What - No GOP Presidential Debate Thread?

No one ever said he got us into Vietnam, Boom. What some of us are saying is that he didn't get us out fast enough.

But if you want an answer to your question, try this: Nixon, as much as anyone of his time - with the exception perhaps of Joe McCarthy himself - was one of the great promulgators of the Red Scare. Which contributed its share of homegrown paranoia to the refinement of ideas and policies like 'The Domino Theory.'



Nixon elected. Freshman congressman Richard Nixon, left, is assigned to the then-obscure House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Associated Press file photo, 1948, by Bill Achatz

 

I have no political affiliation, left or right, Ragu, and no dog in the partisanship hunt. I try to argue on behalf of common sense. But your moral superiority and habit of Randian condescension are noted. And posts like these are why people think you're pompous.

So it's LBJ's war alone? The events leading up to his term in office have no bearing? Then explain how the first American intelligence operative to die in Vietnam did so in 1945. Explain the failed CIA-sponsored coup attempt against Diem in 1960, before JFK was even elected. Where was Congress when LBJ called for a vote on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution? Were there no Republicans present the day they voted? Did LBJ pay for the war out of his own pocket?

History is a process, a series of events and responses to events by many different people in many different places. Not very often, sadly, the decisive action of one Randian protaganist. Here's a handy timeline.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/timeline/

 

Perhaps I was wrong about my interpretation of what you said. Here are my thoughts after rereading what you wrote.

I said Boom_71's assertion that two Democratic presidents were responsible for 58,000 American deaths was a lie. My interpretation of you first sentence is that you agree with Boom_71.

OK.

I wasn't around then and haven't studied it thoroughly. I don't know how much blame goes where. With my limited knowledge, I do believe LBJ dropped the ball big time. As to assertions about who propagated the war in Vietnam, I don't know yet.

It was in reference to this that I said "come see me" if it happens. Seeing as how the bulk of the previous discussion dealt with Nixon's insistence on staying in Vietnam when it was clear to most that it was not winnable, and that decision's cost in American bloodshed (it being Nixon's own fault, and not the fault of Democratic presidents), that is the statement I focused on in my reply.

Until the next Dem president keeps combat troops in the middle of a civil war in Iraq out of political concerns, your parallel will be incomplete.

Obviously.


I hope my reading comprehension has been more to your satisfaction here. Despite my limited ability, I think I comprehended the bulk of your post, in spite of the fact I think you often delve into so much minutae you lose the larger point because you're trying to demonstrate some depth of knowlede about something no one's talking about. It comes off as superficial.

 

Since your own sig seems to corroborate a widely held feeling that you patronize most of us with the tone and tack of your posts, I'll set that aside. But here's a hint as to whence that feeling arises: it's largely a product of your doing things like adding ironical quote marks around words or phrases from our posts; or condescending modifiers like "little" before your synopsis of an opposing thought or idea.

And not all of us have a case to make for any particular party or political approach.

Having already stated, many posts ago, that I thought Johnson was most responsible for our debacle in Vietnam, I'm not sure where we disagree, except in this:

You want to hold an individual to account for his actions. In this case Johnson as the sole actor in the Vietnam debacle. Okay. If you want to include JFK as a further actor, fine - we'll call JFK proximate, and Johnson the primary actor in beginning the disaster of Vietnam. Nixon becomes the primary actor in trying to end it.

You also posit that President Bush will be held to something like the same account by historians in the future. When they look back fifty years from now, or a hundred, you believe it will be or should be George Bush who takes the blame for the current version of the Iraq war.

That being the case, why are you unwilling to hold Churchill to the same standard? The myopia of the men who divided the Middle East 90 years ago is largely responsible for the state of the world as we find it now. Why not try to discern the events that led us to where we are? Why not try to unravel the mistakes made by prior generations in similar situations and try to learn from them?

To say that JFK or LBJ or even Bush acted in a vacuum - or acted alone - is to deny the historical physics of cause and effect.

Would we not be better off now if five years ago more people, voters and legislators alike, had understood how we'd been sucked down the rabbit hole in Southeast Asia under similar circumstances? Would we have made the same nation-building mistakes in Iraq the British made - or the Soviets in Afghanistan - if we were better versed in the history of those places? Are we really better off for not knowing context? For not understanding the linearity of history? For not understanding the failures of prior historical actors trying to do the same things we're engaged in doing now? How far back do we follow the trail? I don't know. Maybe far enough back that we finally learn something from it. A study of the collapse of Ancient Rome wouldn't be inappropriate study for any American these days.

And I'm decidely not trying to let anyone off history's hook. Especially us, as we find ourselves fumbling stupidly in the world as it is now.

But it sounds to me - as you deny complication and historical setting and the linkage of one event to the next - like you are.

 

Deport anyone who votes for Brownback? Hoooooweeee. I guess I best pack my bags for Canada.

 

Ezra Siff's done the best isolated study of Gulf of Tonkin. Responsibility in his mind falls on a complaisant Congress and the Senate in particular.

It's especially important to examine the language of the resolution. Three hundred words in sum with three whereas clauses and three operative power-giving clauses. The whereas clauses obviously don't take the effect of law, but are intended to clarify objectives. But the first operative clause contains a few critical Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian buzzwords: "all necessary measures." Bingo, doctrine of implied powers.

How about four more crucial words? "To prevent further aggression" -- and these are not modified at all by the words "against the forces of the United States."

Sound familiar at all?

 

Ragu --
This is threadbare historicity and you should know better.
We can't blame Churchill for the current bloodletting in Iraq because the current bloodletting didn't start until we kicked over what was an authoritarian state that rose out of the post-Ottoman meddling by the Brits. If that state were still in place, if what existed was the status quo ante that was developed in the 1920's the bloodletting likely would not be taking place. The connection breaks in 2003. Our invasion was what lawyers would call an intervening act. (Just as, in the Balkans, the post-Tito fall of the former Yugoslavia was an intervening act through which the chain of historical causality stopped and took another direction.)
There is no intervening act in the history of Vietnam. It is an unbroken history of anti-colonial warfare going back to the Chinese occupations, then the Japanese, then the French, then us. Each great power stepped in for the previous one. The 1954 elections might have provided an intervening act, but they got cancelled for reasons of geopolitics and American domestic anti-Communism. Which is why I pointed out that Eisenhower created the political context out of which the shooting war became likely. JFK committed Americans to combat roles there -- we can quibble about what "troops" mean, but it's a waste of time -- and LBJ stupidly escalated our involvement beyond all rationality. Nixon -- not stupid, just toweringly cynical -- used the war to get himself re-elected, and to demonstrate to the world that he wasn't the grocer's kid from Whittier any more. (You will note that more Americans died in 1969, the year after Nixon got elected to end the war, than in any other year of out involvement.
And, to get back to the purpose of the thread, there isn't a single GOP candidate for president who even will lie about getting out of Iraq the way Nixon lied about getting out of Vietnam.

 

Btw, all this arguing about Vietnam is why a lot of people are supporting Obama.