It was 40 years ago today Nixon told the guns to spray

#134

 

Your thought process continues to amaze me.

You're saying that American soldiers fought to protect the right to protest, so therefore we shouldn't protest.

Don't you see the logical befuddlement in that?

You also don't see the difference between being "invaded", as you say, and fighting a ridiculous war halfway around the world for no purpose whatsoever except some politician's ego gratification.

 

I think what larry is trying to say is they shouldn't have protested the war in Vietnam, they should have fought in it.

He's saying there was nothing to protest because the war was just. After all, we needed to stop those commies before they conquered the rest of the world, leaving just one last domino, the good ol' USA.

Oh, and the reason the Soviet Union fell is because we stopped 'em in Korea and Vietnam.

The only way peace can be won is to blow 'em all to kingdom come!

 

I think it was China that fought us by proxy in Korea and Viet Nam.

 

One reason there is still so much anger is that the war was a huge mistake and not much has changed as a result, except the volunteer army. I thought we had learned a lesson about "exit strategies", but Iraq and Afghanistan shows that was false. We are still making huge, huge mistakes when it comes to our country's "defense". Iraq, like North Vietnam, never attacked us or any of our allies and we went to war based on flawed intelligence and ideology. America is weaker now because so many people in the world hate us, with some justification.

 

In Korea, yes, but wasn't it proven later that China was not providing support to North Vietnam?

 

China sent in a couple hundred thousand combat troops and logistical support and both China and Russia sent weapons and munitions into Viet Nam.

 

I looked it up. You're right.

 

I read an interesting take on this over the weekend. This author was saying that it isn't necessary for the US to "win" these wars (as opposed to WWII, for example), it just has to not lose them. His reasoning is that the US military is orders of magnitude more powerful than anything the Taliban or al Qaeda can put forward, and continuing to engage those "enemies" occupies their resources to such an extent that they're incapable of doing anything else, which itself constitutes a "victory" of sorts.

He goes on to say that the US Navy basically rules the world, since international commerce requires unrestricted ocean shipping lanes, and no other nation's navy on earth approaches the reach of the US Navy.

I guess I'll have to think about those ideas some more. I don't pretend to fully grasp the geopolitics of globalized military power. I just know what I feel.

It does make sense that if international shipping was seriously disrupted, the economic repercussions would make the recent recession look like a picnic.

 

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaad Nixon!!!!