From two of the best, right?
"Back to Vietnam...
The Vietnam war is still such a divisive episode in US history that comparisons to Iraq are sure to be clouded by emotion. But President Bush tossed analogies around capriciously this week before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and added a few more from World War II and Korea. Since he broached the subject, it's reasonable to take the comparisons to places he might not want to go.
Here's one: It would have been better to surrender South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists in the early 1960s than to engage them in a struggle that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives before it ended in 1975 with the same result: victory for Hanoi and the suppression of non-communist opposition in the south. Would Bush agree that, similarly, it would have been preferable to allow Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding his evil regime, to remain in power than to engage in a more than four-year war that has torn Iraq apart and cost the lives of 3,700 Americans and many more Iraqis?
[On the first point, why were all the papers for Vietnam up until 1968 and Tet?
Second point, in answer to the question, a BIG NO!
I understand and agree, although rather than "many more" Iraqis, try one million (so far) on for size, 'kay?]
At least in Vietnam, there was a clearly defined enemy. The Nixon administration was able to negotiate an agreement with Hanoi in 1973 for an American withdrawal. Similarly, the United States knew the capital cities of the enemies in World War II and Korea. But what is the address of the enemy in Iraq, a nation fractured into sectarian fiefdoms and murderous gangs?
Despite the worry that defeat in Vietnam would have a domino effect, toppling non-communist regimes elsewhere, the damage was limited to Indochina. The communists who took over Cambodia in 1975 in the wake of the American defeat did prove to be genocidal sociopaths. Bush tried to use their example as a caution against a pullout from Iraq, but no one knows whether a bloodbath of this proportion will occur among the warring factions there.
[Yeah, or if it would have happened at all had we not interfered!]
Bush, setting up the ultimate domino:
"If we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home."
[Fine, then stay, and they better NEVER COME HERE, dude!!
That means NO MORE FALSE-FLAG TERROR EVENTS, fuckshit!!!
YOU LOSE!!!! False-flagger here, YOU LOSE!]
Analogies are of no help when predicting the fate of Iraq. Its location on the Sunni-Shi'ite fault line, huge oil reserves, and forced involvement in the US struggle against Islamic terrorism have no parallels to Vietnam of the 1960s.
The Iraq war is now nearly 4 1/2 years old. Bush didn't mention the war-weariness that afflicted Americans as the Korean war dragged on for three years and as World War II passed the 3 1/2-year mark. After 4 1/2 years of intense American involvement in Vietnam, Nixon began pulling out the troops.
[If we are weary now (all based on lies). imagine how this world will be as we fight DECADES for these sick, power-mad, mentally-twisted creatures of excrement.
Is that the kind of world you want for your children, Amurka?]
Bush said: "In Iraq, our moral obligations and our strategic interests are one."
[The man is sickening!!!]
The United States is not winning this war, and there is no strategy in place analogous to Nixon's to get the US troops out and devise a diplomatic solution involving neighboring nations. A weary people demand more of the president than war without end (Boston Globe August 24, 2007)."
[But we ain't gonna get it!
Here's the second half:
The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki...
Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s removal, only to get Mr. Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Mr. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq’s first democratically chosen leader under the American-sponsored constitution.
[Yup, and you guys were all for him at the time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!!]
Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.
Sectarian fracturing even extends to the electricity grid, where armed groups have seized control of key switching stations and refused to share power with Baghdad and other provinces.
[Pffft! It's not his fault, but IT IS!!!! What a shitbag paper!
Any mention of America's role in all this?
Read your own news pages, shitsters?]
The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence.
[Bash, bash!]
He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.
[Yeah, our fault, buuuutt....
'Course, the Times is a propaganda organ, and will lie about "CIA-Duh" in their papers relentlessly!]
That distinction is enormously significant, since President Bush’s current troop buildup is supposed to buy, at the cost of American lives, a period of relative calm for Iraqi politicians to bring about national reconciliation. How much calm it has brought is the subject of debate. But just about everyone in Washington now agrees that Mr. Maliki has made little effort to advance national unity.
[That's why the Barbour Group is preparing the return of Allawi under an "Executive (Military) Council (Command) of non-elected leaders in a COUP?
Bye-bye, Mali-kai!!!!]
The most recent intelligence report on Iraq, released yesterday, concludes that Mr. Maliki’s government is unable to govern and will become “more precarious” over the next six months to a year.
That is why there can be no serious argument for buying still more time at the cost of still more American lives and an even greater cost for Iraqis. A report by an Iraqi correspondent for The Times earlier this week described the deadly sectarian hatreds that have torn apart life in his home province, Diyala, which is almost equally divided between Sunnis and Shiites.
The same day, an Op-Ed article by seven American soldiers serving in Iraq underscored the extent to which American troops have worn out their welcome among Iraqis as social and economic conditions have deteriorated and rampant lawlessness has destroyed the most basic sense of personal security.
[Screw that!!
O'Hanlon and Pollack told me it was "A WAR WE JUST MIGHT WIN," so fuck those grunts.
WHO BLASTED BULLSHIT on their front pages to get them sent there, anyway?]
When it comes to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, Washington and Baghdad are often at cross-purposes. In the western province of Al Anbar, the American military has registered some gains by enlisting local Iraqi Sunnis to fight against foreign-led Al Qaeda formations. That strategy depends on the sense of Iraqi nationhood among local Sunnis. But the Maliki government prefers to concentrate on fortifying Shiite political power and exploiting the immense oil reserves of southeast Iraq. It is hard to imagine any Shiite government acting very differently.
[Yeah, arming the opposition to the central government we allegedly promote sort of STINKY, no?]
Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.
[Then STOP HIM on IRAN, dirtbag suckers!!!
Seriously, you better STOP HIM THIS TIME!!!
But I know you won't, because I read the bullshit!]
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.
[And the murdering of 2-4 million of 'em with massive air ordnance and chemical defoliants didn't help, either!
Sheesh!!!
C'mon, Times, FACE UP TO HISTORY!!!!!!]
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam.
[Or the innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Palestinians et al., Times, don't FORGET THEM!!!!!]
Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.
[I don't know how much we are going to be able to heal this time.
Bush has really done a great job of splitting us with his stinkhole lies.
It's the establishment against the people now, and we are no longer blind.
I'm not, and I was for SO LONG! Went too far with it on Iraq, shitters!
That led me back to 9/11, and SO MANY OTHER THINGS I DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW, but am glad I do now.]
If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them (New York Times August 24, 2007)."
[That blood-soaked, mass-murdering fuck don't care.
His view is the MORE DEATH the better, no matter who it is!
Haven't you been paying attention, Times?]
