CAMBODIA : VIETNAM : : _______ : IRAQ

Stop McCain!

It's interesting to contrast the US in Iraq with Britain in WWII. Iraq was unequivocally a war of choice for the US. In contrast, in WWII Germany tryly posed an existential threat to Britain: it was far from clear in real time that Britain would not fall to a German invasion. Yet my impression is the British government was nonetheless fairly straight with their populace at the time, in absolute terms and doubly so when compared to the US in Iraq today.

I can't seem to dig up documentation on the internet, but a specific example as I recall it: At the end of 1942 in the Battle of the Barents Sea, the Germans sank a minesweeper (HMS Bramble) but misidentified it as a destroyer. IIRC, the British authorities did not publicly correct the Germans' mistake. Thinking like the Bush adminstration, they could have scored a PR coup (and even an accurate one) by saying the German press accounts were wrong, but they didn't want to tip off the Germans that they'd made a mistake and risk giving them even the slightest intelligence edge. In other words, even -- perhaps especially -- in its darkest days, they were wholly focussed on winning the real war, not the PR war.

Um... what is "Iran?"

The most powerless people in a war are POW's. They know almost nothing of how a war is going until freed. They learn of what is going on at home only through newer prisoners and their captors. This was McCain's experience as a POW from Spring 1967 until his release in 1973. He wasn't able to experience, as I was, the full futility of our efforts in the air war on North Vietnam or on the ground in the South. What was to have been for us a war by proxy against Communism, ended up as more than our leaders foresaw. Believe me, we tried out best. It was hopeless and went on for all too long.

"Too many words" is not the reason Noam Chomsky doesn't get traction on television. It's the message itself, no matter how many words were used to express it, that is deemed crazy, fringe, radical, etc. and thus not worth hearing.

As he has pointed out, when you have a message that is something other than conventional wisdom being said over and over, then it's impossible to express the message in a persuasive way using very few words. Those who espouse conventional wisdom need not offer evidence or articulate their premises, because it's all just assumed. Only those who challenge that wisdom are required to do so, which makes that message one that, by definition, can't be accommodated on television.

Amen!

As an example, it is very difficult to say in a few words that our interventionist foreign policy is making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks by creating new enemies all the time --- and it is bankrupting the country on top of that.

It is so easy to get shouted down by a few snide comments. Yet, the truth remains the truth.

Has it occurred to you they're not conservatives? As for Vietnam, there was really no such country as South Vietnam, it was an artificial creation which only existed in someone's mind, put it on a map and declared its existence without the approval of the Vietnamese. Vietnam's existence was to be put up to a vote by the entire country of Vietnam but the election was scuttled by the American government and viola South Vietnam was declared without the consent of the Vietnamese. This is Insane McCain's current mindset. McCain is a war criminal for bombing Vietnamese civilians and a traitor for violating the UCMJ, Uniform Code of Military Justice who wouldn't even protect his own family from the insults and abuse of the Bush gang in 2000.

There is only one way that sheer force could have worked in Vietnam, or in Iraq...but it would have required our military to turn into something no sane person would want.

And this is the inconvenient fact that the John McCains of this world refuse to grapple with.

If we had put a half-million *combat* troops on the ground in Iraq, with orders to shoot to kill ANYONE at any time, for any reason at all; if we had been willing to arrest, torture, and execute--publically--anyone and everyone who said *boo* to a US soldier--I think public torture might have been an interesting tactic too--if we had been willing to do that, and more, *maybe* we could have "won" in Iraq.

Anything short of that? It's a joke. We were never going to "win" anything there. Unless we were willing to turn our Army into a hellish hybrid of the Khmer Rouge and the SS Einsatzgruppen. And I don't think even Cheney could have stomached that.

This is the savage fact that all the "stabbed-in-the-back" mythologists refuse to face. Force wasn't going to do the trick in Iraq, or in Vietnam, unless we were willing to torture and kill every last person who set a hand against us.

And while Cheney might have been willing to try it, I think the American Public, placid though it may be, might have balked..

Hence, the situation we find ourselves in.

It would be nice, just once, if people like McCain would face reality. They live in this strange dream-world that has very little to do with the world as it is.

---with regard to Iraq, had we simply toppled Saddam, left the Iraqi Army intact, and installed someone like Alawi as dictator, and told the Sunnis and Shias that NOTHING was changing, and if they didn't like it, they could pound sand---we could have left with a "win" and Bush would be a hero. But no, we were too smart for something so simple. We had to turn Iraq into a Randian paradise for savage capitalists. And that worked out SO WELL, didn't it? Christ. Cheney really is crazy, isn't he?

I have heard time and again that the reason we lost in Viet Nam was due to the politicians back home. That is what made the Pentagon Papers so important. They show that the military ran that war and it was the duped and lied to politicians that allowed the military to get away with it for so long.

Now, just like then, the Senior officer corps beats its' chest, swills its' taxpayer paid for whiskey, and grabs its' collective crotch in macho bravado. All the while hiding the truth and manipulating the politicians and the American people.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the train coming at US.

footsore