The Logic Off Topic list

At 12:42 PM -0400 9/25/01, GAmoore@... wrote:
>I agree with everything Dennis Gunn said, except I didn't say this :
>>I do not share GA Moore's apparent belief that the US is right in all
>>things.  But I think the handling of this incident has been pretty
>>good
>
>I said before that the US has made mistakes - miscalculations,
>heavihandedness, etc. Toppling the elected but leftish government in
>Chile in the 70's and backing the right wing in El Salvador are two for
>example.
>
>But when you look at the wide range of things the US has needed to take
>care of - Cuba to Korea, Vietnam to Venezuela, Iran to Israel, etc...
>there's chance for mistakes.

Well I really shouldn't say this because it will probably piss you 
off but Cuba was obviously pretty much a disaster, Korea could have 
been a success but instead ended up being a disastrously pulled 
punch, much to MacAurthur's chagrin.  And Vietnam?  What a sad 
debacle.   America Vietnam and the entire world would have been much 
much much better off if the US had done nothing at all or better 
still if the US government had simply recognized the government that 
Ho Chi Minh was trying to establish in 1945 based on a constitution 
that was pretty much simply a translation of that of the United 
States.  Yes Ho Chi Minh had studied Marxism but in 1945 he was not a 
Marxist he was simply trying to prevent the reoccupation of his 
country by the French who BTW spent an amount of money on their war 
in Vietnam that was equal to the amount of aid money they received 
from the US after the war.  I have seen you asking here if the US 
should have simply let the USSR have their way in Vietnam.  With the 
gift of hindsight the answer would have to be a resounding YES 
because if that is what we had done and the USSR had tried to take 
Vietnam it would have been them that were humiliated instead of us. 
On the other hand the Soviets might  have looked at the history of 
Vietnam (like the US apparently didn't) and decided that invading 
Vietnam was not a good idea.

Anyway highly recommended reading on the topic is Vietnam: The Ten 
Thousand Day War by Micheal Maclear.

Anyway while I tend to believe taken as a whole the US influence on 
the world politics has probably been a positive thing I have to admit 
that that is what I *want* to believe and I just don't know enough 
about history to say conclusively that it is true.  We have had some 
really awful failures and I do not expect everyone to sing our 
praises.  On the other hand it still irks me to see people who should 
know better talking trash.

Credit where credit is due.  Bush looks and talks like a boob but 
that does not mean that he should be trashed when he is behaving 
sensibly.  Doing that to a person tends to discourage them from 
behaving sensibly
-- 


                                 Dennis Gunn
                                 Mightyjohn@...

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