like the Chinook helicopter that a missile attack in Iraq brought down last weekend at the cost of 16 American lives. But Iraq is not Vietnam, and 2003 is not 1975 or 1968. Saddam Hussein was driven out of power and his regime collapsed last spring. There is no independent sanctuary named "North Iraq" for his Baath Party henchmen to fight from, no Soviet Union to keep them supplied with arms and fuel, no equivalent of Laos or Cambodia in the Middle East for whole divisions of his loyalists to hide in, no Ho Chi Minh Trail that suicide bombers can use to drive to Baghdad. Nor is there an allied Iraqi government yet, elected or otherwise. The terms of the American discussion about Iraq are often similar to the arguments about Vietnam, and small wonder: although the Vietnamese Communists won the war in 1975, nobody won the battle about it here at home. That may be why, when boiled down to their essence, parts of the current debate seem to be almost as much about Vietnam as about Iraq, as Senator John McCain pointed out in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington last week. "Our stunning victory in the first gulf war, many said, exorcised the demons of Vietnam," Senator McCain said. "But it was only a partial victory," he added, because it left Mr. Hussein in power, "and it did not end the hold of the Vietnam syndrome over our national consciousness." There are lessons from Vietnam worth remembering in Iraq, and one is to be clear about the reasons for going to war. Opponents of both wars have argued that the United States used false pretexts to attack both North Vietnam and Iraq. In Vietnam, it was the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964, after a North Vietnamese attack on an American destroyer that may or may not have actually endangered the ship. In Iraq the joint Congressional resolution in October 2002 authorized military action on the grounds that Mr. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks that may or may not have existed. Supporters of the official position would say that at the time, neither administration was trying to deceive Congress. The fog of war obscured what was going on in the Tonkin Gulf. And intelligence about Iraq, under a dangerous regime led by a secretive tyrant, was imperfect at best. But skeptics say the lesson of Vietnam, that a White House bent on a course of action is capable of deceiving itself as well as Congress, is still valid. The United States involved itself in countering the Communist-led struggle for the independence of Vietnam from French colonial rule because it feared that failure to resist Communism there could allow extension of the Iron Curtain to all of Southeast Asia, and eventually even to the beaches of Waikiki. Only years later, after Vietnam and its Communist sponsor China went to war with each other in 1979, did American leaders fully appreciate that the Vietnamese Communists had distinct national interests. Some — but not all — American supporters of the Vietnam War also came to realize that many Vietnamese — but not all — saw Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader, as their liberator from colonialism, and Americans and their South Vietnamese allies as the new colonialists. Most Iraqis would agree that Saddam Hussein was no liberator, and his die-hard supporters who attack the American forces and the appointed authorities in Iraq do not enjoy the popular support the Communists had in Vietnam. "The Iraqi Baathists and terrorists who oppose us are not guerrilla fish swimming in a friendly sea of the people," Senator McCain said. continued nytimes.com