Originally posted by: BoomerD
Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: BoomerD
Order a suicide bombing? Probably not, but call in an artillery strike? Hell yes.
For clarification...
Presumably, there are VC in that village...and that makes the entire village VC.
We d very similar things in Vietnam, Korea, and WWII.
We Americans shouldn't get so uppity about the ugliness of war.
We should get far more uppity - and especially about the real justification for the war.
You are debating the tactics of the village - we were wrong to kill millions of Vietnamese.
We were also wrong to back France's colonization of Vietnam.
Had we done the right thing, there would have been hundreds of thousands of fewer US casualties, millions of fewer Vietnamese casualties, and freedom from colonization sooner.
Not to mention the strong likelihood that our nation would have been far better off as it elected a democratic President and continuted the liberal string from FDR, no Watergate.
Craig, AFAIK, the official number of US troops killed in Vietnam was about 60K...not in the hundreds of thousands...(DoD say 58,209 although the number of seriously wounded may have been in the 100's of thousands)
I said casualties, not killed, and that includes the wounded, which puts the number in the hundreds of thousands.
I can't even try to justify the Vietnam war.
Forgive the quote break, but I want to take it to enjoy our agreement on this point.
I agree that it was yet another "wrongful war," but just like the current Iraqi clusterfuck, we were there, and in ANY war, the troops should be permitted to do what's necessary to win the war. Otherwise, their deaths are wasted.
(war isn't something to play at...you either do it right...or stay the fuck home)
What I think I'm trying to point out that you are not paying attention to is the responsibility needed for the war decision, that we need to be better at 'getting the hell out' and not going in in the first place - that it's not good enough for that to be a phrase in a sentence about 'but if we don't we need to fight effectively', we need to get the hell out, period. That's not to be glossed over.
I'm not pointing out the issues to advocate our troops use nerf guns and get slaughtered as a compromise solution. I'm pointing them out to try to get people to pay attention to the rights and wrongs of the conflict itself, to break them out of their 'but our leaders say it's right wo we need to just make sure we win' mentality and get them to stop being enablers of evil, and stand the hell up as citizens to their government and realizer *they are murderers* and need to get their noses rubbed in blood so they are motivated to get out.
It's all too damn easy to get happy about a slogan and wave a flag and get a hardon thinking about our big bombers smiting evil as prosperous and safe sons of bitches here.
We need to do something to deal with the ease of such immoral behavior of the armchar warriors voting funds for evil wars.
I don't think I've ever felt so betrayed as when McNamara came out in his autobiography and said:
"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
Even though my enlistment was during the Nixon years, it was the same ill-conceived war...being fought by brave men who had to fight with one hand tied behind their backs...and often blindfolded.
I don't think I've ever felt so proud of the crack in our system's facilitation of evil that can happen in some wars as for McNamara - a great man in many ways, but tragically flawed in others - to do exactly what I ask and speak out and say something about right and wrong, so that people might ask more questions. It's not just the 'hippies' who naively think war isn't nice, but the architect of the war saying how screwed up things are. Even with that few will make any adjustments, but it helps.
Is your sense of betrayal that they made the mistake - or that they shattered the trust to keep telling the Americans who suffered to fight it by telling the hard truth it was a bad war? It's a real problem with a lie of the war's justness has to be maintained to help people not realize the evil of it, when the price for that is to pave the way for the next evil war.
I don't know why you would single out McNamara for admitting the hard truth as opposed to the countless people who have pushed just as evil policies but do not tell the truth.
I've recommended Chris Hedges' "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" quite a few times, have you read that?
I know I'm not the voice of the 80% majority. I'm the voice of the abolionist in the Deep South facing a society whose prosperity rests on the institution I want to ban, not talking to people who know they're doing evil but to people who have adopted a set of beliefs, honestly, about why slavery is actually good go the slave and the owner, that happen to serve their economic interests, too. It appears hopeless after hundreds of years of slavery - but look and see how later the nation can't imagine having slavery again.
It took centuries of abolitionists slowly building the case and converting more people before there was even the decent opposition available - they never did get strong enough politically to ban it, which required the 'luck' of a civil war in which doing so was for military advantage. Nonetheless, how can you see slavery - or evil war - and not fight it?
McNamara is a man of extraordinary ability, and yet he fell into this mistake. That says a lot about the challenge we have in preventing more Viet Nam's.
The question is will we learn from the mistakes - will we see our wrong for what it is, killing millions unnecesarily and unjustly - or will we sweep it under the rug and repeat it?
Will we learn the error of supprting an ally (France) who is wrong, ther weakness in our system that pressured a reluctant new president to choose war wrongly?
Will we learn the error of how nationalistic and militaristic fervor against 'an enemy' can become in effect a mass hysteria blinding us to right and wrong?
It was *before* the lessons of Vietnam that Douglas MacArthur spoke the following:
?Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense?. Indeed it is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.?
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
Douglas MacArthur
And so I hope you can see why I object when you call for accepting 'war is war' and not speaking out to oppose the next mistake that harms so many.
Sadly, for American, what is war, really, but an expression of ego of the power of our nation, a bit of a tax expense, an entertainment or sports event to keep score from the safety as we watch the news and buy into the view that we're doing something important and necessary to stop the latest world pure evil of the day? What is the pressure on Americans to challenge their government on war but their own informed morality?
The more Americans who see 'manufacturing war' as something that has great benefits to those in power for manipulating them, the better off our nation will be.
Indeed, consider in hindsight the great moral causes our nation has had for killing thousands:
- The 'Gulf of Tonkin' non-incident where North Vietnamese gunboats might have shot at an American destroy who was in their waters escorting US-trained terrorists to their land.
- In Grenada, the purported risk to American medical students whose families said they were in no danger and begged not to put them in danger by invading - all to actually shut down a left-wing governmet to keep it from becoming any example for other nations in the region.
- In Chile, replacing the elected Allende with the dictator Pinochet and his police state that terrorized the population, killing thousands who resisted to defend democracy.
All for the economic benefit of some US coproations and right-wing ideologues who wanted to install right-wing Milton Friedman economic policies the public would resist.
- The first gulf war - while looking back a case can be made for opposing the tyrant Saddam who we'd befirended shortly before, the war case at the time that barely overcame initial public opposition was based in no small part on the national coverage of a woman testifying about Iraqi troops stealing incubators and putting babies on the ground, when she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, lying, as part of an ad campaign orchestrated a US ad agency paid by the Kuwaiti government, whose office was run by the former chief of staff to President Bush when he was VP. (And bypassing another group who begged to fight Saddam and kick him out of Kuwait, led by Osama bin Ladin, who wanted to keep the war within the Muslim world, not let the US develop a military strength there, the refusal of Saudi Arabia to let him fight Saddam directly leading to the Al Queda war on the US).
Even going back further, the war where the US took half of Mexico was based on the US president unilaterally declaring a new border inside Mexico, putting some troops there, and when Mexican troops ran into four soldiers and confronted them, the war was begun - a war Grant, who served in it, later said was the most unjust in human history).
There are more, but these are not to single out the US - others are even worse much of the time (e.g., Indonesia's invasion of and slaughtering 1/3 the population in East Timor), but rather to help people get past the seduction of war by buying into each of these types of 'pretexts' to justify the massive killing that's not only so unjustified, but wrong, in pursuit of power etc.
If we don't break the system in which war can be 'manufactured' at will - create a villain, a story, a threat, people cheer - it will contnue.
And good people - whether McNamara, you, John Kerry and Al Gore - will continue to be seduced into them; and other good people - farmers in Vietnam - slaughtered.
There are cases for war. I think there was a case for war with Saddam - but not the corrupt war waged by the Bush administration for its own selfish motives, attempting to pursue an agenda of again installing a right-wing economic system, creating a proxy base for us for attacking other nations, etc. The Bush people were not the right ones to decide on or to plan the Iraq war. Millions of Americans knew that to varying degrees, but too few. It's too easy, as I said above, to fool most of the people some of the time.
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