TJ,
"(American) invasion by force of arms must not be encouraged in any form, and the lessons must be deep, learning sincere"
So, I suppose you think that the US invasion of Japan, Stillwell's Burma road and Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers and the rest of the American effort to save China's bacon was wrong? I think it was, or at least a mistake. Maybe we agree.
There is a strong relationship between the rise of the Japanese militarists and the Bolshevik Revolution and an even stronger linkage with the rise of the communists in China, especially after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. The Japanese leadership, having serious problems with their own domestic Marxists, did not want a communist China next door, to threaten them with subversion or invasion. So they invaded China first and they were probably right in doing so.
But you know all this, after all, your own grandfather was Foreign Minister of China, both before and after the Japanese invasion.
Yes, Roosevelt should have kept his big nose out of this, what would have happened is that in time Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese would have made common cause and wiped out Mao and then China could have enjoyed a normal course of development and entry into the modern world, bypassing all the murderous peasant ignorance that the Maoists brought. In fact, in spite of Roosevelt, by the time General Stillwell arrived in Chungking, Chiang was ALREADY cooperating with the Japanese in many ways and he was right in doing so too, for he knew what would happen if he allowed Mao to run wild. In the end Chiang forced Roosevelt to recall Stillwell as Chiang had come to believe that the general, with his constant demands for Chinese action against Japan, was a bigger danger to China than the Japanese. But you already know all this or should know it, because of your grandfather.
Yes, likewise Europe, the ingrates there should also have been left to their own devices to sort it out between Hitler and Stalin without our loss of blood and treasure.
BUT, on some more recent American "invasions" I think we were on a good bit more solid ground. Take Vietnam. Here is a very simple situation where an ignorant murderous peasant, terribly jealous of his betters and aided by similar minded murderous peasants in the neighboring country manages to seize the northern half of his nation. As the French had been in Vietnam for 150 years vast numbers of the natives had essentially become "Europeans", desiring to live their lives in the modern world. But as they observed with horror the Maoist march back to the stone age next door in China, they realized that if they remained where they were that this would soon be their fate. So they fled, over a million of them, to the southern half of the country where civilization still existed. These folks, rich and poor alike, simply desired to live their lives in the modern world. They had grown accustomed to European style beds and sleeping on clean sheets and didn't want to go back to sleeping on bamboo mats on the hard ground in the manner of their primitive and uncivilized ancestors. They enjoyed the electric light and their Catholic religion and books, music and art. They didn't want to go back to the stone age where the French had found them not long ago and where the murderous ignorant peasants of the north, just like the barbarians further north in China, were planning to take them. So we really had to help these people, it is just that simple.
Not only that, from all over the region came a great cry for our help and assistance, as Vietnam was not the only place faced with this scourge, made much worse by China's descent into barbarism. So we had to act, there really was no other way.
The chief barbarian in the region was of course Mao Tse-tung but every nation there had a crop of these bandit chieftains. I submit that their common characteristic was a vast bestial ignorance of the world in which they existed coupled with a great contempt for their betters. Luis Taruc, the "Mao" or "Ho" of the Philippines is a perfect example of this tendency. Taruc was the leader and chief "intellectual" and "thinker" of the Huks, who were the agrarian communists of the Philippines, who had been waging a murderous rampage against their betters there for many years. Thankfully, the Filipinos found a leader, Magsaysay, with some real backbone, and he went after the Huks with a vengeance. Taruc, fearing for his neck, surrendered in 1954 and served twelve years in prison. But while in prison, he had a miraculous conversion and emerged from jail an ANTI-COMMUNIST.
What happened was that Taruc learned TO HIS HORROR while in prison that Marxism was an atheist ideology, and he supposedly the head communist of the whole Philippines! The problem was that Taruc, like most Filipinos rich and poor alike, was a totally devout Catholic! And he was the party "thinker" and "intellectual" and that because he had attended college in Manila for a while. I will bet anything, that Mao or Ho Chi Minh or any of these murderous peasants were just as ignorant and unsophisticated in their thinking as their contemporary, Taruc of the Philippines. All of them, just like Taruc, claimed to have a smattering of "formal" education but were still just barbarians, none of them capable of running a village, much less a great nation.
So that brings us to Iraq and more recent "invasions". I suspect and fear that this adventure is mainly about restoring the Mosul to Haifa oil pipeline to service, but I could be wrong. My problem is that I am not privy to the quality of information available to Bush, and so I just really cannot make the sort of profound judgement that seemingly comes easy to you. I would imagine that in five years, maybe sooner, that the truth about the matter will begin to emerge. But even if it turns out to be a very fortunate thing to have done, I don't suppose we will get any thanks from your part of the world, as usual.
Slagle |
