Understanding terrorism

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by tw

What happened once those fears were unfounded?

What unfounded? Do you not know that Laos and Cambodia were conquered by communists? There's a pattern to your representations here...

Nationalist Vietnamese wrote a Declaration of Independence only so that the US would come to their aid? A document as fundamental to them as the US Declaration of Independence is to Americans was instead written only as a cheap and dirty ploy . . . ?

Something you're not discussing, and I am, is the question of are they following the libertarian impulse behind such Declaration? They aren't, AFAIK, doing that even nowadays. Had they done something other than the usual communist oppression, purges, and poverty, they wouldn't have had refugee one. I'll take the evidence of a quarter million fleeing, preferring pirates, robbers, and dying of thirst at sea on rafts, to ordinary daily life under communism, over all of your pravda, TW.

Ho Chi Minh asked to become a protectorate of the US because ... well even the US government says why he made those requests.

And this is known; I addressed that in my previous post. It is known that he was disappointed in this, and that he turned instead to Red China and the Soviet Union, both of whom were hardly unwilling to spread Communism, and with a religious fervor about it, to yet another region undeserving of such monstrousness. Did Ho set up anything but yet another Communist prison state? I'm unaware of Ho's state doing anything Mao would have taken exception to. You have to understand totalitarian systems are evil, impoverishing, and wasteful of life before you can understand anything of history, TW, especially the history of the twentieth century. For an instance -- and such an instance! -- non-democracies perpetrated every single genocide in the twentieth century. Such understanding is less than evident in what you post.

The domino theory was a lie predicated on a now universally discredited theory that Vietnam was part of a global communist agenda. A global communist conspiracy necessary to justify a widely discredited Domino Theory did not exist. What you describe as targets of that Domino Theory was nothing more that civil war - leading to far more corrupt government in Cambodia. Thailand instead remained true to their people and therefore suffered no coup. How can that be if the Domino Theory was valid?

Who needs a global conspiracy when a regional campaign of expansionism will do? Who needs a conspiracy when you consider that at its base communism was a sort of religion? What did the communists do besides go on jihad? What did they succeed in doing besides kill folks by the many tens of millions over seventy years and make folks poor? What you present as argument is not so much history as collectivist-totalitarian pravda, which you've swallowed hook, line, and sinker. How does it feel to be in a fellational relationship with the shades of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao? I'm sure I'll never find out for myself.

Where do you fall in the political quiz over in Politics? I'd like to see your numbers.

Cambodia had communists in its hills, for years upon years. You want corruption? Look at the wonders the Khmer Rouge performed upon the Cambodian population. Corruption? -- better say Cambodia was run by crazy people. Whatever one can say about Norodom Sihanouk, he wasn't an ignorant maniac like Pol Pot. The domino fell.

A polite war? Where do you come up with these myths? America used every asset of our conventional war machine in that war. Armed forces in Europe, S Korea, etc were sometimes stripped down to almost decommisioning to fight a *polite* war. We even considered using nuclear weapons. We lost almost 10% of our B-52 force. When did that become a *polite* war?

Okay, here I'll cut you some slack because you've never thought of it this way, and are completely at sea.

Look at the limitations we clamped on our strategy: we stopped at borders, rather than go harrying the enemy wherever he might flee. Polite. We made a point of not bombing war matériel north of the Chinese border, rather than doing everything to break their power to battle us. Polite. It became even more absurd: rather than destroy the sinews of war everywhere in or near North Vietnam, we publicly restricted ourselves to only bombing targets in certain patches of North Vietnam. Beyond polite; this was born to lose, and the idea didn't come out of the people doing the fighting. This totally allowed the North Vietnamese to install missile sites to shoot at our guys -- unmolested in the least. We were so concerned about bothering a pack of totalitarians committed to an inhuman system that we forgot to win the war.

Even Johnson, in recently released tapes as president, admits the American war in Vietnam was not winnable.

Having lived through the 1960s, I don't recall that Richard Nixon thought of it in quite this way. He seems instead to have possessed the Republican capacity for resolve in war. Even with all our too-polite strategy, the communists remained stalemated until we left in 1973.

Even Johnson says UG has misrepresented the facts. Blame does not fall on the armed forces. Blame belongs on top management who both literally and intentionally lied to create a Vietnam War. Deja Vue. We do it again to American troops in Iraq. Even worse, Urbane Guerrilla endorses the trashing of American troops and American principles. He even puts up 'straw men arguments' about blaming the armed forces. The military was but another victim of lying Generals and civilian leaders. But again, Urbane Guerrilla conveniently declares the military was blamed.

This paragraph constitutes a most astounding misreading of this one:

"The blame does not fall on the armed forces. It falls on trying to fight a polite war, which was done in the nation's capital -- an error which today's Administration, having experience of Vietnam, is determined not to repeat. Neither the Kennedy nor the Johnson Administrations knew how to win Vietnam, and in the losing of Vietnam, the domino theory was vindicated also: South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and additionally Burma fell into darkness. That not all the available dominoes fell is just our, and their, good fortune, not a disproof of the concept."

The Vietnam Declaration of Independence was a ploy to get American support against the French?

What, this again? Was Ho Chi Minh NOT seeking outside aid? Was this NOT directed against the French? Ho was already done with the Japanese. I've never said it was a ploy and I'm not going to. Please cease to misrepresent the matter.

UG - who do you think was paying the French - according to US government documents?

Are you saying that immediately postwar we somehow shouldn't have been helping a very battered wartime ally? And is there any particular relevance in this, or indeed anything astonishing?

Meanwhile here we are again making the military another victim of a lying president and his "Mission Accomplished" war. When I say those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, well, we have Urbane Guerrilla as a perfect example.

What you've posted here is remarkably congruent with the kind of pravda that communists and their fellow travelers would say. TW, you do not have anything to teach me.