Which of these do YOU think should be the basic idea behind Democratic foreign policy?

[Ken Burch]

Poll question: Which of these do YOU think should be the basic idea behind Democratic foreign policy?

Obviously, we should also think of American foreign policy in general, but we're always going to have a better chance of influencing an administration led by THIS party on that question.

[smalll]

1. Somehow, I find this a loaded poll --

The first two options are virtually the same, the last starts off with something I must admit I can support, and then crashes and burns purposefully ("unimportant".) -- "The current effort to demonstrate that military intervention could still be progressive, with diplomacy remaining basically unimportant"

How about this option --

"U.S. military intervention is no different from the Nazi Wermacht marching across Europe, being 100% evil, and it doesn't matter how bad Saddam or the Taliban were or are, or how many noses they cut off, we are ALWAYS worse than everybody else, and it's hardly sporting to bring the weight of the U.S. "MIC" (military-industrial complex) to bear against poor, impoverished, misunderstood brown people who are just trying to defend their homeland, and at the same time, we are ALWAYS and FOREVER doomed to EPISTOMOLOGICALLY CERTAIN FAILURE in every military endeavor we pursue, and also, if the last troop leaves Iraq a year from now without this kind of pic resulting --



-- well, it will be a highly unsatisfying end to the war at least for me, let me tell you."

:shrug: Sayin'!

[Ken Burch]

2. The three options are actually radically different.

The second option is pacifism, and we're never going to have THAT as the main emphasis of U.S. foreign policy

The first option is a realistic middle ground, getting out of foreign military intervention(which Iraq and Afghanistan have now proven to be a difficult if not impossible option for this country).

The third option, the one you feel unaccountably defensive about, is the status quo...the option THIS administration, for whatever reason, has chosen to embrace as of now.

[grantcart]

3. and completely superficial

[Ken Burch]

5. Well, it sounds like you're trying to rationalize your own support for the militarist status quo

Even though it is now clear that no American military intervention can ever again have progressive results.

You have a right to your opinion.

Why is it so important to you to keep this country stuck forever on the "JFK in early 1961" worldview?

Why SHOULDN'T we admit that further military interventions are pointless?

It's not as if we've turned Iraq or Afghanistan into paradises on Earth, and clearly we can't improve anything in either place by staying. And why shouldn't we assume that it's going to be just as useless for us to send troops anywhere else?

Why ISN'T it enough to use our troops to defend our own territory?

[karynnj]

14. The first is essentially what Kerry spoke of in 2004, BUT even had he became President

the reality is that he would have started with the fact that we were in two active wars. Because Kerry did give speeches in 2005 and 2006 recommending in some real detail what should be done, we have a real comparision between Bush and Kerry. You have to play the cards that you are handed, but there were big striking differences in Bush's occupation/"spreading democracy" goals and Kerry's far more limited actions designed to empower Iraq to take back their country. These recommendations were consistent with his 2004 goals. Feingold's recommendations throughout that time were very similar in goal. (I do realize that in this interval people like McGovern (D, MA) and Kuchinich had closer to "out now" positions)

Obama and Clinton both voted against Kerry/Feingold - speaking more hawkishly than Kerry. But, Obama, running for office, ran on essentially Kerry/Feingold with a longer timeline. In office, he stretched the timeline again - but he is still speaking of ending the combat mission next month. The test then will be whether we actually move to really exiting.

On Afghanistan, I disagree with Obama's massive surge that Gates, Clinton, and most of the military pushed him to do. Even here, he spoke of the goal being just to prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for Al Qaeda. In addition, the real fear is a destabilized Pakistan, here there is a very real risk of the government falling and being replaced by a more dangerous government. (Wikileaks deals far more with the Musharraf period - though Zadari is not flawless.)

I don't KNOW that option 1 is NOT the real Democratic position. I hope that in assessing what to do in new problems, it is where we are. If your option 3 were rewritten to be the Bush doctrine, the three options would be more compatible - all dealing with how we deal with a new problem.

Instead, you are really equating anything other than an "out now" position for the incoming Obama administration with being the Bush position.

[grantcart]

4. This iconic picture is one of my favorites.

Most people think that it is people leaving the US Embassy in Saigon but it is not.

[Ken Burch]

6. OK...where ARE they leaving from?

And why is it so important to you to try to rehabilitate the idea of an interventionist foreign policy?

We have nothing to show for it in either Iraq or Afghanistan(and we didn't intervene in Iraq because Saddam was a bastard-our leaders always KNEW he was a bastard, even when they were giving him massive military aid. We also didn't intervene in Afghanistan out of any concern for the Afghan people-there, it was just "geopolitics").

[grantcart]

7. the idea that there are only interventionist or non interventionist foreign policy options

died about 40 years ago. Your terms of discussion are so superficial and dated that there really is nothing to discuss.


The picture which is often captioned as showing people leaving the US Embassy in Saigon is actually a rather remarkable picture of helicopters that returned to take CIA dependents out of Saigon from various pre arranged apartment buildings. The operation went off remarkably well and about 3,000 dependents were removed. They were signalled to go to their off take point by the playing of "White Christmas" in what was considered one of the worst kept 'secrets' of the war.

[Ken Burch]

8. OK...I'll bite...what other options are their besides intervening or NOT intervening?

Doesn't it pretty much have to be one or the other?

Or did you believe Nixon was serious about "Vietnamization".

BTW...you aren't trying to argue that we should have stayed in Vietnam after all...are you?

Clearly, nothing we could have done could ever have prevented what occurred in 1975. South Vietnam was never a real country and the South Vietnamese government never had the support of the people it supposedly governed.

[grantcart]

16. Intervention or non intervention has been non existent in the debate of

American Foreign Policy for decades. For the last 40 years serious discussions about foriegn policy center on the question of unilateral, bilateral or multilateral emphasis.


My avatar gives away my preference more Multilateralism


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateralism

Multilateralism is a term in international relations that refers to multiple countries working in concert on a given issue.

International organizations, such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization are multilateral in nature. The main proponents of multilateralism have traditionally been the middle powers such as Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the Benelux countries and the Nordic countries. Larger states often act unilaterally, while the smaller ones may have little direct power at all in international affairs aside from participation in the United Nations (by consolidating their UN vote in a voting bloc with other nations, for example). Multilateralism may involve multiple nations acting together as in the UN or may involve regional or military alliances, pacts, or groupings such as NATO.


The Oil disaster in the Gulf is a perfect example of the need for an intelligent multilateral approach.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/grantcart/291



Obviously the country of South Vietnam was a functioning entity for decades. The critical lesson of Vietnam was that the US cared more for its survival than its own elites did. What made Vietnam such an unusual situation had nothing to do with the French or the americans but the Chinese. The fundamental core of identity of Vietnamese identity is its defiance of China, a nationalist movement that inspired the Vietnamese for hundreds of years. It is similar to Japanese or Cuban obsession with their own identity in order to maintain a seperate identity in the face of a giant power. Ho Chi Minh was much more effective in capturing that even though ironically he hadn't lived in Vietnam very much at all until he returned to join the Viet Minh. The only path for the South Vietnamese government to survive was to be aggressively stubborn and independent, handing the war to the Americans was a fatal move. In any case South Vietnam was a divided country with half of it Buddhist and the other half of Catholic.

The Chinese understand Vietnam's penchant for being absolutely independent and never really supported Vietnam during the war except in public. There were reports that some of the war material intended for Vietnam from Russia was intercepted and taken by the PRC. Three years after we left China invaded Vietnam in the Sino-Vietnamese war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War


Since the American aim in Vietnam was to stop a monolithic communist action it is ironic to note that had the Americans had known that the communist Chinese and communist Vietnamese hated each other so much (again ironic given that Ho spent a decade posing as a Chinese Communist) that had they known they were going to go to war after we left, they would have never given any support to South Vietnam in the first place. Even more ironic is the fact that had the radical right not gotten rid of the 'China Hands' because of McCarthy they would have known of Chinese-Vietnam animus.


The point of providing the information about the picture is simply to correct one of the myths about the Vietnam war, like 'the Tet Offensive was a great VC victory' this picture not only is not of the embassy it shows that, contrary to what some believe, the CIA did have and did execute a plan to get vulnerable assets out of the country.

[Ken Burch]

17. "Obviously the country of South Vietnam was a functioning entity for decades."

Uh...no...South Vietnam only existed as a country from 1954(when the U.S. forced it into existence against the wishes of the Vietnamese people).

And "Vietnamese" identity was shared by ALL the people of Vietnam. It was "Vietnamese" identity, not "North Vietnamese" or "South Vietnamese". Those terms never had any meaning outside the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

As to "multilateralism"...it's still military intervention, at least as you define it. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one ever really thought that the opinions of Iceland, the Netherlands, Italy, or South Korea were ever given any real weight in the development of military strategy or diplomacy. This didn't change when the Obama Administration took office.

[grantcart]

24. point by point

1) Vietnam has always been divided it has never been unified prior to 1975


South Vietnam 1954-1975 21 years

The country Vietnam never existed as a unified political entity prior to 1975.

For most of Vietnam's history it has been divided north and south


From the 1500s onwards, civil strife and frequent infighting engulfed much of Vietnam. First, the Chinese-supported Mạc Dynasty challenged the Lê Dynasty's power. After the Mạc Dynasty was defeated, the Lê Dynasty was reinstalled, but with no actual power. Power was divided between the Trịnh Lords in the North and the Nguyễn Lords in the South, who engaged in a civil war for more than four decades before a truce was called in the 1670s. During this time, the Nguyễn expanded southern Vietnam into the Mekong Delta, annexing the Champa in the central highlands and the Khmer land in the Mekong.

The division of the country ended a century later when the Tây Sơn brothers defeated both and established their new dynasty. However, their rule did not last long and they were defeated by the remnants of the Nguyễn Lords led by Nguyễn Ánh with the help of the French. Nguyễn Ánh unified Vietnam, and established the Nguyễn Dynasty, ruling under the name Gia Long.






Once the French took it over they divided it into thirds



2) My argument in the above thread was that the common identity of all Vietnamese is tied to a nationalist struggle going back hundreds of years. It was Ho's brilliance that he outmanouvered the elites in the South on the issue and that in any case the Southern identity was divided between the Catholics and the Buddhists so that Vietnam's evolution to a single nationalist entity was inevitable.

3) Multilaterism isn't a military doctrine its a diplomatic one. It is based on problem solving using diplomatic and economic, regional and global strategies to solve problems. At its base it is fundamentally a non military response although it allows that in some situations joint military power may be necessary. The prospect of any single country facing a determined united opposition will in almost all cases reduce the liklihood of military action.


You are now free to return to your archaic duality of intervention or nonintervention of the 1930s.

[Warren Stupidity]

20. "the CIA did have and did execute a plan to get vulnerable assets out of the country."

Did you actually mean that seriously in a discussion of that picture? That was 'planned'? Some plan.

p.s. south vietnam was a fiction we invented in 1954 that ended in 1975 when we pulled the plug on its corpse.

[grantcart]

25. Vietnam had been divided by both the Chinese and French for hundreds of years

and only existed as a unified political entity for brief periods of times and even then usually as a vassal state.. See the reply above for the details.

"We created South Vietnam, it never existed before" is like a similar chant "the Tet Offensive was a great victory by the Viet Cong" repeated so often that people take it as a matter of fact. In fact that untrue. Before 1975 the country called Vietnam going back 2000 years Vietnam was either colonialized or divided north/south except for a period from about 1000 to 1400.

You are correct that once the colonialist structure was eliminated that powerful forces of Vietnam nationalism would be a strong force. South Vietnam was created in part by hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled the collectivisation of the North.

We didn't pull the plug on South. The North had a well planned conventional military campaign called "The Ho Chi Minh Campaign" but even they were surprised when Southern military leaders panicked and abandonded the Pleiku Highlands. The US military had already lef in 1972 leaving all of their plugs behind.


Did you really think that the picture was the entire plan? The CIA had made arrangements to significantly reduce the exposure their staff had. The evacuation of the remaining CIA dependents that was captured in the picture went surprisingly well. In 1978 the PRV agreed to release about a few that had failed to meet the evacuation - due to their father's obstinance and I arranged their departure from Vietnam.

[Make7]

9. Info on that photo:

 
http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Vietnam_Airlift
 

[Ken Burch]

11. Basically, from what I can pick up from the link

it was a building called the Pittman Apartments(a building known to pretty much everybody in Saigon as CIA headquarter).

So fine, it wasn't the Embassy.

Does it really matter?

[Make7]

12. I never said that it did matter.

I was just trying to clarify the issue regarding the specific location of the photo since it seemed the response by the person that raised the issue was somewhat lacking in detail.
 

[Ken Burch]

13. Sorry....that was aimed at grantcart, not you.

He'd made a point of announcing that it wasn't the embassy, as though that mattered.

I thank you for the link.

[Mudoria]

10. I'd vote for non-intervention in the rest of the world

I'm also in favor of using diplomacy for all occasions. I wouldn't waste an American GI for any conflict or genocide going on in the world. They can solve their own problems.

[IndianaGreen]

15. Other

Dismantle the fascist national security apparatus we built at the end of World War II under the pretext of fighting communism, and expanded further after September 2001. Respect of other nation's sovereignty without confusing their governments with their peoples. Complete withdrawal of military forces from all of the 75 countries, according to several press sources, and strict adherence to a policy of non-intervention particularly in Latin America.

Our non-intervention policy should not in any way mean that we will be silent about human rights, but human rights begin at home, and the US cannot speak of conditions in other countries while poverty, economic injustice, and political repression remain rampant in America.

The one trillion already spent on military adventurism since September 2001, could have been better invested in our own people and cities, and on providing such fundamental human rights as fee universal health care, free universal education, better schools, roads, mass transit, saving the family farms, and providing popular alternatives to traditional lending institutions.

The first step would be to practice what we preach about terrorism, and deport to Venezuela wanted terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles.

[Arkana]

18. Let's see...

Your first option was the philosophy of the isolationist movement between the two World Wars. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now. We're participants in a global community, and war is ALWAYS going to have to be one of the options on the list, though hopefully it's the last one.

Your second option is completely non-feasible.

Your third option is a stupid strawman.

Got anything else?

[Ken Burch]

23. My third option is, in fact, the status quo.

It's what Hillary has spent most of her public life pushing for.

And what we had in the 1930's wasn't isolationism(nor is Option one, which is engagement without militarism). Hitler didn't rise because the U.S. wasn't heavily armed. Hitler rose because the wealthy in all European countries supported him and traded with him. Hitler was abetted, NOT ignored.

[Warren Stupidity]

19. An interesting question is "what is the current idea behind Democratic foreign policy"?

As I suspect that the answer includes "whatever gets us re-elected".

[Ken Burch]

22. At the moment, I think it's effectlively Option Number Three

This administration, unfortunately, is one of the last game refuges of that vanishing species known as the "liberal hawk".

[SoxFan]

21. -