On Dec 12, 2004, at 11:41 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
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.
Well, first, Cheney was part of the Nixon Adminstration for about a week, since he was on Gerald Ford's staff.
Sorry, but that's not entirely correct. He was on Ford's staff, yes, but he started at the WH in 1969:
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/vpbio.html>
Excerpt:
"His career in public service began in 1969 when he joined the Nixon Administration, serving in a number of positions at the Cost of Living Council, at the Office of Economic Opportunity, and within the White House."
I'm not sure Rumsfeld was _ever_ part of the Nixon Administration.
As Dan pointed out, that's not correct either. I'm glad he did the digging. It surely hurt less coming from him than it would have from me.
Both men were on the Nixon administration and both men knew each other. IIRC it was Rumsfeld who recommended Cheney initially in '69.
He was, again, Ford's SecDef. Beyond that, however, Nixon got us _out_ of Vietnam. You keep talking about "once-failed" leadership, but _this doesn't make any sense_. Unless you want to point out how Cheney and Rumsfeld failed during Vietnam - and I'm pretty sure you can't - it's just a nonsense statement.
For starters, you need to acquire a thesaurus and look up synonyms for "nonsense". You're far too young to sound so cantankerous.
Second, since Cheney and Rummy were present while the history that we refer to was the present day, it's hardly "nonsense" to assert that they were (1) closer to the action in the WH than most people alive at the time; and (2) apparently didn't learn very much from watching the Nam fiasco self-destruct.
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.
I'm sorry, this is just nonsense. If Vietnam was about overthrowing the government of North Vietnam, _we would have invaded North Vietnam_. That might even have been a good idea - Vietnam might be a free state today if we had. Whether it was a good idea or not, though, we _didn't do it_ because that _wasn't our goal_.
So ... what, thousands of troops and millions of dollars committed over years for a goal that was not the overthrow of the N. Viet Nam government?
Who's uttering the "nonsense" now?
By your standard, I point out that _World War 2_wasandabout "nothing but conquest", as it too was about "liberating the people" of the natoins of EuropeAsia.
All wars are about conquest. I'm not sure what you mean by the rest of your point here.
Well, they're usually about conquest _by one side_. The side that's trying to prevent itself from being conquered is not usually described as fighting for conquest.
I'm not sure what spin doctors would put it that way; whether one is on the offensive or defensive is immaterial. If one is not engaged in war with the sole purpose in mind of conquering one's enemy, one is doomed to lose.
My point was that if you believe what you write, then you oppose the American involvement in the Second World War as well. After all "all wars are about conquest."
I don't know how you draw a line from my statement of a fact to my feelings about the ethical validity of US involvement of WWII. That's like saying that if I assert gravity is a universally-attractive force, I must find it unethical that people perform stunts on the trapeze. Sure, there's a relationship, but it's tenuous and entirely spurious.
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?
I don't know. My point is that it was a good thing we got involved - because we weren't fighting to conquer anybody, any more than we were in Vietnam.
Yes we were. We were fighting to conquer the Nazis, the Fascists and the "yellow menace".
It's only you who is making the nonsensical statement of claiming that we _were_ trying to conquer people in Vietnam. Well, by the standards you have suggested, if we were conquering people in Vietnam, we were doing it in the Second World War as well.
That is precisely what we were doing.
wasMost historians of the Cold War think that the American reaction was _defensive_ - that's why our strategycalled "Containment". You've heard of it? Weweretrying to stop them from conquering us.
I've not only heard of it; I was around for part of it.
Then, since the lessons of history are immediately apparent to you, Warren, tell me how you managed to learn from containment that we were trying to conquer the Communist countries.
How else would you define the defeat of Communism, which really was the goal of the cold war?
It wasn't all just them there reds that were aggressive, you know. It's been argued, in fact, that it was Reagan whose ramp-up of the arms race in the 80s was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union; it just went bankrupt, unable to keep up with US innovation.
This was heralded as the "defeat" of Communism. If you look up defeat in the same thesaurus you use to find a replacement for "nonsense", you'll find a synonym for "defeat" is "conquest".
All war is about conquest. That's the reality. If you're not out to conquer, you're not fighting a war (that's the corollary to the earlier premise about losing any war in which one's goal is not conquest).
Words have meanings - that is, actual meanings, not just whatever you want them to mean at this particular moment in time.
I'm aware of that; I'm not the one trying to deny the reality of the definition of war; nor am I the one who is apparently unaware that warfare is about conquering the enemy.
What, exactly, are they teaching you in those PolySci courses?
-- 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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