On Dec 12, 2004, at 8:44 AM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
From: "Warren Ockrassa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I honestly don't know why the lessons of history manage to go unlearned, Dan. I only know that they do.
Well, you think that _your_ lessons of history go unlearned. Other people (people who, among other things, _know_ a lot more of the history) might think that those lessons are very different, or that they don't apply in this situation.
This, apart from the needless snide aside (you have no way of judging how much of any history I might know), is a good point. If you could have managed to state it without trying to turn it into a personal jab, it would have been well-done.
Yes, interpretation of historical events is at least partly objective. Given that I can see how some things that might be clear to me may not be to others.
I referred specifically to Rummy and Cheney.
Well then, how, exactly is anything about them a "lesson from Vietnam"?
Nothing about them specifically is a lesson from Nam, but I listed more than their names as lessons. I brought *them* up to point out that once-failed leadership was in charge of this second debacle, and that should have been a point of concern before the invasion of Iraq. It wasn't.
I wasn't comparing McNamara to them; rather, I was indicating that their hawkish tendencies and failures in previous administrations should dang well have been warnings not to employ them any more. But it seems that, in every level of government employment, nothing succeeds like failure.
What failures in previous Administrations, precisely?
The failures in Nixon's administration. What other administration was involved in Nam and also had Cheney and Rumsfeld as participants?
Both Nam and Iraq are about nothing but conquest. 30 years ago it was about overthrowing Communism; now it's about a "war on terror"; but the subtests of BOTH conflicts were "liberating the people" of those nations, whether they wanted to be liberated or not.
Vietnam was about nothing but conquest? Really? South Vietnam wasn't an independent country?
Viet Nam was about trying to resist or overthrow the Communist government of North Viet Nam. That's conquest. (Show me any war, by the way, that is not about conquest.) South Viet Nam as an independent country with at least two political factions at odds within it. And it was in danger of not being independent much longer.
By your standard, I point out that _World War 2_ was about "nothing but conquest", as it too was about "liberating the people" of the natoins of Europe and Asia.
All wars are about conquest. I'm not sure what you mean by the rest of your point here.
We could, after all, have just pounded Japan after Pearl Harbor and left Germany alone.
I'm not sure how. Germany and Japan were at least loosely allied. Pounding Japan would have left us with the undealt-with problem of the Nazis.
For that matter, Japan would never have attacked us had we not gone to great efforts to protect China from Japanese conquest.
Mmmmmaybe. Certainly we were a thorn in their side. But they would have been foolish to overlook us; they would eventually have got tired of having Europe, Asia and Africa all to themselves, don't you think?
We kind of assumed that they wanted to be liberated from the Nazis, and we were right.
"They" being the European nations that were invaded by the Nazis? Yes.
Most historians of the Cold War think that the American reaction was _defensive_ - that's why our strategy was called "Containment". You've heard of it? We were trying to stop them from conquering us.
I've not only heard of it; I was around for part of it.
In both cases the US was the occupying force, in both cases the US met much heavier resistance than anticipated, and in both cases the US was caught off guard. I don't know why holders of advanced degrees can't see the parallels. They seem pretty plain to me.
Well, among other things, because your first statement is false and your third statement is questionable.
No, and no, respectively. The VC saw the US as an occupier, just like "insurgents" in Iraq see the US as an occupier now. The US was obviously caught flatfooted by the quantity and nature of guerilla resistance in Nam, just as it is with Iraq. I get true and unquestionable, sorry.
How exactly were we caught off guard?
By the way the war dragged on and on in the face of resistance that was much heavier than expected? Or by the way US forces ultimately had to retreat and let Saigon fall? Are you saying those events are evidence that the US was *not* caught off guard? Or were you referring to Iraq -- and the way resistance was much heavier than etc. etc.?
McNamara was blitheringly incompetent, surely, but he wasn't _surprised_.
So he expected to lose to "inferior" forces? Interesting. In that case he wasn't just incompetent.
But Dan, for every expert you can mention who was caught flatfooted by Iraq, I'm pretty sure I can find another in the same field who was predicting disaster from the beginning. For instance, we had US armed forces commanders predicting *precisely* the series of events we're seeing now, and these men were ostensibly students of military history to a depth at least as great as anyone you can cite.
His point - which I think is obvious - is that if there is a lot of disagreement among those experts, it's a little strange that you're so absolutely certain that you're right.
What I am certain I am right about is that there were mistakes made in Nam that are being replayed in Iraq, and that these mistakes are pretty obvious. I don't see what part of the foregoing you take issue with.
Now if Gautam wishes to address this issue further he's welcome to do so, but I won't carry on a discussion by proxy.
Why not? Dan's doing at least as well as I could.
Because I won't debate with a third party what you might or might not have meant by a particular statement. You are quite capable of making your own arguments.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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