20th January 2008, 11:55 PM
A Black Falcon Wrote:As I said, there are not "islamofascists". They are theocrats, and the difference is important and significant. Fascists are not religious, theocrats are. It really does make a huge, huge difference.
OK, let's go over this one more time. Giuliani is a fascist because he's authoritarian. Islamists are authoritarians as well. Since being authoritarian is enough to be called a fascist - according to your own definition - I fail to see why Islamists can't be called fascists. So what we can do is either use your definition and call both Giuliani and Islamists "fascists", OR we can use the word "fascist" properly and in reference to extreme nationalism, the corporatist economic model etc. etc. and not call either Giuliani or Islamists fascists. Pick one. Not half of one and half the other.
Quote:Oh, and those were only a couple of things Bush has done to our civil liberties. Other things include revoking the right of habeus corpus, the Supreme Court nominees he chose revoking centuries of precedent in multiple cases (that 'centuries of precedent' one was when they said that police can break into your house with no warning if they have a search warrant. Before you actually had to get notification before they could do it; this right reached back centuries and was part of the British Common Law we inherited as the basis of our legal system. The conservative majority in the supreme court tossed that out, saying something like 'who cares if you're embarrassed by the police' or such.), all that stuff about indefinite holding of people who have not been charged with a crime (this goes so utterly, TOTALLY against everything that the American judicial system has ever stood for that it is simply astonishing that anyone even considered it, much less implemented it... previously habeus corpus had been suspended during wartime a few times, but always with the intent of bringing it back soon. Here the "war" can never end, so it is a permanent measure. The "War on Terror" is a gift that keeps on giving!), etc, etc, etc.
You're exaggerating. I don't know the specifics of this, but it has a lot to do with whether you can be classified as an "unlawful enemy combatant", and at any rate courts have generally been upholding habeas corpus in the cases that have been brought to them. Beyond the laws of the USA though, there is a serious question of what to do with terrorists or foreign combatants - POWs that don't belong to an actual protagonist in a war. While I do think that the rights of US citizens ought to be protected, I'm not certain that things like the Geneva convention should apply to terrorists - they certainly don't fight according to its rules. Ultimately, I think there should be devised a way to identify just what an "unlawful enemy combatant" is. We need a new Geneva convention for the Terrorist Age.
Quote:So you'd risk war with a nuclear-armed nation just on the THEORY that they might not attack? What a great idea... (during the Korean War, of course, China didn't have the bomb yet.)
Of course not. This is in retrospect. You can, of course, only go on intelligence that you DO have. Maybe it would have been possible to get that intelligence.
Quote:As for Tet, it was a strategic defeat for the NVA and NLF, that is true. What it was most successful at doing was hurting American morale. But given that we never should had been in there in the first place and the whole war was based on lies and misconceptions (in addition to the whole "was Ho Chi Minh's government actually anti-American at the end of WWII?", you could also add on "the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a forgery and a lie -- quite simply, it never happened. That was the excuse for war. Thus, the war was unjustified and based on lies, but was fought anyway because of how badly the US government wanted to fight it." and "the government lied to the American people consistently and blatantly throughout the war, pretending that we were "winning" when we were not (invading a village, killing whoever you found there, and then leaving is not a "victory".), understating or ignoring Vietnamese civilian casualties and displacement (do you really want to tell the American people that we have killed millions of innocents? FIVE MILLION people died in Indochina between 1959 and 1975!), saying that "if Vietnam goes communist it'll all fall like dominoes" when that did not happen, etc, etc, etc...
Of course, you start a war with a diplomatic incident - how else? Wars are fought for inherent strategic reasons, not because of "incidents" - those are just the excuse, they've always been. As for "lying" to the American public, I'd say that, considering how weak-kneed they turned out to be precisely after Tet, it was only a bad idea because of the eventual backlash.
Domino theory has its pros and cons. Laos and Cambodia did fall to communism shortly after Vietnam, but the Indonesian communists had been defeated earlier on and Thailand turned out to be surprisingly stable. You do need to take in account factors in other countries, domino theory can't explain everything. I would say that Vietnam definitely emboldened communists worldwide.
Quote:They need to hold talks between the three major groups, with international negotiators, and with clear statements that they would be rewarded for making peace, while continuing to fight would not be an option. Bush has given up and is just letting them fight and not talk; the important thing here is getting them to talk, not who gets them to do it. Either the UN or a Democratic administration could do the trick, I think, though of course any Democratic administration would get the UN involved too. Don't understate the capability of the international community... as I said, Rwanda ended when they finally got involved, Iran got rid of nuclear weapons because of European pressure, etc. Things could potentially happen in Iraq with the right international pressure, but we'll never know with anti-internationalists like the Bush administration in power here.
Rwanda, Iran? Are these dreams you had? Rwanda ended when everyone was dead - or rather, when rebels finally ousted the genocidal government, and Iran for all we know is building a nuke right now with Russian help. The Europeans are just as freaked out about Iran as anyone, and the French foreign minister even said that they would support an armed intervention if need be.
I'm not sure I follow your point on Iraq. What more do we need to do to "get them to talk"? Elected people from every ethnic group have been talking for a while now and not getting anywhere. There are some things we could do to help along those talks, including trying to stabilize the situation military-wise - and this, I believe, is what the current US policy is. What else do you want to do? Force them to make a decision? It'll just make the fighting flare up again.
Quote:You are right, though, that having nations like Syria on the UN "Human Rights Commitee" is a disgrace and makes that body useless. The UN should be doing more to get nations to build democracy among the peoples of the world; it is a very hard task, but not an impossible one. As I said simply holding votes does nothing; you must instead build civic culture in nations that do not have it. Even though it does seem impossible, I think that it is... even in the Middle East, mostly devoid of such feelings, there are nations like Turkey that have real elections and government. Pakistan too, really, though its is more troubled of course. I don't think that not recognizing any autocratic nations is the solution, though... there are simply too many of them. We should punish the ones that are the worst human rights abusers for sure (China needs to be treated very differently... we can't because they make all of our stuff, but they need to be.), but punishing nations simply for being autocratic? No, we should be working on efforts to change them instead, within what is possible; not everything is.
Well, you need to pick one. Either we shut our door to autocratic regimes like China, or we try and build a "civic culture" in those countries - by trading, in all likelihood. You can't just shut down commerce and have them live in abject poverty then try and help them build a "civic culture", it's nonsense.
Quote:Kissenger is a power-hungry warmonger... and as I said early on Ho Chi Minh did make some overtures to the Americans, which we ignored. Would he have ended up solidly in the Soviet camp anyway even if we had attempted to befriend Vietnam at the end of WWII and told France that we wouldn't support their effort to retake Vietnam (this would have led to a very quick failure of the French effort. We funded most of the French war in Indochina that ended in 1954.)? Possible, certainly, but we'll just never know, and it seems very hard to believe that that path would have led to a worse result than the one we got, given how horrifically badly things went there in the course we chose.
Kissinger is a textbook realist , and you mostly know him as a power-hungry whatever because he was very successful - any realist will look like a power-hungry warmonger, but most of the time you don't hear about them because they don't become media sensations like Dr. Kissinger did. Anyway, he's recognized as an authority on international relations and is widely studied. Who Ho Chi Minh would have sided with should the USA not have opposed him from the start is interesting but difficult to ascertain - IMO he would have edged towards the Third Way countries, IE I'll side with whoever gives me the most money, or I'll just take everybody's money and side with the Soviets in the end because they have the biggest guns anyway. That may be better than what happened historically, but it's not better than what could have happened - like, for example, winning the war.