Haig said "We didn't learn much in Vietnam" and USSR fell from corruption

[Jeffersons Ghost]

on C-Span just now...
Here's a Nam lesson

[IndyOp]

1. USSR fell from military overspending & corruption...

I have my fingers crossed for soft landing for the US - soon, before too many more people die.

:(

[TayTay]

2. That is an excellent point.

The US is neglecting so much that we urgently need to attend to in this country. This war is a needless and tragic distraction from so much that we need to do here at home.

[karynnj]

7. Is Iraq our Afghanistan

in the analogy with the USSR.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

3. here's the only gang that will get a "soft landing" after this ride...

[Donna Zen]

4. Smart bombs

Is it Haig who says that we learned to make "Smart Bombs"? I don't have CSPAN but I did attend this event. The best is the last forum although they were are good.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

5. no telling

I see Haig as very useful over the years when it came to feeding the Military Industrial Machine...
His initial comments sounded almost anti-war, which startled me but I switched channels upon hearing that we left Nam too soon.
As a veteran that comment made me kind of sick. Can you read the transfusion bottle? It's the blood of 46,000 GIs.

[H2O Man]

6. There are times

when Haig almost makes sense. Maybe it was because he was sitting next to Henry Kissinger, who I find far more repulsive than Haig.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

8. yeah, henry KissofDeath was especially repulsive yesterday...

His support of the war was what turned me off but at least he got us out of Nam. How did he win the Nobel Peace Prize?

[mmonk]

9. Chalmers Johnson sums it up

this way.

They were extremely interested in whether their officers were competent, whether the strategy made sense, whether the war they might have to fight was justified, and if they began to believe that they were being deeply lied to, as in Vietnam, the American military would start to come apart. The troops then were fragging their officers so seriously that General Creighton Abrams said, we've got to get them out of there. And call it Vietnamization or anything else, that's what they did.

(snip)

Usually we believe that the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse and, in essence, our victory. A friend of mine put it another way. The United States, he suggested, was so much more powerful than the USSR that we had a greater capacity to shift our debts elsewhere. The Soviets didn't and so imploded. My question is this: Are we now seeing the delayed end of the Cold War? Perhaps both superpowers were headed for the proverbial trash bin of history, simply at different rates of speed?


(snip)


http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=8747

[Jeffersons Ghost]

10. not only headed the same way at different speeds

but likely headed there for the same reason