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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (12058)	8/21/1998 10:56:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

"People fought for us. So we need to fight for the next generation." Some questions come to mind... are you really fighting for the next generation? Who told you that you are? Is that person trustworthy? Is that person sufficiently informed to render judgement? Is ideology or religion in any way involved? If freedom is involved, whose definition of freedom, and whose freedom? "Fighting for another's freedom is divine" seems perilously close to "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". I think that questions like this would be much more easily answered for, say, World War II than for Vietnam. Perhaps the most urgent question, of course, is "is it necessary", and if more people asked it before going to war, there might be fewer wars. Probably not. Necessity is an extraordinarily malleable concept, especially among ideologues. Steve

To: Gauguin who wrote (12058)	8/21/1998 10:59:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

The professional military advised Lyndon Johnson not to commit ground combat troops. Gen Harold Johnson, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a survivor of the Bataan March, certainly opposed this use of troops. But we had two civilian leaders who "knew better" and overruled the advice of the professional military, LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara. They are the men who sent in the Army with no good idea of what they intended to accomplish. They had no strategic plan, no definition of what would constitute victory, and no idea of when or how they would pull the Army out of the region. And where was Congress? They signed the blank check that permitted an undeclared war with no plan for how it should end. I don't know if anyone is paying attention, but we are going to look back on this week in August 1998 like we do the Gulf of Tonkin. We declared war again without anyone noticing. This time we are going to take on the world of Islamic terrorists, no matter where they are located. Anyone have an idea of how we will know when we have won this one?