From: kmitche@eis.calstate.edu (Kenneth Mitchell)
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Principles, principles, principles
Date: 14 Oct 92 01:53:19 GMT
Organization: Calif State Univ/Electronic Information Services

nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle) writes:
> Long post here, people, press 'n' now if you're not into millitary history.
> 

Ditto.


> >Nathan, all we had to do was to cut off the invasion forces from North
> >Viet Nam. It is a popular misconception that it was a CIVIL war; it may
> >have started out that way, but after the partition of French IndoChina, it
> >quickly became an ordinary old war of arression on the part of NVN. 
> 
>     Right, I'd agree with that. Unfortunately, I'd say that your statement 
> that "all we had to do was to cuff off the invasion forces" is a lot easy 
> to say than to do. Over that sort of terrain air power isn't enough.

Actually, it was working pretty well, but nothing is ever perfect. 



> >The problem in Beirut was that the Marines were sent in with no OBJECTIVE;
> >nobody said, "O.K., how do we know when we've won?" it was a fiasco and a
> >disaster. In VN, the war protestors here at home successfully prevented
> >the government from doing those things we already knew we needed to do to
> >achieve victory. 
> 
>     Perhaps. Would you say that there's any lesson to be drawn from that 
> war concerning the wisdom of committing forces prior to 'committing' the
> American people? In the absense of that commitment, should we have stayed?

Actually, I'd say that the lesson to be learned is to decide ahead of time
what the objectives are (i.e., "How will we know when we've won?) and
don't get in unless we're willing to go for those objectives. The persian
Gulf War was a good example. The objective was apparently "We win when
there are no more Iraqis in Kuwait" (though I'd have preferred "We win
when Saddam is in a Saudi jail for war crimes, but picky, picky) and we
did what needed to be done to achieve the objective. In Beirut, as you
correctly note, nobody had defined the objectives, and we got creamed. 

Bill Clinton has said occasionally that we need to get involved in the
Serbian wars of aggression. I'd support aerial intervention ("we win when
there are no Serbian airplanes flying over Bosnia or Croatia") but Slick
Willie apparently doesn't have such clear objectives. The question is, did
he learn the right lesson from the Viet Nam war? Because many people DID
NOT. The lesson they think they learned is that wars are bad and shouldn't
happen. But that's too simplistic; sometimes war is the lesser of evils. 

Mark Twain is quoted as saying that a cat who has once sat on a hot stove
will never sit on a hot stove again. Of course, he'll never sit on a COLD
one either!  While it is important to learn the lessons that history
teaches us, it is CRITICALLY important that we learn only the right lessons!


> >The "fecal matter" in your post was the stuff about
> >crushing the PEOPLE; damned few of the PEOPLE cared one way or another. It
> >was the INVADING NVN REGULAR ARMY TROOPS that we needed to "crush", and it
> >would have been easier to do that at the source. 
> 
>     Probably you're right. It would have been interesting to see how matters 
> would have turned out if the millitary had been allowed to prosecute it as 
> a quick offensive war. It's really too bad that things didn't turn out the 
> way you say it would have.

Again, look at the Gulf War for an example of a well-managed one. Or the
Grenada or Panama invasions. 


> 
> >Yes, the Viet Nam war was badly mismanaged at EVERY level, and there's
> >more than enough blame to go around. The Army was mis-managed and badly
> >led; the politicians manipulated the data, and military commanders were
> >dragged into the politics. Protestors here at home successfully prevented
> >popular support from being expressed or reported, and exagerated the
> >scale of inevitable losses.
> 
>     You're making it sound more like the Crimea than the Boer War. Time 
> to dip into the history books again, I suppose.
> 
Probably worse. If you care to look, check into Army personnel assignment
policies that destroyed unit cohesion and took experienced leaders out of
the field just as they were beginning to learn the ropes. Y'see, "combat
command" is a real promotion "plus", and the Pentagon wanted every young
officer to have it. So inexperienced guys were thrown in for six months or
so, and then replaced. On Wall Street, in portfolio management, they call
this "churning". 


> >And worst of all, the military was willing to continue to fight even after
> >the political leaders had forbidden them to take the actions needed to
> >win; i.e., attacking the North, whence came all the supplies and materiel
> >for the enemy. When it became obvious that we WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO WIN,
> >the military should have pulled out completely. There was a lot of support
> >in the military at the time for a philosophy of "either get OUT or get IN;
> >this halfway stuff is KILLING us!" 
> 
>     Right. That's exactly my position. So if that's my reason for opposing 
> the war, and if there were lots of people in the millitary who felt the 
> same way, then would you say that both me and the rest of them actually 
> "supported the murders committed by the Khmer Rouge"?
> 

Since I'm one of the ones who wanted to get IN and finish the job, you'll
understand that I'm not real sympathetic to the ones who wanted to quit. 

> >>     Many of the crimes committed by the Vietnamese or Cambodians against 
> >> their own people were heinous in the extreme. 
> 
> >And were never EVER criticised by the Hollywood Left and the anti-war
> >activists in the U.S. I take that back; Joan Baez, long an anti-war
> >protestor, protested the NVN atrocities after the fall of Saigon, and was
> >shunned by her former fellow protestors. Jane Fonda was quoted as saying
> >that she would NEVER criticise NVN, no matter WHAT they did. 
> 
>     I thought that _The_Killing_Fields_ was some pretty powerful anti-Khmer
> Rouge stuff as well. 

Came YEARS later, and was roundly scorned by the Hollywood Left. 


> 
> >> Cambodians today remember 
> >> the "Pol Pot Time" as a blur of misery and suffering. Unfortunately many 
> >> of those Cambodians today view the Vietnamese as their saviors rather than 
> >> the US. For some reason they view our effort on their behalf as a half-
> >> hearted and somewhat bungled attempt which was abandoned as soon as we 
> >> found out that we'd gotten into more than we bargained for.
> 
> >And whose responsibility was that? I can assure you that the vast majority
> >of military folks were SICK about the way we abandoned those poeple. 
> 
>     Yes, the same way a vast number of them were outraged by our reluctance 
> to take millitary action to protect the Kurds and the Shiites in the south.
> Unfortunately we just can't always be the world's policeman, and *we aren't
> responsible* for Khmer Rouge atrocities. It was a tragedy which our nation 
> didn't have the political will to change.

What a tragedy that we had the ABILITY but not the "political will" to
prevent 3 million murders, and the enslavement of 30 million people for 25
years.

> 
> >>  That part of 
> >> the war effort is very difficult to portray in a positive light no matter 
> >> what our intentions were. If you think that makes me a Khmer Rouge supporter 
> >> then I guess we just have to agree to disagree.
> 
> >I don't; I just figure that when the consequences of an action are BAD
> >that we have to be ready to accept that it doesn't make any difference
> >WHAT our intentions were. 
> 
>     Hmmm, sounds dangerously close to being a justification for further 
> expanionist "adventurism", but I'm sure that's not your intention. I guess 
> I'm just extra sensitive because that's the basic reason the British used 
> to justify literally dozens of "little wars" from the 1830's through 1910.
> 
Not sure what you're talking about here.

> >But look at the bright side. Thailand DID NOT fall to the communists.
> >Neither did Malaysia. And while Indonesia took it's own bizzare detour
> >through "fascism" under Sukarno, it is now a relatively (sort-of) free
> >country. I choose to believe that our efforts and our sacrifices there mad
> >a positive effect, since I have NO doubt that all those nations would have
> >succumbed without the time we bought for them. 
> 
>     In that case, do you think that they would have experienced a similar 
> dominoe effect such as the one that has occurred in Eastern Europe? Would 
> they eventually have been free of communism anyway, even without the time 
> we bought with our boys' lives?


I think it unlikely. After all, even as weak as we left them the communist
regimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam are still in power, and show no
signs of letting go. On the other hand, absent our resistance to communist
(read: Soviet) expansionist "adventurism" in southeast Asia, in Angola, in
El Salvador, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, etc, it's unlikely that the
Soviet empire would have fallen apart. They fell when they FAILED, and
they failed because of US. I find the notion that the Soviet Union would
have crumbled no matter what we did to be as silly as the Christian
Scientist's assertion that it was his prayers, rather than the
pennicillin, that cured the pneumonia. 

> 
> >But I take great exception to statements that the war was wrong and evil,
> >and it always was, and that nothing good could EVER have come from it.
> >Because those are damned lies. 
> 
>     It's a good thing I never said anything like that, eh?
> 

It's a popular notion, though. When I was at the University of Kansas, the
Journalism Department had a big poster which read, "There is no such thing
as a Good War, or a Bad peace". 

And it's clearly wrong. Want an example of a 'bad peace"? 1937, when
Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland, in defiance of the Versailles treaty.
His total army was less than a single division then. If France and
England had acted THEN, instead of two years LATER, World War Two would
have lasted about a week.

I begin to think that maybe there's hope for you yet, Nathan!

Ken Mitchell
kmitche@eis.calstate.edu
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh