corysub
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ORIGINAL: submaleinzona
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ORIGINAL: corysub
Thank you for your voice on this thread. Such a welcome relief to the general personal attacks between people who disagree, rather than an intelligent, thoughtful essay.
I could not agree more with your comment that the United States, so often accused of being an imperialistic nation has shown over a hundred years of history that this is not true. We have been a nation that has freed peoples from the bindings of dictatorship and slavery, a nation that truly has been the grandest uncle to so many, for so little in return. In the words of some of our political leaders and the media, it's America that has to rekindle friendships with other nations....and don't see the pols and media in those countries with a similar push towards our country.
I can see where some might make the case for that. America didn't really have a real official "empire." At best, America's "empire" was more like a shadow empire of puppet governments and wars by proxy. The Kellogg-Briand Pact made aggressive war illegal, so maintaining our "empire" became more of a game to get what we wanted while still making it seem that everything was legitimate and above-board.
I guess you could use words as "shadow empire" or even "spheres of influence" but in terms of "empire" which, to me at least, means occupation, control, taxation, imposed rules and law. I guess you can point to United Fruit as a controlling arm of the United States...as did large trading companies from other countries for their homeland.
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I also agree that the U.S. government has a history of not being totally open with the citizenry as to why we are going to war...or if not open, certainly has not done anywhere near the communications necessary to widen support for the use of military force. We will never have a country with total agreement on a conflict, but to fabricate an incident as we did in VietNam, send over 500,000 troops to that conflict with horrible sacrifice of men I knew and you may as well. To abandon the South as we did was as if we left our fallen hero's on the battlefield!
Vietnam was a part of our overall Cold War strategy of Containment. It really started back in World War II. For whatever reason, that territory (when it was still French Indochina) got U.S. attention when it was threatened by the Japanese, which triggered the U.S. embargo on Japan, which triggered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While the Japanese were occupying that territory, we helped the resistance movements which had been mostly led by Communists. (It should be noted that, during the Second World War, the resistance movements in occupied countries tended to have Communist leaders, since the Communists had already been operating underground and had a network and structure for doing so. This was also true in French Indochina and the resistance led by Ho Chi Minh.)
The second world war ended in 1945. The French did not have the heart to fight in IndoChina, and, had enough problems in Algeria. I truly believe that the French Military abandoned that fight when they truly "abandoned" the 9,000 brave men of the foreign legion surrounded and destroyed by General Giap at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
To those today that are so concerned about the United States and its "cruel" treatment of terrorist prisoners, of teh 11,0000 prisoners taken and marced 250 miles to interment camps in the north, only 3,000 were alive to be released in 1958.
Vietnam was different from Korea. The reason the Korean War got started was because we made a deal with the Soviet Union that, if they declared war on Japan, the Red Army would get to occupy Korea north of the 38th parallel. It was a bargaining chip in order to get Stalin's help against Japan after Germany was defeated. The original agreement called for an election which was supposed to establish a unified Korean government, but that fell apart when the Red-occupied North boycotted the election and formed a separate nation. Just because Korea was an involuntary part of the Japanese Empire didn't make them an Axis nation, and they shouldn't have been treated that way. But at least there was a method to their madness, because the defeat of Japan was the top priority at the time.
But giving North Vietnam to the Communists made no sense, since the Japanese had already been defeated years earlier. It was just blatant appeasement to the Communists. If they had nipped the problem in the bud in 1954, they wouldn't have had to invent the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify going to war.
Well, you are very correct, the Gulf of Tonkin was truly a major lie to the American people.
This is where the right-wing also got a bit perturbed with our government's policies. Our politicians and other leaders kept saying over and over that "the Red Menace must be stopped" and "Communism is our enemy." They still often ask why we didn't let Patton just go in and attack the Red Army immediately following the defeat of Nazi Germany. They ask why Truman fired MacArthur for wanting to invade Communist China. They ask why we were still trading with the Soviet Bloc at a time when those Bloc nations were also trading with North Vietnam and sending our trucks to be used by the North Vietnamese Army in their war to kill Americans. People on both sides of the political spectrum began to wonder, "Well, are Communists the enemy or aren't they?"
The way the government was acting, it seemed as if they were not so much interested in stopping Communism as much as having continuous war for its own sake. Some believe it was just the Military-Industrial Complex trying to get rich with no other purpose in mind. Others might also suggest that it had to do with national interests and vital resources. Sugar merchants and United Fruit established their own little empires in Latin America, but for some reason, they just couldn't muster up enough to get rid of Castro. On the other hand, mining and copper interests don't mess around like those fruit peddlers, so they put Allende out like a light. Their cousins in the oil industry can also get pretty rough at times. So, some would argue that a lot of what our government has done has been to safeguard U.S. economic interests, and Communists were seen as a threat to those economic interests.
The Soviet Union was a real threat to the United States until Ronal Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the Pope, each did their bit to bring down not only the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain across Europe, but the Soviet Empire itself. The Soviet Union was not a figment of someones imagination..and that risk is rising again...postponed only by the $100 decline in the price of oil. (Our government today is guaranteeing that oil prices will rise again by their anti-drilling "Green" policy)
But that's where it gets complicated from a moral and philosophical viewpoint. Should we sacrifice our own people in battle just so some big business interests and fat cats can get rich? Is that what it's all about? It's understandable that some people just don't want any part of that, because it sounds like we're killing and bombing people just so we can get rich and live high on the hog, as we have been doing all along. I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, (Good for you!)but I can understand how some (especially from around the world) can draw that conclusion, especially in light of all the utter sheep's urine that our government keeps spewing out on a regular basis. This is where propaganda and false imagery can bite us back. If you live by lies and propaganda, you die by lies and propaganda. I'm firmly convinced that that, more than anything else, was what led to the fall of the Soviet Union. Yea.. I would like to believe that too!...but the truth is they were bankrupt in their ideas, and bankrupt in their treasury. The world was also lucky that Gobachev was a man who, deep down, loved his country and believed in opening up the society of the Soviet Union when he introduced iglasnost as one of his troika of programs in his campaign to reform a faltering Soviet system.
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I guess a "democratic republic"..does not have tolerance for an extended conflict. We are seeing that today in Iraq where, once again, there is a loud outcry to remove our troops immediately, although heartening to see the President apparently continue the Bush policy of listening to his generals.
While I disagreed with the VietNam protestors at the time and the "flag burning", I could understand the fears of the students who were subject to the draft, particularly in the later years when politicans were undermining the effort. To be drafted and sent to VietNam was not a career building item on your resume' in those days. As an aside, I saw a comment somewhere that half of those men and woman who died in the conflict were conscripted young men. It always brings a tear thinking about that waste. I believe Afganistan and Iraq are totally differnet stories..but that's another thread.
Sorry..I'm starting to ramble...take care... cory
Actually, I think that discussions which put a wider perspective on our current dilemmas are probably more productive and fruitful than a lot of this back-and-forth sniping that keeps going on in just about every forum I know of. I agree!
Overall, I'm happy to have been born and raised in this country. While I was never rich and sometimes money got tight in my family (money's still tight these days), I never went hungry and I always had a roof over my head. I attended good schools, a good university, took opportunities to travel and see the world. I've traveled extensively around America, and it never ceases to amaze me at the wonder and majestic beauty of this nation. I love this place. I really do. It's obviously not perfect, and every country has its problems. We also have some dark pages in our history which can't be denied either. But through all the arguing and finger-pointing and so forth, the bottom line is that this still our home. We have to live here together, for better or worse. We can all agree on that too!
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