I wouldn’t call it the main reason. But certainly this decision lies at the heart of that tragedy. From a realpolitik POV it was a missed opportunity. Ho Chi Minh could have been America’s bulwark against China in southeast asia.

Domino Theory explicitly relied on the idea that the purported acrimony between China and the USSR (they weren’t close even before the Soviets ignored Mao’s reasonable claim to Senior Commie on the grounds of unacceptable yellowness) was a clever ruse to lure the West into complacency.

Also clever ruses: detente, disarmament, glastnost, Chernobyl, perestroika, losing in Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, peaceable independence movements, “democracy”, Putin having one fewer egg for breakfast today than last week.

Even after Ho Chi Minh became disillusioned with the proto-third-worldist rhetoric of the Wilsonians, having an ally close to the USSR would have been of enormous use – and backing recolonization in the Japanese sphere was horribly stupid to begin with.

I sense a new country music genre called wingnut western.

The New Ledger, Founded in January 2009
Benjamin Domenech, Editor-In-Chief

Does the wingnut welfare never cease?

And I also try to remember that a vast portion of the world suffers. They don’t enjoy these luxuries. They want for food, shelter, water, safety, education, health services. They desperately dodge famine, disease, violence. Many fail. And most tragically, many that fail are children. My son’s age. Or your kid(s) age. Or li’l Studly’s age.

We are not responsible for all the world’s suffering. Not all. But a great deal. And often in ways that only the most astute and watchful can identify. There are connections and threads to events that weave back to us and our actions that can in turn place responsibilty on our pointy little heads. We own, as the most consumerist society on the planet, a great deal of the planet’s suffering. Some of us try to remember that. I think a lot of people right here do remember.

Of course, some of the world’s suffering is much more easily traceable to the actions our nation takes (I suppose, in our names). Iraq would be a mighty fine example of that, of course.

I also like the fact that the windows in my house have not been blown out by the concussive shock from the detonation of a 105 mm artillery shell at the bus stop down the street. Or that I am not being woken in the middle of the night by armed, enraged gunmen who drag my relatives out into the street and execute them for their particular flavor of religious beliefs. I like the fact that I have not watched most of my neighbors cradling the lifeless body of a relative killed in the latest car bomb detonation. I am happy I do not have to scrub the sidewalk, playground or walls to remove the blood, entrails and brains. Lucky me.

Alas, people in Iraq (and many other places, to be sure) are not so fortunate. They live (if that is even the right word at this point) in a maelstrom of pain, loss, deprivation, violence and in-your-face-death that to me is incomprehensible.

So.

When I read the smarmy, clueless drivel of warbloggers and I think (just a bit, only that much I can really handle) what has been unleashed on the Iraqi people I get a bit upset. I think it would be really good for some of these people to actually feel the shock wave of a car bomb explosion. Or to see the aftermath. Or to actually be forced to pick up the remnants of what was once a child’s head and hand it back to that child’s mother. That would be good for them, I think (and definitely for me, oh yes).

When some smart ass little troll comes sauntering in, with the little stick he found down the street and starts whacking it on the fence and saying shit like “address my point about the surge” I want to take him to Baghdad. I want to force him to feel the warmth leaving a body as it cools post mortem. I want him to see the human splatter on the walls. I want him to see that much of the shouting in Baghdad is at funerals for non-combatants. I want his world to collapse in on him under the weight of what he is seeing, hearing and smelling. I want him to be crushed by the soulessness of his being. I want his lack of compassion and empathy and decency to fall back on him like the collapse of a neutron star. I want it all.

One of his arguments was “everyone uses winders, so you should too”; this has some merit as it’s about the applications, though there were actually a good number of good apps for OS/2 at the time. On the other hand, monocultures don’t tend to have a lot of resiliency in the face of habitat change. It’s too bad that he didn’t learn from that experience….

turns out though i was totally wrong and i was so incompetent that i maimed one kid and killed the other, the owners fled, and i eventually ended up burning the house down. (guess i shouldnt have gotten rid of the smoke alarms and fire extinguishers, but they were associated with the old kitchen regime.) there also was this unfortunate incident involving torturing a pet and I even made the entire neighborhood worse off than it was before. but you know, “stuff happens.”

after 6 or so years of fucking up good, i decided i should do what the experts said to do from the start to try and repair some of the damage. so now instead of a smoking crater, theres a somewhat livable, but still dangerous home on the site. the electricity still comes and goes and everyones life in the area has been irreparably damaged, but the homeowners now have a sweet new in-sink-erator and even some granite countertops in places! (dont tell them theyre resting on particle board and scrap.)

ok, so it took a lot longer than i said it would and im still not finished, it didnt go very smoothly to put it lightly, it cost waaaaaay more than the price i quoted, and i left a trail of death and destruction. but in the end there IS a house with a new kitchen standing there so for that i definitely deserve platitudes and a feature article in metropolitan home or elle decor and apologies from all the naysayers.

The main reason that Vietnam went so badly wrong was the Truman administration’s decision to return Vietnam to French colonial status.

I wouldn’t call it the main reason. But certainly this decision lies at the heart of that tragedy. From a realpolitik POV it was a missed opportunity. Ho Chi Minh could have been America’s bulwark against China in southeast asia.

Correct. Don’t forget Yglesias, tho. A pundit is a pundit is a pundit.

“Vietnam is difficult to quantify in many ways, but if one measures it by the commencement of bombing, which happens to be the date of my birth, March 2, 1965, to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, that’s less than 8 years. This period also marked the beginning and end of a significant ground presence.”

If we’re talking about The Vietnam War As We Know It, the proper date indeed is 03/02/65, when among other things the Marines hit the beach near Danang and were somewhat baffled to be handed flower leis by girls in ao-dais. Though they found the enemy soon enough after that.

By the way, I could’ve sworn BBC reported on a couple more really horrific bombings this week in Iraq. Fortunately, I was smart enough to disregard their liebrul propaganda, for I am firm in the knowledge that Teh Surge Worked.

Or should it just get the same free pass as that portmanteau of “Idiot” and “Libertarian”?

Barbara Amiel as a pundit, ROTFLMAO!

So what about The Surge?

I know I shouldn’t even respond to this weak babyshit troll – let alone with actual FACTS – but what the smeg, it’s one of my days off & I’m feeling frisky.

BushCo waited & waited to install Teh Glorious McSurge until a) enough of one side had ethnically cleansed the other out of Baghdad to make it look like it was the McSurge itself that made the city cool down (of course more heavily armed Yanks coming to town during such an unstable time had exactly the opposite effect), & b) preceded it with a big “Neighbourhood Watch With AK-47’s” payola program predicated on a cessation of boom-boom from the “staff” on Uncle Sam’s payroll … not to mention c) the serendipitous godsend of al Sadr’s declaring a cease-fire due to humanitarian concerns about excessive civilain deaths (even though he was kicking serious ass) -a little detail which the “Coalition Of The Triumph Of The Willing(TM)” seems not to have given much of a shit about at the time.

You’d've seen much the same results even sooner with just the payola alone (not to mention a lot fewer American kids with missing body-parts or a bad case of terminal lead-poisoning), but that wouldn’t've helped Uncle Dickie’s Halliburton stock any, now would it?

The McSurge ended quite a while ago, yet the bad old days of 2006-2007 haven’t returned, even with local economic & living conditions still largely sucking ass, after seven hellish years – leading those of us suffering from Chronic Logic Syndrome to conclude that it was all a dog-&-pony show for the rubes back home … yeah, it worked, alright: it sucked a bunch of Ignint McNugget dickheads back into the old “We’re Number One / Might Makes Right” con, & put some serious green into the right pockets, just like it was supposed to.

They just don’t make wingnuts the way the used to, circa 2002-2003 …

AN EPIC MISMATCH IF I EVER SAW ONE Jane Galt counters the various arguments of antiwar protestors in her typically lucid and intelligent manner.

No, that one’s just pathetic, in that it shows that Megan McArdle aka Jane Galt has always been stupid and wrong, and even stupidly wrong, since forever.

Bill Clinton thinks that we ought to get Osama bin Laden before going after Saddam Hussein. Never mind that the two are not mutually exclusive. Never mind that bin Laden may already be dead. Never mind that if he is alive, making his death a prerequisite for any attack against Iraq gives Saddam Hussein even more of an incentive to support al Qaeda, as James Taranto points out today. In short, never mind basic facts. Bill Clinton wants you to take his advice. Any takers?

FUCK.

YOU.

YOU FUCKING FUCK.

Fuckers. Still with blood on their hands.

I’d be happy if McAddled and her compadres sat out the next march to war. That’s all. Consider it a one-warmongering suspension after a major penalty. I’d be delighted if Me-Gan never got paid for her thoughts again, but the world is not just.

t makes you want to go back in time and tell them, “in 7 years, Bush will be one of America’s least popular politicians, Al Gore will win the Nobel Peace Prize, Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House, Al Franken will be the 60th Democratic Senator, and a little-known African American State Senator from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama will be President of the United States.”

I tried something like that, and I was “disappeared.”