History does repeat itself

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=19080

<snip>In Vietnam and Iraq, we tried to occupy a country that posed minimal threat to the U.S. We waged a counterinsurgency effort against adequately skilled, motivated and well-supplied fighters who did not want us occupying their land. We tried to prop up a weak and corrupt foreign government that we had helped install.

The circle has come around again in frightening and depressing ways, complete with thousands of U.S. troops and innocent civilians (including children) dead and horribly injured, war profiteers getting rich and America’s reputation in the world severely damaged.

We also have a U.S. administration, like the Nixon administration, that has lost the trust of most of the people, the Congress and strikes many as being out of touch with reality and dangerous.

Now, as in the days when Nixon was leaving the presidency and Ford assumed office, the Congress is trying to take responsibility to resolve a difficult and poorly thought-out war of choice, waged in an apparently incompetent way. snip

Equally dangerous and disturbed is the need by some people for vain and false glory, gratification and power from warmongering and sending others to their deaths and severe injury. These are the chicken hawks, and they are dangerous.

[azurnoir]

1. It may have already happened

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2686323

[izzie]

2. You forgot this

Bush is not doing something with Iran and Nixon never went into Cambodia. And to think 'something' in the white house in a higher place is talking or was, to these two fruit cases. And that both wars are a big hole in the ground that we pour money and goods in.

[NNN0LHI]

3. I reread your post and realized you were being sarcastic about Cambodia?

You are very good at it and I am half asleep. Take care.

Don

http://chnm.gmu.edu/hardhats/cambodia.html

On April 30 President Richard Nixon announced to a national television audience that US troops were invading Cambodia, the country west of Vietnam through which the North Vietnamese military was supplying their troops in the South. In fact, the US had been conducting bombing raids in Cambodia for over a year.

The image of the President's hand resting over an abstract map of Cambodia circulated widely. It appeared not only in the New York Times but on the cover of Time. Millions also saw it on live television as Nixon disclosed the invasion. Several journalistic accounts commented on the sense of disbelief and helplessness felt by many viewers. Time's cover story began,

"At one point during his television address to the nation last week, Richard Nixon lost his place in the typescript. For four or five seconds he shuffled pages, eyes darting through paragraphs to pick up the trail again. For the nation watching, it was an instant of complex psychology. There was the acute embarrassment and sympathy for the speaker who has fluffed his lines. There was also, for some, an eccentric half hope that if he could not continue, an absurdist, McLuhan logic would apply: 'The U.S. was about to move into Cambodia, but the President lost his place in the script.' The instant passed. Richard Nixon went on."

For the past year the Nixon had been promoting the "Vietnamization" of the war, promising to replace US troops with newly-trained South Vietnamese soldiers. Citizens had expressed relief at the thought of American fighters coming home.

[cap]

5. there are Special Forces already in Iran

assisting rebel groups there. It does look like Cambodia redux.

[pretzel4gore]

7. and the Iranians never heard of cellphones, video cameras and the internet?

the Iraqis too. goddam boobs (mind you, had mr pig seen the opposition using these tools, then these 'tools' would have been taken away , somehow, but AT LEAST mr pig would be forced to exert itself a bit, but NOOOO! a systematic record of the crime-against-humanity called the iraq occupation just too much trouble eh, 665 thousand dead iraqis were too darn busy to bother with it)

[izzie]

6. I knew men who were stated in that country at air bases.

Yet their are still people who say Nixon did not go into that country.

[cap]

8. I knew an SF guy who went back and forth between Vietnam

Laos and Cambodia with the Hmong. He was in there before the bombing.

[izzie]

12. But their are also people who swear no one was stationed in those

countries. I guess it just how things work out. People will always wish to say that the people like the ones at Kent State lost the war when it could hardly be that at all. There are also people who will not face the facts that USSR lost millions of people fighting the Germans in WW2 and swear we did it all our self. Won the war. As if half the German army were not fighting on the Eastern Front. This believe that we are always right and know it all and can always win just gets me down.

[charlie]

4. Ayup, it's a deja vu nightmare

Looks like we're in for a reprise of the 70s, too. LBJ/Nixon's guns and butter spending brought us intractable stagflation, coupled with the OPEC wallop we were thoroughly unprepared for. Republicans have stuffed the Treasury with IOUs, and we're facing dwindling oil, with precarious stability in major oil states. Same old, same old, only worse.

I'm waiting for a soul-wasting musical development like Disco to rear its ugly head.

[EFerrari]

9. Nothing more dangerous than your chicken hawk.

If Cheney had to spend one single minute worrying about an IED, this would have been so OVER.

[otherlander]

10. At least in Vietnam

we were up against an enemy with one cause. Meaning that when we left that enemy would take over, instead of there being endless infighting.

[NNN0LHI]

11. The so-called "enemy" in Vietnam consisted of several different factions

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/FacultyPages/EdMoise/viet9.html

Edwin E. Moïse

The Vietnam Wars, Section 9

The Negotiations

For a long time, the negotiations went nowhere. The diplomats spent months simply arguing over the shape of the negotiating table. The US wanted to have two sides: US and Saigon on one side, Communists on the other. The Communists wanted to have four sides: 1) the US, 2) Republic of Vietnam (the Saigon government), 3) the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the Hanoi government), and 4) the guerrilla movement in South Vietnam which had originally called itself the National Liberation Front and was by this time calling itself the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). Many people have criticized this as a remarkable piece of stupidity, a case of diplomats wasting time on trivialities. They are mistaken; the debate over the shape of the negotiating table was perfectly rational.

The US wanted a peace settlement in which the Saigon government would win full control of South Vietnam. If this happened the PRG, and the South Vietnamese Communist apparatus which formed the guiding core of the PRG, would be wiped from the face of the earth. What the US wanted was, in effect, an agreement under which the North Vietnamese Communists would sell out their southern comrades. The PRG was not likely to approve of any such agreement. As long as the North Vietnamese were demanding that the PRG have its own separate delegation at the conference and speak for itself, rather than being included in a combined Communist delegation where the North Vietnamese could speak for it, it was obvious that the North Vietnamese were not willing to sign an agreement satisfactory to the US. On the other side, the Communists were determined to get an agreement that would bring South Vietnam under Communist rule. If the US were not even willing to have a separate delegation of South Vietnamese Communists at the conference, the US was obviously not willing to sign any such agreement. It would have made no sense for either side to accept the other's view as to proper shape of the conference table and then expect anything useful to come out of the conference. A compromise was finally reached involving one large circular table and two smaller rectangular ones, arranged in a way that the United States could interpret as representing a two-sided negotiation, and the Communists could interpret as representing a four-sided netotiation.

The problem was that there was no real possibility of compromise. Both sides talked about peaceful political settlements, but in fact there was no way the Communist organization and the Saigon government could ever get along peacefully together within South Vietnam; they were going to go on trying to destroy one another until one or the other succeeded.