Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: Atreus21
Originally posted by: NFS4
I'm listening to John McCain's town hall meeting live, and he keeps saying that "We can't accept defeat" or that "I'd rather lose a political campaign than lose a war".
What is wrong with defeat? What is wrong with admitting that we may have screwed up? What's wrong with admitting that some actions may have been wrong? Why must we WIN at all costs and not accept defeat in a war?
Is it pride? Is it for morale? We are not a perfect nation, so why must it be assumed that every war must have a perfect outcome of "WIN"?
I dunno, just my random musings...
We are not perfect, but we are the best in the world. Every conflict we've engaged in throughout our history has been on behalf of a good cause, Iraq included.
That's why we cannot lose.
Ya, like how we helped the Vietnamese in their struggle to be free people, ending colonial occupation for centuries, by the Chinese, the French, and during WWII, the Japanese.
Ho Chi Minh wrote to *Woodrow Wilson* for asking for the US to help them. After the Japanese occupation ended in WWII, o Chi Minh said hey, now's a good time for not re-occupying them, and asked the US to help them have France not come back. He even wrote a 'Declaration of Independance' modelled on the US.
And the US helped them get their freedom, right? Oh no, that's right - we supported the French re-colonizing them, because it was 'in our interest' to side with our 'European allies' and turn a blind eye (until JFK had the morals and courage to change the policies) - and at one point were paying the French 90% of the cost of *their* war there. But the French lost, and so that was that, right?
No, faced with their doing their own thing, not under our thumb, we came up with a scheme, and promised a 'temporary' partitioning, until elections - but when it was clear Ho Chi Minh would win and not 'our guy', we *blocked* the elections and refused to let the country re-unite. What next? We trained and sent terrorists from South Vietnam into North Vietnam - which is what the destroyers were doing in the 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident that actually happened (in their waters, despite our saying otherwise, as I recall).
No, we had yet to send millions of Americans there to fight Vietnamese peasants - dropping more bombs than in all of WWII, dropping Napalm, dropping Agent Orange.
Two million of them killed. Now, we 'thought' we had a good cause - there was a global war on communism, and we assumed that they must somehow be part of some big evil communist tide that would leave us 'fighitng them in San Francisco if we don't fight them there' (it might sound familiar. Some presidential war justifications are apparently standard). And besides, LBJ had domestic political pressures pushing him to war, and he lacked the strong standing of JFK to refuse was, as JFK had.
Now, you can say we had 'good intentions', but not a 'good cause', IMO. I can't think of a way to view those two million people killed as a 'good cause', only as our misguided cause.
And I can't say that our *irresponsible* mistake in not bothering to understand the situation before so much violence is not too excusable. Robert McNamara now says so too.
If you are going to make that the standard, then pretty much every side in every war is justiified, including the Muslim terrorists who are pretty sure they have a good cause, too.
No, you are blind to the ulterior motives our nation has had in countless wars - take the Mexican war (and half of Mexico, like we did), through Grenada, or our 'proxy wars' and using others for assassination to prevent any government who refused to serve our corporations' demands, as in Chile, Argentina, and many other places.
Your homework assignment, to help you become informed and not a parrot for the propaganda, is to read:
"Against Empire" by Michael Parenti (useful for 'expandng your horizons' despite its controversial views) and 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man', by John Perkins.