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

To: epicure who wrote (172680)	10/17/2005 5:35:10 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good post. You know, you can make an argument that supporting Saddam, and sending him weapons, and buying his oil, was the "right" thing to do, and you can make an argument it wasn't. And arguments were made for supporting the Shah of Iran and for supporting Augusto Pinochet. The US has a very long history of foreign policy positions where the brutality of the thug in question was not of any concern. The rightness of the policy is based on near term benefit couched in the more elegant phrase of it's in our national interest. I suppose it was in our national interests for the Reagan Administration to produce books for the Afghans preaching the goodness of jihad. It's too bad they didn't think that those same books might be used against us. It annoys me greatly that people are not able to separate the threads of arguments about this, and that some people simplify it to "You're against the war, you support Saddam." It doesn't strain the brain to call someone a traitor. Pros and cons are complicated, sometimes requiring fuzzy logic to make a conclusion. It's much easier if your adversary, whether it's a country or a poster is just simply evil. And there's a whole lot less typing required. I understand the folks who favor the war. I don't agree with them, and unfortunately many of their reasons don't hold up, but if the end does turn out to be good, they will always have that. And if it doesn't turn out, then they'll blame someone else, i.e, the spineless liberals. I learned from Henry Kissinger just a few weeks ago that we actually won the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong were defeated and the North Vietnamese Army was getting kicked by the well-trained South Vietnamese Army. If only we had stayed just a bit longer. jttmab

To: epicure who wrote (172680)	10/18/2005 3:16:59 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Great post Ionesco. It's too bad, however, that people who are intellectually capable of acknowledging "the other side" and discussing it rationally are opposed by people whose strength is primarily grounded in the fact that they are largely incapable of recognizing the validity of any other side. They commonly say things like "It's America's destiny to spread freedom around the world---Bush is guided by a higher power---mess with my team American and you get a boot up the ass, no questions asked---war opponents are week-kneed, hate-America wimps who'd sell out and allow the country to become subjugated to evil men---love it or leave it---bomb the bastards back to the stone age..... How do you rationalize with people who unabashedly mouth such silly platitudes? How do you rationally deal with people who believe every word of the Bible is straight from God and can't be questioned? How do you deal with people who think we could have, and should have, continued to fight and win a senseless, doomed to failure and costly war in Vietnam that was killing our sons in the tens of thousands? But most importantly, how can you rationally deal with people who are willing to keep betting on the lottery in Iraq with the lives of our soldiers? I'm tired of being reasonable. I see too many faces of the dead. To use your lottery analogy; we started a lottery in Iraq. I'm of the view that the lottery numbers have been called. It's over. The winner was chaos and our only option is to let chaos take the prize. As for those self professed "strong Americans," they'd better be getting their "it's someone else's fault" excuses in order because they're going to have to use them, and use them a lot. Maybe, as happened with Vietnam, people will forget in a generation and they can convince another majority that God and nationalism justify the use of force against foreign nations that haven't done anything to justify going in and wholesale killing them off. Cause that's what it takes to "win" in another country's back yard when winning means MAKING them do things we want them to do. The rest is a sure fire formula for the death of a thousand cuts. I only wish they, and theirs, were the ones getting cut up. I watched a PBS "American Experience" show last night called "Two days in October." One of the themes revolved around the ambush of two companies of Americans in Vietnam. They did everything wrong and one company got wiped out, the other company got hit really hard, and together they lost 64 dead out of about 120 men. It was, of course, billed by the Army's press releases and in America's news as a victory..never lost a major battle and all that. The general's son who'd commanded the battalion was killed after walking them into the trap and then sitting like a lump while they got wiped out. He was posthumously awarded the second highest award for valor. Despite all the "America's best in uniform," that's how it really works. The gung-ho company commander of one of the companies was the most interesting person they interviewed. He was one of the black and white thinkers going in; we were there to "help" the Vietnamese, Americans couldn't lose, the enemies were bad guys and all that. He encouraged his men to be just as gung-ho. When the plan of battle was laid out by his dumb shit Battalion commander he gently tried to disagree but stood up, saluted and toed the line when rebuked, kind of like Colin Powell. He distinguished himself in the battle but lost most of his men. Years later he was still a black and white thinker but his experiences had turned him the other way and he was strongly anti-Vietnam war. My wife felt sorry for him-I didn't. You can't push your men into a box while playing the "game" of war and then beg forgiveness when they go where you sent them, how you sent them and die because you sent them. These war wimps pushing the war from the safety of their homes are worse. They don't even risk their own lives but they're willing to send others to die without being willing to seriously question the correctness of their views. Fuck em. Ed.