6th January 2008, 9:01 PM
N-Man Wrote:Whathafuck, how much time do I have to devote to this. Just give me my pants back.
1) Are you joking? Comparisons between people like the Taliban and fascists make no sense? Whatever Bu$hitler has done to civil liberties pales in comparison to their acts, surely you'll agree. Show me the repression of free speech, the enslavement of women, the banning of communication media. At worst, it's easier to snoop - big deal. Did you know that Arab nationalist groups like the Ba'ath are directly inspired by and have their roots in 1930s European fascist parties? Furthermore: talking to Islamists is a waste of time, invading Iraq was a good idea if poorly executed, and you should indeed consider invading Iran - if only consider. IIRC even the (socialist) foreign minister of France agrees.
So, so much is wrong here...
1. SADDAM AND THE ISLAMIC RADICALS HATED EACH OTHER!!!
I know that if all you watch is Fox News you wouldn't know that in fact Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and actually was a secular leader who despised the radical Islamists, but that is how it was. So yes, Saddam was in many ways a fascist. The radical islamists, however, are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum from him. Their goal is theocracy, not fascism, and those two types of government are diametrically opposed. Republicans love to confuse secular Arab parties like the Ba'ath party with radical Islamic ones like the Taliban, but no person who has any understanding of the region could ever possibly believe such ridiculous lies. It's all just misdirection to cover the fact that there's no justification for what they did in Iraq... get people to think that Saddam was like the Taliban and you're home free! It's too bad for them that some people actually looked at the facts.
2. Yes, civil "rights" are nonexistent in much of the Arab world. Yes, women's rights there are worse than anywhere else on the planet. However, saying that as long as we aren't at their level everything's good is an incredibly, incredibly stupid thing to say. So according to you as long as we aren't holding public executions in the street we're all good? Ah... NO! America's Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are some of the greatest statements of freedom and rights ever made. In many ways Americans have more rights than almost anyone else on earth; for instance, we have more freedom of speech than almost anywhere -- where else could groups like the KKK actually be legal? Defending this is an incredibly important task that has become much more difficult recently, as the Bush administration's goal is to destroy as much of it as possible. The administration has put a massive effort into obliterating as many of our civil liberties as they could ever since day one (or at least the days after 9/11 when they slipped the horrific Patriot Act through), and on far too many issues they have been successful.
-Domestic spying -- it is now okay to spy on people in the US pretty much carte blanche. The qualification that it has to be related to "international terrorism" is a meaningless one that any sane person could drive convoys of qualifications through.
-Indefinite holding -- we can kidnap anyone from any nation on the planet (other than our own) and hold them in jail in an undisclosed location for any length of time we want without ever giving them any access to lawyers, without telling them why they are being held, and without sentencing them. We can use many techniques on them to extract whatever information they have, many of which are torture.
-Extreme rendezvous -- we can then take those people and send them to other nations such as Egypt, where they can be tortured even more extremely than we can do ourselves. We can then ask for the Egyptians (or whoever) to tell us what it was that those people said.
Quote:2) Yes, if you could have gotten Ho Chi Minh to be on your side and not a communist that would have been pretty smart. If you could have convinced Saddam Hussein to hold free elections, also. That is neither here nor there.
Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a Communist second, not the other way around. We never understood that. The WWII coalition he led to free Vietnam from the Japanese and French was one with all kinds of nationalist groups in it, not just Communist ones. That changed after the war, of course, but as I said, that only happened because the US refused to support their efforts for independence and instead supported French military efforts to reconquer their colony. Oh yes, and as for elections, they were never held because we knew that Ho Chi Minh would win them, and we couldn't allow that. This was standard US Cold War policy -- we never supported holding any elections that we thought leftists would win. North Vietnam and the united Vietnam had no elections either, of course, but as far as American involvement goes, there was never the slightest shred of doubt that the vast majority of the Vietnamese people, north or south, wanted a unified government led by Ho Chi Minh or his successors.
Saddam Hussein? Totally different... for one thing, from the day he took power until 1991 we SUPPORTED him, and supported him fully. Remember that great picture of Rummy shaking hands with Saddam in the early '80s? :) We were funding his war against revolutionary Iran. Bush I and Sadaam got along. In 1991, in fact, before he invaded Kuwait, Saddam asked some American officials if they'd have a problem with his taking over Kuwait. They essentially said 'fine, go ahead', and so he did, thinking that America would not act to stop him. It was only later that Bush I had a change of mind and decided that no, he had to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
As for elections in Iraq, what would they have done? Holding elections in a country with no political culture and no sense of what democratic politics are is totally pointless, as the elections we have held in Iraq since 2003 have shown (Afghan "elections" show this too). You can make them vote, but as long as they don't understand what democracy is and what voting or popular rule really means, it gets you nowhere -- people simply vote for whoever their tribe or faction leader tells them to vote for and that's it. An effort to build political culture in the Middle East would be a great and noble task, but it'd also be an incredibly, incredibly difficult one... not that we have ever tried to do that. We wanted Iraq as a reliable friendly nation in the '80s, so we supported its government; its record of using chemical weapons, genocide, war crimes, etc, didn't matter one bit until we'd decided that Saddam wasn't our friend anymore, and we didn't want elections until then either, knowing that Middle Eastern people are often much more anti-American than their leaders, so any popularly elected government would probably be less friendly.
For a present-day analogy here, look at Pakistan, where it is similar fears of the results of an election that provided Musharaf with years of American support.
Anyway, those two situations were totally different and have very little in common except that in both cases it was the Cold War that drove US policy, towards supporting Saddam in Iraq and opposing Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
Quote:3) After Tet, the Viet-Cong were exhausted. Instead of finishing them off, you caved in to popular pressure and withdrew. That is the plain truth. North Vietnam would have eventually come to the peace table - no country, no army can sustain casualties like they did forever. It took 12 years for the British to win in Malaysia, and that's in an environment where their enemy was largely withheld supplies - but in the end they won. Kissinger himself described how the US later realized that North Vietnam was much closer to caving in completely in negotiations than they thought at the time.
Tet was 1968. We "caved" and withdrew in 1972. It's pretty obvious that what you are saying did not happen. North Vietnam was being supplied by the Soviet Union and China (though later in the '70s after China and the USSR split the Chinese supplies were cut off).
Quote:4) So, you don't have an idea for solving Iraq either, yes? What exactly are you saying, beyond "get the UN involved"? How would getting the UN involved help? Oh - surely Shi'ite death squads and Islamist suicide bombers will have more respect for UN negotiators than US ones, everyone knows the stability that they brought to dangerous situations in the past, like Rwanda for example.
Iraq... yeah, Iraq is a huge, huge issue, and it is something that I think about a lot but don't know what to do about. I do think that nothing will happen until we get another administration in because of the Bush administration's proven record for not wanting to actually do anything and for hating the UN. I know that it's Republican dogma that the UN is evil and wrong and bad and useless, but I'd say that, looking at the real world, the exact opposite is true. Sure there are things we disagree with the UN majority opinion on (such as Israel) but overall the UN is an incredibly important, and very powerful and influential, organization. Once we get a Democratic president we'll have a huge, huge task on our hand making the UN like us again, but it MUST be done. UN assistance is really our one hope for improving things in Iraq...
The UN has done a huge amount of great work. They are often very, very slow to act, which is a major failing of theirs, but once they get involved things happen as long as the money and political will is there. For instance, the UN-backed sanctions of Iraq from 1991 to 2003, which were completely successful at stopping Sadaam from rebuilding his chemical and biological weapons programs. Those sanctions did have tragic side effects as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died from lack of medicine and such blocked at least in part by the sanctions, but they did achieve their main objective.. a fact that conservatives did not believe in 2003 and that was not proven until we invaded the place and found absolutely nothing.
As for Iraq, one important step that must happen is that the oil revenue sharing agreement (between the Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds, to give the Sunnis in central Iraq, who have little oil in their lands, some of the money the Kurds and Shi'ites are making from their oil fields in the north and south) must be passed. I think the fact that it still is not passed proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that this administration does not care about actually improving the situation in Iraq. No political reconciliation will happen until the money issue is worked out, and that money issue is not getting worked out.
Quote:I LMAO at how Bush is "shredding civil liberties" but how North Vietnamese concentration camps and forced collectivization are just like "oh well, they did ok". What am I supposed to say to you?
Well, I meant that relatively. We had, and in some ways at least still have, civil liberties. They are a part of our nation that we should protect. Losing them greatly hurts our nation and undermines the government and freedome we claim to have; remember Ben Franklin's quote saying that people who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither? I believe that securing our liberties is incredibly, incredibly important and, yes, sometimes does come ahead of security. Oh, security absolutely is important and where possible we should be secure, but going too far and destroying our rights in search of that impossible "perfect security is wrong. That isn't the kind of principle this nation was founded on and it isn't one that we should be pursuing.
In contrast, Vietnam never really had any civil liberties to begin with, so compared to what they had before the Communist rule in Vietnam wasn't that bad, particularly if you factor in the decades of war that killed millions. Also, as I pointed out, the civil rights situation there was perhaps even worse in South Vietnam under the American-supported dictators than it was later on under the North Vietnamese. Even so, of course you are right that it's a problem that the Vietnamese government is still oppressive, and we should work towards making it more open; we have strong trade connections with them, we could push... of course we won't, as the fact that we trade with China shows (China is almost certainly the world's #1 human rights abuser, and we do nothing about it), but yes, we probably should.
That said, if we'd been supporting the Vietnamese nationalists from the beginning I would expect that things would never have gotten that bad in Vietnam. Imagine Vietnam without 45 years of Soviet influence... that could, potentially, have happened.