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BT
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
USA
168 Posts |
 Posted - 11/21/2007 : 2:26:51 PM
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R. Dittmar, I see what you are saying, but I think much of your point is somewhat undermined by the fact (and this is going by what I have read and remember, so I could be wrong) that Bush didn't WANT to go to the UN. He was basically forced to do it by Colin Powell, in order for him to sign on. And I don't think their reasoning was that bad.
The execution of the first gulf war had 2 major differences (at least) with the current one. First, it followed a clear act of aggression, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which did not occur in 2003, unless you can link 9/11 with Iraq, something no one has done. Secondly, Bush Sr. was able to put together a much larger contingent of allies than Bush Jr did, which accomplished an important goal. While the military might of those allies was negligible, the inclusion of a number of predominantly Muslim countries in the coalition precluded any sort of talk about the war being a war against Muslims, and instead framed it (properly) as a war against Iraq, and Iraq alone.
so when you stated:
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Bush’s opinions about Iraq were certainly complex given his dad’s involvement in the region, so I can’t rule out a certain fixation on his part. I do not believe, however, that Bush was obsessed with Iraq to the point of constantly being on the look-out for some reason to invade. I think that once he and the advisors starting formed this plan to “drain the fever swamps” in the Middle East, he wanted to get as much international support as possible. (Contrary to all the thoughtless criticism of him as a “cowboy”.) If you compare Iraq with other possible targets at the time like Iran and Syria, what difference do you see? Iraq had a bunch of UN resolutions against it that it wasn’t complying with, while Iran and Syria were probably chairing the UN women’s rights panel or something. Bush naively thought that the UN weenies would actually want to see their own resolutions enforced, so he thought they would cooperate and help if we went as defenders and respecters of the “world community”. As we now know they spat in our face, as almost any precocious 1st grader could have told them ahead of time.
I would say his choice of Iraq was not based on any thought of interference from the UN, as I think in Bush's mind, their blessing of the war would be great if he got it, insignificant if he didn't. I think it was based more by the fact that Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and others had his ear, and had been calling for an invasion of Iraq for years. It's not so much that Bush was "obsessed" with Iraq, but rather that he thought an invasion and subsequent ouster of a truly evil man would be in our best interests, and 9/11 gave him that opportunity.
To put it more succinctly, many on the Right believed that after 9/11, Bush soberly gathered his intelligence, and came to the conclusion that Iraq was a threat, apparently a uniquely dire threat, and decided, again after weighing the evidence, that we had to invade.
I don't believe that this is what happened.
I think his mind was made up way before judging the evidence. I think Bush wanted to invade Iraq, 9/11 gave him that opportunity, and he gathered whatever intelligence he could that would support that move, and dismissed any intelligence that would not. It's not so much that he lied, but that he carefully chose which Intel to believe, and which to dismiss. No information that has come to light since the invasion has led me to believe I'm wrong about this, but there has been quite a bit of info that leads me to believe I'm right. |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2007 : 4:04:24 PM
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First, it followed a clear act of aggression, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which did not occur in 2003, unless you can link 9/11 with Iraq, something no one has done.
I've never maintained that it is necessary to link Iraq to 9/11. Indeed, I never saw a connection. It is my position that Iraq violated several terms of the 1991 cease fire throughout the entire 1990s. Clinton's bombing of Iraq in Operation Fox was over these repeated floutings of the 1991 agreements.
Simply put, when you violate the terms of a cease fire, that cease fire no longer exists and the aggrieved party is legally right to continue the hostilities to their logical conclusion. That is the overthrow of the recalcitrant regime.
This is the rhetoric war that Bush lost with the press and the Left. This war should have been sold as simply a resumption of hostilities with a regime that clearly had no intention of rejoining the community of nations as an upstanding member. Instead, opponents were able to characterize this as a "preemptive war". An imperial power lashing out whenever and wherever it pleases.
The world would look quite different today if it had reacted en masse with the first violation of the Treaty of Versailles by Germany with military and economic pressure.
At least a few people seem to have learned from that mistake, but clearly not a lot of European countries who suffered brutally the first time they let an aggressive country slide. |
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Prankster
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Canada
727 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2007 : 4:39:58 PM
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Originally posted by Food
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Originally posted by Prankster
\By the way, that war I mentioned? The World one? Number Two? It took SIX YEARS--FOUR of them with AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT--and that was the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen. Amazing how we dispatched that one so efficiently, isn't it?
Actually, those weren't efficient at all. The casualities the US suffered were sky-high. There were single days in each of those wars that had more US soldiers die than in the entire Iraq War.
War is inherently inefficient, but to tackle a threat to the entire world like the German and Japanese military machine and defeat them in six years is pretty darn good. There were always going to be major casualties, but in WWII they mostly made it count. There were lots of individual acts of hubris and ineptitude amongst the military leadership, but on the whole, the war was executed efficiently. The point is that the Germans and Japanese were defeated in less than half the time (from the American perspective) than Vietnam took to limp to a conclusion. Surely, on a curve, that's pretty efficient? And surely it raises the question of why Vietnam and Iraq, with their smaller bodycounts, are causing so much more fuss among the citizenry?
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Check out my online comics at [URL]http://www.phantasmictales.com[/URL]! |
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Prankster
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Canada
727 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2007 : 4:53:33 PM
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And Citizen, what you and the rest are ignoring is that there were already sanctions against Iraq, along with fairly aggressive military containment. The escalation against Iraq was and is disproportionate, not utterly unwarranted. If the US went around invading every country that violated treaties and engaged in hanky-panky...well, there wouldn't be much of an army left, for starters. The war was sold in 2003 based on the idea that Saddam was somehow an immediate threat to America, and the actual motivations had to do with bad blood and the stuff that goes in your car.
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Check out my online comics at [URL]http://www.phantasmictales.com[/URL]! |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2007 : 6:57:59 PM
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I would never advocate that we go around invading every bad country. I think we should reserve the right to pick and choose our fights.
I was wondering how long it would take to bring oil into this. There are a lot of questions that haven't been answered.
For example,
When oil is scarce, it is more expensive. Pre-war Iraq's oil was only trickling into the world market by what he could sell via "Oil for Food" or smuggle out with accomplices in the U.N.
If the motivation is oil profits, wouldn't it then make sense to keep Iraq's oil off the market via embargos and thus create a more scarce market?
But let's assume that the motivation to invade Iraq was in fact to access Iraqi oil and make it available to the world market again. I say the "world market" because the United States actually gets very little oil from the Middle East. Most of ours comes from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. We are actually one of the few countries that can refine Venezuela's very poor quality oil, so remember that the next time Chavez threatens to "embargo" us. Where else is he going to sell it?
Why invade? Why not just lift the embargo? That would be cheaper and it wouldn't involve American deaths or Iraqi deaths (except for those Saddam would continue to kill). It also wouldn't involve plummeting approval ratings.
So why not just lift the embargo?
Ah, but some would say that we wanted to seize the oil ourselves. Halliburton, Exxon, whatever. Take over the Iraq oil fields and all that.
Problem with that argument is the Iraq Oil Ministry has had control of the extraction, transport, and most importantly, SALE of Iraqi oil for over three years at least. We restored control of that to them VERY early in the game.
Until these questions can be answered, I find it very difficult to say: "We invaded Iraq because of oil."
Heck, we won't even drill OUR own oil, which wouldn't cost any lives or military budgets. So we're supposed to believe we'd rather go to the other side of the planet and fight a difficult occupation/nation-building war over oil when we've got billions of barrels of it off our coasts and up in Alaska?
Doesn't wash. |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/21/2007 : 7:49:17 PM
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Originally posted by Prankster
[brWar is inherently inefficient, but to tackle a threat to the entire world like the German and Japanese military machine and defeat them in six years is pretty darn good. There were always going to be major casualties, but in WWII they mostly made it count. There were lots of individual acts of hubris and ineptitude amongst the military leadership, but on the whole, the war was executed efficiently. The point is that the Germans and Japanese were defeated in less than half the time (from the American perspective) than Vietnam took to limp to a conclusion. Surely, on a curve, that's pretty efficient? And surely it raises the question of why Vietnam and Iraq, with their smaller bodycounts, are causing so much more fuss among the citizenry?
By the casualities-per-day curve, it's nowhere close to as effecient as Iraq. Nowhere close.
To answer your question about the fuss among the citizenry, the reason Iraq casualities cause so much fuss is because they're microreported far more than any other war. During the world wars, casualities were reported by the hundreds. Today, they're reported by single numbers. Had the world wars' coverage been by single numbers, a similar fuss would've been created among the citizenry. I don't think the citizenry would've stood it. I think the citizenry would've begun calling for an end to America's empire-building ambitions in Western Europe and the Pacific Theater.
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Prankster
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Canada
727 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 12:00:55 AM
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Citizen, a lot of what you're saying is disingenuous. For starters, I'm pretty obviously not claiming that you said we should go around invading everyone. I'm asking, why make such a big deal out of Iraq, when dozens of other countries are and were thumbing their nose at UN resolutions? Iraq was contained; it didn't warrant the kind of attention Bush gave it. That obviously doesn't mean Saddam is a fine fellow. The debate always seems to come down to "Did you think Saddam should have been allowed to do that?" as if the only options were to invade, or do absolutely nothing. This is the kind of straw man argument that the Bush administration and its supporters have been using to muddy the water since day one.
More importantly, you're conflating designs on Iraqi oil with competence at actually getting the oil out, which has of course been a huge problem, contributing to the high price of gas. The oil is actually flowing more poorly now than it was under the embargo, so if we're being purely cynical as per your own model, the oil companies benefited from the war.
This doesn't change the fact that the administration clearly made oil a major priority during the invasion--securing the oil fields and Oil Ministry building right away, for instance--and that the *long term* benefits to the oil companies remain potentially enormous.
Oil is not the only reason the U.S. invaded; another goal was to have a "friendly" nation right next door to Iran. And yeah, the administration "believed" that there were WMDs, though that doesn't excuse their deliberate ignorance in that regard. But the fact that Bush is not a cackling evil mastermind does not let him and the architects of this war off the hook in any way, shape or form. There's such a thing as "criminal incompetence".
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Check out my online comics at [URL]http://www.phantasmictales.com[/URL]! |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 02:29:58 AM
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First, as to Warden's points:
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Just curious... but the tone of the comments on the board suggests that being against the Iraq war is somehow leftist.
The Left has spearheaded the anti-war movement in the United States. To deny this is to deny the obvious.
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At this point, Saddam is dead, Iraq is disarmed, al Qaeda in Iraq seems to have been marginalized and possible defeated outright (at the very least it is less of a force than it is in Afghanistan or Pakistan).... so all we seem to be there for is to keep the Iraqi from fighting each other and to nation-built
Unfortunately, none of the current crop of anti-war movies would seem to take these developments into account. Redacted, for example, has but one raison d'etre, and that is to portray the rape and murder of an Iraqi woman by U.S. forces as somehow being emblematic of the larger conflict.
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Traditionally this sort of peacekeeping/nation-building is the lefty thing to do.
By your logic then, Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace could not possibly have been a leftist since he was the most vocal opponent of the Marshall Plan. (By the same token, former Republican president Herbert Hoover must have been a lefty since he staunchly favored the plan.)
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The war in Iraq is the single biggest issue in American political life today. To the extent that art seeks to be relevant, it has to address the issue.
Hollywood during WW2 did not produce a slew of anti-war, anti-FDR movies, even though that war was far more costly in terms of blood and treasure. And despite whatever fantasies Prankster might entertain, incompetence and mismanagement were rife throughout that conflict as well. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor (itself a disaster), the US failed to achieve victory in the Pacific until the battle of Midway, nearly six months after the initial raid on Pearl Harbor.
Meanwhile FDR was appointing rank amateurs like General Lloyd Fredendall to head combat forces in the Atlantic campaign. Fredenhall's bungling led to humiliating US military defeats at Battle of Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine Pass. Only after Fredenhall was relieved of command and a new general put in charge, a certain George S. Patton, did the Allies' fortunes slowy reverse themselves.
Even after the Allied campaign gained momentum, there were still devastating setbacks. Operation Market Garden, for example, a disastrous and poorly conceived Allied operation, killed more US and British soldiers in eight days than have been killed in Iraq in four years. Keep in mind, this military defeat occurred after D-Day.
So where were all the Hollywood anti-WW2 films calling the FDR administration to task for its rank incompentence? Answer: there were none.
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So what should a movie about the war in Iraq say? I would also like to see a positive movie, perhaps about an Iraqi whose family has been tortured by Saddam finding a way to rebuild a decent life in post-Saddam Iraq.
Interesting that the only example of a positive movie you cite is one that does not directly involve US troops.
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If this war had occurred on Clinton's watch, conservatives would be jumping up and down to express their outrage at the way the war was handled and would absolutely condemn having Americans continue to die simply to keep the Iraqis from fighting each other.
If the situation was reversed, you would probably be correct on that score. Partisanship, unfortunately, is part and parcel with Beltway politics. The difference is that during our Clinton-era interventions in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, neither Congressional Republicans nor conservative pundits sought to portray our troops as either murderers, torturers, rapists, or rubes as a way of delegitimizing the larger war effort. The same cannot be said of certain present-day Hollywood filmmakers, left wing pundits and bloggers, and Congressional blabbermouths like Rep. Jack Murtha.
Again, principled, responsible opponents of the Iraq war like B.T., whom I greatly respect, are not the target of criticism here. It's the unprincipled, irresponsible lefties who are cause for concern. And even if these activists do comprise only a minority of the anti-war movement, they nonetheless wield great influence in the public debate. Witness the war funding games Democrats are currently playing in Congress. According to a recent Pew survey, only 27% of Democrats are calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and only an additional 12% are calling for timetables. So which constituency are the Democrats seeking to placate, their mainstream base or the Moveon/Kos convergence?
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But Bush gets a free pass...
Bush would not have gotten a "free pass" if a more promising leader had thrown his hat into the Presidential ring in 2004. Instead, the Democrats offered us John Kerry.
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And worse, anyone who expresses in prose, song, or film any frustration with the war and its consequences is branded an out-of-touch traitor who hates the troops.
Again, it's not just anyone, it's only those who take the most radical positions opposing the war.
Black Hawk Down, for instance, did not take a rose-colored glasses view of the war in Somalia, but neither did it depict our soldiers as being either depraved or foolish. Nor did it attempt to tarnish the US adminstration's motives for escalating that conflict. Filmmakers bent on bringing the Iraq war to your local multiplex would be well-advised to adopt a similar approach.
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I don't know anyone who wants to see us "lose"...
Yes, Warden, there are radical lefties who want us to lose. Why? Because of who's sitting in the Oval Office. That's the only reason. The fact that you personally don't rub elbows with any of these characters doesn't mean they don't exist.
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... whatever that means given that Iraq is disarmed, Saddam is dead, etc.
You need a definition of defeat? Okay, here's one: we withdraw and Iraq collapses into chaos. Here's another one: we withdraw and Iran seizes control via a Shiite puppet government.
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Clinton doesn't. Obama doesn't. Edwards doesn't. Not even Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi want to see American soldiers killed.
Who said they want US troops to die? Again, you're putting up straw man arguments. The Democrats' pattern of attack suggests they're not looking at this conflict rationally. They're only opposing this war because Bush and the Republicans are for it. How a US defeat would impact the individual soldiers on the battlefield and their families at home is inconsequential to them.
It's all about Bush.
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You can't ascribe to mainstream Democratic opinion the beliefs of crackpots like Crissy Heind. I don't believe all Republicans are Ann Coulter-clones, so there is no justification to take a quote from a nut and assume it reflects the opinion of others.
No one is ascribing anything to anyone, or at least I'm not. Again, the thrust of this thread is directed toward the hard war Left, the Kos crowd, and their counterparts in Hollywood. If you and other war opponents you know fall under the category of "None of the Above" then why are you getting so defensive? This thread isn't about you.
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About calling people names... I don't think anyone in this thread called Bush Hitler... but Senator Clinton did get referred to as a horrid woman.
Prankster has compared Bush to Putin in another thread. I'm sure you'll issue him a firm finger-wagging.
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Finally, about staying until we "get the job done." What is the job now?
In sum, to leave Iraq with a friendly, stable, representative government capable of administering its own security. This was the goal from the moment we took control of Iraq and it remains our goal to this day.
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I mean seriously. Iraq was a nasty, brutal place before we got there. It is a nasty, brutal place now. It will be a nasty, brutal place when we leave.
Not necessarily: conditions have improved considerably in the past six months. The main obstacle now is getting the Shiites and Sunnis to reconcile and agree to share power. There is no guarantee that this will happen, but recent events suggest this is not beyond the realm of possibility. In September, representatives of various Iraqi Shiite groups, include Muqtada al-Sadr's, met with Iraqi Sunni leaders in Finland, where they agreed on a tentative roadmap to peace. Whether this roadmap will be implemented remains to be seen.
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Are you telling me the job was done back in 2004, but we just didn't know it?
Um... no.
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Or are we really going to stay until violence is down to zero?
No, we're going to be stay until the Iraqi security forces can handle the violence without our help.
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"Getting the job done" is a nice bit of rhetoric, but what does it mean? And why does its meaning keep changing? At one point it meant democracy. Then in meant a strong central government capable of keeping order.
No, the goalposts have not been moved. Iraq remains a fledgling democracy and the Coalition stands staunchly behind Iraq's duly elected government. There have been no calls from the White House to depose Prime Minister al-Milaki from office.
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Now it seems to mean well armed militias cooperating to defeat AQ.
Wrong. Militias have played a part in Iraqi security since 2003. The Kurdish peshmarga is a civilian militia which has worked with the Coalition since day one and is largely responsible for security in Northern Iraq. The only change between 2003 and now is that militias from other groups (i.e., Sunni, Shiite) are finally cooperating with the Coalition and the Iraqi Security Forces.
If there has been a perceptible shift in strategy, it is that our military leadership now realizes Iraq to be a tribal society. In order to get the Baghdad government to succeed we need to engage the Iraqi sheikdoms, who wield considerable clout in the outerlying provinces. And we're doing that.
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Finally, about "talking the gloves off." Fine, okay. This is the antithesis of General Petraeus' approach and is contrary to our new counter-insurgency doctrine, but whatever. Who would you like to whack? I mean in terms of a class of actors. Who should we beat up on, and how does that achieve our goals, whatever they might be?
I agree with you on this point. This is where I part company with those on the Right who more or less propose that we should bomb Iraq back to the proverbial Stone Age. The solution to Iraqi woes does not lie with more bunker buster bombs. The solution lies, at least in part, in the more aggressive counter-insurgency that Petraeus is pushing now.
If only Petraeus had been running the show in '03...
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In the meantime, I am not sure what any of this has to do with the fact that filmmakers want to address the war and that doing so honestly necessarily means dealing with some unpleasant issues. War is unpleasant. I can't see any justification in seeking to whitewash it.
Once again, can you name a single film that deals with the specific issues you raise? It is mendacious to take a movie like Rendition and pretend that this film is intended bring light, as opposed to heat, to the current debate.
EDIT: Originally wrote "anti-Bush" when I meant "anti-FDR". |
Edited by - zombiewhacker on 11/27/2007 6:36:30 PM |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 02:58:33 AM
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First, Prankster, I'm glad to see that your Internet privileges have been restored. Now that you're no longer limited to five minutes on the web per night and are once again engaging in spirited political debates such as this one, perhaps you will kindly respond to my posts (as promised) from four months ago.
[url]http://www.Jabootu.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3321&whichpage=3[/url]
After exhaustively rebutting all your arguments that Bush lied about the war, you countered by attempting to shift the debate to the pardon of Scooter Libby, which while worthy of its own separate thread is all but irrevelant to the issue of where the world intelligence community stood on Iraq pre-2003.
Now that you've had the rest of the Summer and Fall to mull over your response, I'm certain you will not disappoint us.
With regards to your current remarks, this will have to be a two-parter:
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As for the Vietnam stuff, this guy takes it apart better than I could...
<http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2007/08/pyorrhic-victory-snatching-defeat-from.html><http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2007/08/pyorrhic-victory-snatching-defeat-from.html>
<http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2007/09/shut-up-he-explained.html
Prankster, it speaks volumes about you and your ability to think rationally that you've deceived yourself into believing, even for one millisecond, that these blog entries have anything meaningful to say. They are, in short, puerile screeds.
But in the interest of fairness, let us delve anyway. First, onto the author's first piece: "Pyorrhic (sic) Victory". Much of this rant is devoted to ad hominem attacks on Victor Davis Hanson, one of the finest minds of the Right side of the blogosphere. Now if someone wants to disagree with Professor Hanson on any given point, that's fine. But if he wishes to be taken seriously by anyone other than the Democratic Underground, the author needs to structure his arguments more constructively and support them with either historical evidence or at least something remotely resembling keen analysis. Simply denouncing Hanson for his "crackpot politcal beliefs" and walking away simply won't do.
For example, the author derisively cites Hanson's lament that most college students today are unaware that the Tet offensive in Vietnam was a US victory. After bashing Hanson incoherently for more than two paragraphs (note that the author never takes issue with Hanson's point that Tet was a US victory) we get this:
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Let's ask a few more questions and see who can answer. Let's ask 'em who blocked the reunification elections in 1956 because its side was going to lose. Let's ask if they can answer a multiple choice question: Who threw the Japanese out of Indochina in 1945? a) the Vietnamese; b) the French; c) the United States? Let's ask if they can tell us who reoccupied Vietnam in the name of colonialism in 1946? Anyone? Bueller? It was Great f--- ing Britain, that's who. Who resupplied the French when they took over garrison duties, since the Vichy had left their weapons in the hands of the people who actually lived there? Beginning with Diem, name a leader of South Vietnam whose claim was legitimate. Is there any oil in South East Asia? Did destroying the village actually save it?
This is a perfect example of intellectual sloppiness. Even if the West was entirely to blame for everything that went wrong in Vietnam, and the Vietminh and Viet Cong represented only the best and brightest that their country has to offer, it still doesn't change the fact that the US won the Tet offensive. Nothing he cites refutes this. If I say Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and you counter Jefferson was a slave owner, that doesn't change the fact that he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
As to the matter of Japanese capitulation in Vietnam, the author is begging the question.
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Who threw the Japanese out of Indochina in 1945? a) the Vietnamese; b) the French; c) the United States?
Presumably, the author thinks the answer is A. In fact, a more accurate answer might be "All of the Above" or, at the very least, "More A and C than B". The Vietminh were able to fend off the Japanese in North Vietnam, yes, but not in South Vietnam, where Vietminh influence was considerably weaker. Singlehandedly, they could not have defeated the Japanese on their own, nor could any other insurgent groups at that time.
In truth, the Vietnamese insurgents were working in close conjunction with the Office of Stategic Services (OSS), America's forerunner to the CIA. One of the great ironies of 20th century history is that during WW2 the United States was training Ho Chi Minh's forces and supplying them with arms and materiel. Without our intervention the Vietnamese could never have prevailed.
Additionally, it is foolhardy to examine the Japanese's surrender in Vietnam without examining the larger context of WW2. By the time of their drawdown, the Japanese were close to being defeated by Allied forces anyway. To presuppose that Vietnamese singlehandedly defeated their Japanese opponents is beyond sophistry. A stronger Japanese army would not have given up so easily.
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Here's an amazing fact of history: tiny Vietnam ultimately prevailed against, in succession, the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the British, the French again, and the United States. They displayed a remarkable resilience and savvy leadership more powerful nations thought impossible, and their history includes perhaps the single greatest feat of military genius in the modern era.
As to the US part of the equation, the North Vietnamese never defeated us militarily. On January 27, 1973, a ceasefire was declared; thereafter we began the rapid drawdown of troops. By late 1974 the bulk of our fighting force had been removed from theater, and none were involved in any further operations against the North Vietnamese. It was only after our drawdown that both sides (North and South) chose to violate the ceasefire and resume hostilities. Meanwhile, the US government voted to cut off all financial aid to the Duong Van Minh government. The final nail in the coffin was that Minh was an incompetent military leader whose troops were defeated time and time again despite being numerically superior to their North Vietnamese opposites. Finally Saigon fell in April 30, 1975, when our only remaining troops in Vietnam were those guarding the US embassy.
In short, South Vietnam was lost, no question about it, but it wasn't our troops who lost it.
Moving on...
Hanson: "The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat."
Author: "Extra credit for working in a sneering reference to Jimmy Carter, actual US veteran, over something he had nothing whatsoever to do with. For the rest, B for bullsh*t"
Again, instead of a reasoned response from the author, we get knee-jerk snark. Hanson never said Carter was responsible for the Vietnam war. Carter was President during most of the post-Vietnam era, and unlike his predecessors Carter showed no interest in militarily confronting perceived enemies around the world, whether they would be the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the fundamentalists in Iran, or the Russians in Afghanistan. Therefore how is Hanson distorting the historical record?
Hanson is also correct in pointing out that the prevailing opinion during the post-war period was that the Vietnam war had been lost for moral as well as practical reasons. Note again, the author doesn't dispute this. Instead, he points out that Carter is a US veteran. There's a term for this kind of argumentation. It's called a non sequitur.
Next Hanson bemoans the spread of pacifist thought. Hanson quotes Mahatma Gandhi, who once famously opined: "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
The author's response: "Yeah. Thank God somebody shot him."
What is the author's point? Is he defending Gandhi? Surely he must be aware that Gandhi was opposed to the war against Hitler. Gandhi wanted the Allies to surrender to Hitler. Gandhi told the Jews of Europe to surrender to the Germans and accept the Holocaust as a fait accompli. Does the author seriously believe that if the Axis powers won the world would be no better or worse off?
I'll skip down because much of what follows is more scattershot ranting --"Doghouse Riley", in addition to presenting himself as a moral cretin, also seems to be something of a poster child for Ritalin.
Finally, we get this:
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I'd suggest the opposite: most Americans dismiss the death toll in Iraq--total or total American--as bad, but not that bad, provided they aren't being drafted.
I would suggest the opposite, that most people are completely unaware of history and therefore have no historical perspective by which to judge the current conflict. Never mind WW2 comparisons; we lost more soldiers during the Revolutionary War than we have in Iraq. And that was when our country was a fraction of the size it is now. In any event, does the author have any real point to make here?
Anyway, he goes off on more tangents: WW1, WW2, Pol Pot, the Civil War, the Persians, Iraqi refugees, Democrats in bikinis... all in all, a worthless read.
"Shut Up He Explained"
Sadly, most of this isn't worth the effort to Fisk it because there's nothing to really Fisk. Mostly the author quotes another writer he apparently despises (in this case, Donald Kagan) then counters by making more snarky remarks.
What few observations the author does tender are mind-numbingly dense. For instance, he helpfully explains that when people say a nation was defeated in war, what they really mean is that the nation's military was defeated. "The Viet Minh did not defeat 'the French', they defeated French forces in Indochina." Ahhhh, thanks for the clarification, Dogpile. Reminds me of the time Noam Chomsky informed C-Span audiences that the term "property rights" means that people have rights to property, and not that property itself has rights. Where would we be without the world's great intellectuals to set us straight on the greater order of things?
Dogpile grinds on. Next he targets Hanson again:
Hanson: "The Democratic convention was dominated by the anti-war faction whom the Republicans called “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake."
Dogpile: "Well, in fact it was because they wore copper coins as political badges, but we've gotten this far without resorting to accuracy, so let's push on."
Wrong, Dogpile.
"The Copperheads didn't choose their name. They thought of themselves as Peace Democrats or true conservatives committed to preserving the Constitution and preventing Lincoln from grabbing too much presidential power. They were dubbed Copperheads in a letter to the editor in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1861 that suggested the term on the basis of Genesis 3:14: "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." The name stuck."
[url]http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-155522174.html[/url]
But hey, Dogpile's gotten this far without accuracy...and in case, what exactly does this have to do with Vietnam? Anyway, he drags on, but you get the point. There's no there there. |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 03:09:32 AM
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As for Prankster's own observations:
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According to you, dissatisfaction with a war at home is going to cause us to lose. But what if the war is being badly handled? What are we supposed to do? Nothing, apparently.
The war was being badly handled at one point, and we did do something. We put General David Petraeus in charge and implemented an entire new strategy that has thus far seen a vast turnaround.
And what has been the radical Left's response to our progress in Iraq? Take your pick: label Petraeus a traitor, or deny progress is being made, or admit security has improved but claim the Surge has nothing to do with it, or admit the Surge is working but that political benchmarks (e.g., Iraqi oil revenue sharing) are the only worthy barometers, so the improving security situation really doesn't matter.
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Literally any and every criticism of the current administration can be, and has been, spun as "undermining the troops" or "losing hearts and minds" or some such thing.
Here's a tip: if the war is really so fragile that it can be lost by criticism at home, maybe it's a poorly conceived war to begin with.
If opposition to a war forces a pull-out of troops before victory is achieved, of course political opposition can lead to defeat. If I persuade firefighters to lay down their hoses, am I not at least partially responsible for the house burning down?
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Do you honestly think that WWII would have been lost if people had been critical of it at home?
Yes, Prankster, if there had been a groundswell of anti-war sentiment in 1944 leading citizens to vote FDR out of office and replace him with ar president bent on bowing to the Axis powers, that would have constituted a defeat. Similarly, if anti-war sentiment had inspired Congress to cut off all funding for the war effort, that, too, would have led to defeat. Surely you must understand this.
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More crucially, why do you think there wasn't any real criticism of America's involvement (after Pearl Harbour was bombed, that is)? It's because it was a noble cause, and one with real stakes and definite goals against powers that were roughly the U.S.'s equivalent in military might.
No, it was because the US was the one being attacked, pure and simple. Nobility of cause had nothing to do with it. When the Axis powers were somebody else's problem, Americans were all too eager to simply look the other way. Not that Americans were alone in their isolationism. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the appeasement accord with Hitler at Munich, he returned to largely roars of approval, not condemnation.
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Vietnam, and now Iraq, are America playing in the imperialist sandbox for shifty reasons, unable to clearly define their missions to the American people, fought against tiny countries that, militarily, ought to have been pushovers
Since I address the motives for going to war in another thread, I'll leave that aside for now. As to your other point:
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And indeed, as you point out, they were defeated pretty handily from a military perspective. You're correct in your assertion that these wars are "lost" in the hearts and minds of the people, but what you're not questioning is whether there was anything inevitable about that.
Again, in Vietnam we were not handily defeated. Nor have we been handily defeated in Iraq.
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Back when the invasion was first launched, I mentioned that I thought a draft was inevitable. That was because I thought Bush was serious about winning the war. It quickly became clear that he wasn't serious, that he simply wasn't going to commit the troops neccessary to secure the country...
For the record, most people in the military don't want a draft either. An all-volunteer military is far more motivated and efficient.
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If Bush had "hit them hard" as you suggest--which I'm going to be charitable and assume would have meant sending enough troops to stabilize the country, as Shinsecki and co. suggested--there still would have been valid ethical criticisms of the war to be made, but at least the PR war and the actual military conflict would have been two separate animals.
The PR war can never be meaningfully separated from the blood-and-guts war.
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By the way, that war I mentioned? The World one? Number Two? It took SIX YEARS--FOUR of them with AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT--and that was the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen. Amazing how we dispatched that one so efficiently, isn't it? Without a lot of politicians making excuses for why it was dragging on and on?
One reason for the "efficiency" of that war is that we openly targeted civilians. Allies deliberately killed millions of innocent men, women, and children. We carpet bombed whole cities. The firebombing of Tokyo alone may well have killed more Japanese than five years of war in Iraq have killed Iraqis. Ditto Dresden. And Berlin. Not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki; my, that was military efficiency at its finest, wasn't it?
It also bears mentioning that in World War 2 (as in most other wars American has fought, including the Persian Gulf War), the enemy wore uniforms clearly distinguishing themselves as the enemy. It's much easier to kill an adversary who is essentially wearing a sign saying "Shoot me".
In Iraq, by contrast, the enemy has not worn a uniform since the end of the kinetic phase of operations in 2003. Today the enemy dress like civilians. Today the enemy hides among civilians. And since our armed forces do not target civilians anymore, this affords the enemy an obvious advantage. Further, today's enemy, whether they be comprised of al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias, rarely engages us in open combat. Their idea of combat is burying a IED in the middle of the road in the dead of night, or threatening some Iraqi that they'll kill his family unless he agrees to take on suicide mission by driving a VIED through a military checkpoint. It is therefore difficult to wipe out the enemy when the enemies are usually too cowardly to show themselves. This is where the tactics of counter-insurgency comes in. Rather than playing whack-a-mole as we were doing the first four years of the conflict, our forces have now shifted tactics by drying up reservoirs of insurgency support in Iraqi communities. You might want to call it winning hearts and minds.
Put another way, if the Axis powers had ditched all their uniforms, masqueraded as civilians, and adopted the cowardly game of cat-and-mouse like the insurgents are doing now, they would not have been defeated by 1945. And if the Allies had decided that under no circumstances were they going to call in massive air strikes because civilians might get hurt, the enemy might never have been defeated.
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Why, it's almost as though, the more morally grey a war is, and the worse the intentions of the instigators, the harder it goes for them. Funny that.
Ah, I see... right makes might. So Lenin handily defeated a fledgling Russian democracy and established a dictatorship that ended up murdering tens of millions people. Nonetheless, he must have acted with only the noblest of intentions because he won, whereas Alexander Kerensky clearly must have been a monster on the order of the vilest neoconservative because his democratic coalition lost. |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 07:24:30 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Prankster
Citizen, a lot of what you're saying is disingenuous. For starters, I'm pretty obviously not claiming that you said we should go around invading everyone. I'm asking, why make such a big deal out of Iraq, when dozens of other countries are and were thumbing their nose at UN resolutions?
Dozens of other countries did not start an illegal, aggressive war for territory against a United States ally, engage in ground combat with U.S. forces, surrender, agree to terms, and then spend the next decade plus ignoring those terms, plot to kill a former president, and offer bounties to AAA crews if they could shoot down coalition planes in no fly zones Saddam signed an agreement on.
That's the big deal. That's the difference.
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Iraq was contained; it didn't warrant the kind of attention Bush gave it.
Doesn't matter if it was contained geographically and it's conventional forces were severely diminished. He was acting as if he was still running WMD programs. You don't need brilliant generals and lots of tanks when a few pounds of anthrax released from a Cessna over New York City would result thousands of deaths.
As far as Iraq being a threat, the Democrats in 1998 made it clear how big a problem they considered Iraq. Their rhetoric from that year is indistinguishable from any "neocon".
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That obviously doesn't mean Saddam is a fine fellow. The debate always seems to come down to "Did you think Saddam should have been allowed to do that?" as if the only options were to invade, or do absolutely nothing. This is the kind of straw man argument that the Bush administration and its supporters have been using to muddy the water since day one.
No, the other options were punitive bombing raids, economic embargos, and attempting to foment internal overthrow of the regime.
All of those were tried.
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More importantly, you're conflating designs on Iraqi oil with competence at actually getting the oil out, which has of course been a huge problem, contributing to the high price of gas. The oil is actually flowing more poorly now than it was under the embargo, so if we're being purely cynical as per your own model, the oil companies benefited from the war.
My model wasn't cynical, it was relying on the basic tenets of supply and demand and the fact that scarcity determines value.
I suppose my using the capitalist business model to explain my reasoning is "cynical", while your statement that we've initiated a costly, deadly war because of oil isn't cynical?
Hmm. That's an interesting line of thought...
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/08/23/iraq.oil.biz/index.html
Above is a CNN article concerning Iraq's pre-war oil exports. About 2 million barrels a day, as of the 23 August, 2002 posting of that article.
Currently, Iraq averages about 1.6 million barrels a day in exports. Yes, less by about 400,000 barrels, but not enough to cause the current spike in world gasoline prices. Other oil producing countries can easily make up the difference. There was a time in past years that Iraq wasn't producing even this much, but world oil prices didn't spike as they are now because of it.
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This doesn't change the fact that the administration clearly made oil a major priority during the invasion--securing the oil fields and Oil Ministry building right away...
I would have made it the main priority too. Oil production is over 80% of the Iraqi economy. In other words, it is what puts food on people's tables there.
That we should've used more troops initially is a valid argument, but preserving Iraq's main source of revenue was a no-brainer.
It would be like if portions of Detroit were on fire and you sent all your fire trucks to save city hall, libraries, and the art museums while the car factories everyone works at burn to the ground. THAT would be gross incompetence.
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Oil is not the only reason the U.S. invaded; another goal was to have a "friendly" nation right next door to Iran.
Amen, but not just a "friendly" nation. A modern, functioning democracy with a market economy and a free press. The existence of such a country serving as an example to all the others in that region is alone worth fighting for.
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And yeah, the administration "believed" that there were WMDs, though that doesn't excuse their deliberate ignorance in that regard.
Why the quotation marks around "believed"? Are you sitting at your computer doing an impersonation of that old SNL Chris Farley skit?
Of course they believed it. So did France, Britain, Russia...just about everybody worth talking about. Even the Democrats believed it. Again, look what they were saying in 1998. They dang sure believed it.
Why did all those people believe it? Because that's what Saddam wanted the world to believe. He said so himself not long before he was executed. |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 10:12:40 AM
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| Damn. |
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BT
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
USA
168 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 10:26:32 AM
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Wow, so much to reply to, so much turkey to eat, so little time. I'll just make a few brief points
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This is a perfect example of intellectual sloppiness. Even if the West was entirely to blame for everything that went wrong in Vietnam, and the Vietminh and Viet Cong represented only the best and brightest that their country has to offer, it still doesn't change the fact that the US won the Tet offensive
Zombie, I could be wrong, but I think you are missing the authors point. He wasn't arguing that the US did not win the Tet offensive, but rather that college age students ignorance of this fact is no more indicative of biased thinking than their ignorance of all the other facts that he mentioned. VDH seemed to think otherwise.
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Take your pick: label Petraeus a traitor, or deny progress is being made, or admit security has improved but claim the Surge has nothing to do with it, or admit the Surge is working but that political benchmarks (e.g., Iraqi oil revenue sharing) are the only worthy barometers, so the improving security situation really doesn't matter.
I don't think this is entirely fair. For starters, conflating "the left" with ONE ad sponsored by ONE group doesn't seem right, putting aside the fact that the right has routinely maligned generals with whose opinion they did not agree. Secondly, I haven't heard anyone on the left make the argucment that the surge has nothing to do with the decrease in violence.
Lastly, and I think it's an important point, I don't think you can dismiss the notion that while violence has decreased, the benchmarks, which were the STATED reason for the surge have not been met, so easily. I don't think many rational people thought that it was impossible to decrease violence by stepping up the amount of troops in specific areas, but that decrease is essentially useless if it does not lead to the very benchmarks which Bush himself tied the Surge to. If those benchmarks are not met, then essentially we are looking at extending the surge in perpetuity, simply to keep us at the level we are at now. You might not agree with it, but it's a valid argument, as opposed to an unprincipled stab at Bush.
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Dozens of other countries did not start an illegal, aggressive war for territory against a United States ally, engage in ground combat with U.S. forces, surrender, agree to terms, and then spend the next decade plus ignoring those terms, plot to kill a former president, and offer bounties to AAA crews if they could shoot down coalition planes in no fly zones Saddam signed an agreement on.
Perhaps, but there WERE other countries who were funding Al-Quada and were actively housing terrorist groups. Had we invaded one of those countries, it would look much less like we are fighting a war of choice, and were fighting the war against terror.
Again, in my opinion, everything you mentioned might be true, but I don't believe any of them are reasons why we invaded. We decide to invade, THEN we decide how to sell it to the public. I believe former Bush administration members have almost admitted as much. |
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thewarden
Minister of the Sacraments of Jabootu
USA
25 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 12:20:42 PM
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Zombie: Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
I only disagree on a couple of points. I don't think we stand behind the duly elected government of Iraq. At this juncture, we have come to believe that the Maliki government is too corrupt and too close to Iran-affiliated militias. Arming the Sunnis is a reflection that we have given up on reconciliation and instead are hoping to encourage a balance of power that sustains a devolution of power to the provinces. It might have been an inevitable development given the divides in the country, but you are simply wrong to claim that the strategy we are pursuing now is the same as always. The goal-posts have not been moved -- that analogy suggests mission creep in the sense of expanding goals. Rather we have changed our focus from a stable, democratic center to a tribal-based federation.
About the last six month... violence is now down to Jan 2006 levels. We have a long, long way to go to get to 2004 levels. In the meantime, none of the institutions are making progress. It is likely that the police, for instance, will ultimately need to disbanded and recreated yet again given how rife it is with corruption and mixed-loyalties. In terms of the Iraqi army... according to our own assessments it has made no, literally no, progress in terms of being able to stand alone. Yes, there are technically more Iraqis under arms, but the number of capable units, loyal to the democratic government rather than militia leaders, has not increased at all.
I supported the war. I just happen to think that we have accomplished 95% of whatever we are ever going to accomplish there, and that even at reduced levels of violence, the cost in American lives far outstrips the benefits we can reasonably hope to gain by accomplishing the last 5%
I see no reason to assume that if we left, the result would be a bloodbath. The Sunnis lack the manpower to try take over Shiite areas or Kurdish areas. The Kurds and Shiites have no reason to seek to control Sunni areas. Ethnic cleansing has effectively eliminated mixed areas, so there are few flashpoints. Quite literally, the only likely impetus to violence going forward is the distribution of oil revenues. Rather than fighting and dying for the fantasy of a stable, democratic country -- the likes of which exists NOWHERE in the Arab world -- if we merely managed to cobble together an oil law we would have accomplished everything we could hope for.
Lastly... about losing the propaganda war. There is no such thing as a military victory. As Clausewitz wrote, "War is a continuation of politics with an admixture of other means." With the possible exception of World War II in Europe, there are virtually no cases where military forces has instrumentally accomplished a political outcome. Normally, victory and defeat are a function of politics as much as anything else. Aspiring to win militarily without taking into account politics is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of war. |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/22/2007 : 3:15:49 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by thewarden
With the possible exception of World War II in Europe, there are virtually no cases where military forces has instrumentally accomplished a political outcome.
The American Civil War. |
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