Vietnam's real lessons »
Posted By BusinessDude 1 year, 10 months ago in NewsFINDING IN THE DEBACLE of the Vietnam War a rationale for sustaining the U.S. military presence in Iraq requires considerable imagination. If nothing else, President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier this week revealed a hitherto unsuspected capacity for creativity. Yet as an exercise in historical analysis
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
It was the Vietnamese who went in and rescued the Cambodians from the Khmer Rouge, after we left. Who knows if it wasn't our incursion into Cambodia that brought the Khmer Rouge to power? In any case, that domino fell in the right direction, and now Vietnam has preferred-nation trading status with us. Many died, but at least the conflict did not go on idefinitely, after we left.
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bumbaklotartattack1 year, 10 months ago
It's been officially documented that US gave aid and funding Khmer and helped put Pol Pot into power. I am sure history will prove that America is quite a brutal regime, greater than the Nazis.
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
From Wikipedia...
Historian Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen have used a combination of sophisticated satellite mapping, recently unclassified data about the extent of bombing activities, and peasant testimony, to argue that there was a strong correlation between villages targeted by U.S. bombing and recruitment of peasants by the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan and Owen argue that "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began,[3]. In his study of Pol Pot's rise to power, Kiernan argues that "Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia" and that the U.S. carpet bombing "was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot's rise."
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
...By December 1978, because of several years of border conflict and the flood of refugees fleeing Cambodia, relations between Cambodia and Vietnam deteriorated. Pol Pot, fearing a Vietnamese attack, ordered a pre-emptive invasion of Vietnam. His Cambodian forces crossed the border and looted nearby villages. Despite American and Chinese aid, these Cambodian forces were repulsed by the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese forces then invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. Despite a traditional Cambodian fear of Vietnamese domination, defecting Khmer Rouge activists assisted the Vietnamese, and, with Vietnam's approval, became the core of the new puppet government.
At the same time, the Khmer Rouge retreated west, and it continued to control an area near the Thai border for the next decade. It was unofficially protected by elements of the Thai Army and the United States Special Forces, and was funded by diamond and timber smuggling.
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
We supported the Khmer Rouge simply because they were the enemy of our former enemy???! Looks like we might be making the same mistake with Iraq and Iran!
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
From the article... Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden do subscribe to a hateful ideology. But to imagine that Bin Laden and others of his ilk have the capability to control the Middle East, restoring the so-called Caliphate, is absurd, as silly as the vaunted domino theory of the 1950s and 1960s.
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
The terrorists are not rich and powerful, like us. They try to get as much mileage as they can from a few dramatic acts of terror (that's what terrorism is). The reason there has not been "another 911" is we are doing a good job, all by ourselves, of extending the "mileage" from the first one. Which of them ever imagined they would be elevated to the number-one feared enemy of the world's greatest military power? How can a handful of terrorists do so much damage to us, at so little cost to themselves? I guess thay know how to draw us in, eh? By creating a trillion dollar war against them, we have inflated their importance and amplified their effect. Iraq has become the jihadist battleground Afghanistan was during the Soviet occupation. It is the children of those we assembled to fight the Soviets who are fighting us, now. Iraq is AlQaeda's live terrorist training lab and world jihadi recruitment center.
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rimbaud1 year, 10 months ago
The beheadings of innocents, killing of children, Muslim on Muslim violence, are all designed to keep us enraged and engaged. AlQaeda's leadership (yeah you, Zawahiri) are a bunch of clowns. They are like those bullied children who want to blow up their schools. They have no political objectives other than to lash out. Their policy of Muslim on Muslim killing has made them the enemies of even the Sunni "insurgents" in Iraq, and certainly not pleased Allah. Send then the SuperNanny, not the US Military.
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