Hey, would it be OK if I sent your kids some cluster bomblets for Christmas?

__________________
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

--Hunter S. Thompson

Never stop living up to the stereotype, do you?

I guess we'll never know. But I dont beleive the US would have allowed it with our forces in country.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

No, but that's not really the question.

The real lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that even the strongest modern military, occupying a foreign country to prop up a puppet government, cannot win against a determined insurgency. Only a true native government with the support of the people behind it can do that, and it doesn't really matter how modern and powerful its military is, because the insurgents aren't going to have state-of-the-art forces anyway. Although the occupying power can never be defeated militarily by the insurgents, that isn't necessary: the inability to finally win means that sooner or later, the occupiers will retreat in political defeat, unwilling to take casualties endlessly. The same thing, of course, is happening in Iraq. The insurgents there can never defeat our military forces on the battlefield, but they don't have to; the fact that we can never finally defeat them, either, means that we will continue taking casualties until we retreat -- and, sooner or later, retreat is exactly what we will do.

Also, countries adopt harsh governments in response to harsh realities. One of the harshest realities possible is war. It's pretty safe to say that the government Vietnam would have adopted in 1956 would have been far gentler than the one that emerged in 1975. So to the limited extent that the U.S. was to blame for what happened after the war (the main blame of course falls on the Vietnamese themselves), it's not because we left (that was inevitable), but because we were there in the first place (that was not).

I guess we'll just have to disagree. We could have won in vietnam and we can win in Iraq, if we only fully committ. It seems to always hang in the balance between the military victories on the battlefield and the determination by the democrats to choose power over security.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

How could we have won? How can we win in Iraq? What does "winning" consist of? If you mean end the fighting so that our troops are no longer taking casualties, how can that be brought about?

I'm not sure what you mean by "choose power over security." Neither power nor security was in question in Vietnam. The choice was between continuing the war indefinitely and accepting the fact that we could not win. (Or, if you think we could have won in any meaningful sense beyond continuing not to lose, tell me how.)

Incredible.

We don't have the potential for those numbers without inflation and production bottlenecks because they are only possible for a nation that is recovering from complete destruction. Indeed, much higher levels of growth are possible.

Pol Pot was the ultimate left-wing moster: Marxism and nihilism taken to the absolute limit of evil, and beyond. He turned the nation into a slaughthouse. They are now recovering because they have adapted capitalism and thrown out the psychotic Marxist maniacs who turned that nation into a charnel house.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

We could have easily won on Vietnam. Far too many targets in the north and Cambodia were off limits. Silly liberal hand wringing over direct confrontation with the Soviets or the Chi-coms, combined with a misplaced concern over civilian casualties prevented the US from waging the total war necessary to ensure victory. Not even one nuke was dropped, yet the bleeding hearts claim we were defeated. The same pernicious nonsence that will lead to defeat in Iraq as well.

Had we not turned tail and retreated from Vietnam, the US could easily have marched into Cambodia in '75 and quashed the Khemer Rouge. Vietnam only took 12 years, Cambodia would have been cleaned up in a decade or less.

We could of course have defeated and overthrown the Khmer Rouge (Vietnam did it), but that would not have been "winning" in Southeast Asia. It is true that having limits on our own military activities there, such as not invading North Vietnam, made things more difficult, but in the end such limits didn't matter; we would not have been able to win had they been lifted. Any purely military calculation as to why we lost misses the point: we did not lose on the battlefield. We lost because there was no way to win, and because we were not willing to go on merely not-losing forever. It was a political defeat, not a military one.

But that's one of the things von Clausewitz called war: politics continued by other means.

Tim: I have to take issue with two of the words you used to describe the Khmer Rouge. They were neither "leftist" nor "nihilistic." They were insanely extreme nationalists and isolationists. The targets of the slaughter included anyone who had ever had any contact with foreigners, or who was of non-Khmer ethnic origin, including a lot of ethnic Vietnamese, which may be what prompted the Vietnamese invasion. In a way, the Khmer Rouge show us what can happen when a regime that is as viciously nationalistic as the Nazis turns their full attention inward instead of outward.

Aside from that, I certainly agree with your characterization of Pol Pot. In a world history that has no shortage of monsters, he was in a class by himself.

I thought it was for the oil? Please get your stories straight...

__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

not here, but I have a slip for my boat you can mine.





Oh and I am not 100% positive but pretty sure they didn’t
drop cluster bombs on Hanoi, but hey, we did our best

__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

We did not do our best in Hanoi, too many restrictions on what sites could be targeted. Had we hit Hanoi like we did Tokyo or Dresden the war would have turned out differently, with a glorious victory for the US.

Winning consists of creating a democratic govt that protects the basic human rights of its citizens, and has the ability to protect its citizens lives from foreign threat. We were well on the way to this in south vietnam when we withdrew. We are well on the way to that in Iraq.

Democrats, however, want to win elections, not to win wars.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

Yep, and we would have had the liberals at home complaining about killing "civilians", the same "civilians" storing weapons for the soldiers. There are no innocents except children, as adults have choices.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.