A Black Falcon Wrote:So, so much is wrong here...
1. SADDAM AND THE ISLAMIC RADICALS HATED EACH OTHER!!!
Would you like us to discuss real, actual fascism? The corporatist economic model and all? Why is it so much of a stretch to describe Islamists as metaphorical fascists, when their societal ideals are actually quite similar to fascism - if for entirely different reasons - but not so much of a stretch to call Rudy Giuliani a fascist? Do you understand your own hypocrisy - calling Bush and Giuliani **"fascists" while refusing to acknowledge the term "Islamofascist" (which is, if as uninteresting as the term "neoliberal", at least somewhat vaguely accurate)?
As for the rest, I read your descriptions of "shredded civil rights", and I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I just don't believe that the things you cited constitute much of an affront to civil rights, unless used in particularly malicious ways.
Quote: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).
And yet, it did. After Tet is when politicians started motioning to "bring the troops home", renewing the enemy's energy and allowing him to make outrageous demands. Of course, it didn't happen instantly.
Relations between China and the Soviet Union became cold long before the 70s. Mao started being a little bitch soon after Stalin's death, when Khrushchev acknowledged that Uncle Joe was a bit of a genocidal maniac. It has been postulated that the USA could probably have invaded North Vietnam without causing a Chinese counterattack considering that situation (which was unknown at that point to US intelligentsia).
Quote: 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.
I guess all those people who died in Rwanda and Bosnia didn't live in the real world. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of the UN - actually, I strongly believe in a one-world state - its problem is that it includes nations that are not liberal democracies. Those nations' governments should not be regarded as legitimate nor recognized in any way. If those governments were to be removed from the UN, then I have no doubt that it would have the moral imperative (and therefore the gumption) to act decisively.
Anyway, explain to me, in ten lines or less, what the UN, once it is "involved" will do in Iraq to solve or ease the situation.
Quote: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.
Yeah, that's a real bind innit.
Quote: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.
Maybe. Vietnam was involved with the Soviets much earlier than you'd think. Ho Chi Minh was not so much pro-American as he was a proponent of the "Third Way" - technically neutral in the conflict between capitalism and communism, but really on the Soviet side. Third Way states were usually third world nations that weren't really communist, but naturally prone to seeing the USA as the enemy. Kissinger explained this fairly well in his book I mentioned earlier - third world countries could gain more, materially, by opposing the USA, since they were less likely to become confrontational than the USSR. Nasser gave the first example when building the Aswan dam by playing off the superpowers against each other, to see who would propose the most money, then finally denouncing the Americans as imperialists to gain points with the population.