Um... wouldn't that simply be restating the exact same idea?

What Omega fails to realize is that it *was* critiqued when it happened! And it's still being critiqued!

Criticizing foreign policy when it happens is good. Criticizing foreign policy a decade or two after the fact is dwelling on that which can't be changed, and thus a waste of energy. In foreign policy, the same situation rarely repeats itself twice except on the most general level, so learning from what may or may not have been a mistake is very difficult.

Here we see a double-standard at work. The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.

quote:

---

(a) forcibly doubled its size through conquest,

---

There is a moral difference between aggresively conquering your neighbors (which Israel didn't do) and being ganged-up-upon by several other countries, defeating them anyway, and then creating 'buffer zones' to preserve your central core's security.

Put it this way: if the US and Russia declared themselves enemies of Canada and attacked, and Canada somehow fought back and kicked ass, siezing, say, Alaska and Maine and part of Siberia in the process, and kept them (later giving back Siberia as part of a peace deal), that would be different than if Canada had simply attacked and taken Alaska and Maine without being provked.

quote:

---

(b) became far and away the most-heavily armed nation between Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and

---

If you faced CONSTANT, fanatical aggression, you'd soon find that it was practical to be more well-armed than your adversaries, too.

quote:

---

(c) developed the military-industrial conplex to independently maintain that status to the present day.

---

How else would one do (b)?

[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]

The debate here is whether we can call those policy decisions 'mistakes.'

'Mistake' implies that there was some other, better course of action that could be taken. Since all the talking heads, even with the added superiority of 20/20 hindsight, have thus far utterly failed to come up with any alternative favorable scenario, one must conclude that the actions were not mistakes at all.

As Trek has put it... "It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose."

quote:

---

The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.

---

Feel free to criticize. I see another double standard, though ... follow me on this.

Are you going to stop bashing on Clinton any time soon? I doubt it. So, you would still be able to criticize past political leaders and decisions, while at the same time urging the lefters on this board (me, Jay, Tahna, Tom, others) not to criticize the U.S.'s containment policy (which, ironicly, came out of Truman's administration).

This was proven patently ridiculous when after the reunification of Vietnam, communists in South East Asia proceeded to spend twenty years slaughtering each other. Communist revolutionaries were never one big happy family working together towards a common goal whatsoever, but usually nationalists first and foremost who tacked Marxism on as a way to garner the support of the peasant classes and rebel against a feudalesque elite. (see: anywhere in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America). "Aggression" can be proven in every case have little to do with the USSR moving pieces into place to create a new world order (or have we forgotten that Stalin completely threw out Lenin's ideas of sponsoring international communist revolt when he shut down the Comintern?) but rather it lending armed support to causes sympathetic to it, because it was in its self-interest to have more friendly countries in its camp. First goes on and on about how countries can never be expected to do anything but whatever is in the self-interest. This is very clearly another case.

The US failed to contain communism in South East Asia and, yes, in hindsight, the world did not end. But guided by this false principle that it might, it pumped millions of dollars into a war that ended up destroying funding for important reforms at home as well as thousands of young lives. Ultimately it ended up protecting a corrupt elite class from a populist-but-not-democratic nationalist movement. For First, in, ahem, hindsight, to say that attempting to contain something that was proven could not be contained led to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years afterward and therefore made the policy a rip-roaring success is ridiculous.

As Jeff has said, people at the time weren't so stupid as to be completely blind to possible outcomes when the war was underway. People were making the point that US support of a corrupt and unpopular regime was morally ambiguous and that such heavy losses were not a reasonable price to pay for keeping communists out of half of a tiny country. People critiqued the Domino Theory from the moment it came out. And it wasn't just dirty long-haired univerity students, but academics and politicians, and yes, talking heads. On a foreign visit to the US in the sixties, Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (who had earlier picked up a Nobel Peace prize from stopping your fanaticism about containment at all costs leading to an invasion of Egypt), delivered a rather famous speech at a university (whose name escapes me, will look it up) in which he said that military intervention in Vietnam was emerging as a patently stupid exercise. Soon after, he visited LBJ in the Oval Office, and LBJ was furious enough to pick up the much-shorter Pearson by the neck and hold him against the wall screaming at him for daring to criticize America's plan to save the world. While its usually now only quoted as one of the more unusual stories about Canadian-American relations, it proves my point adequately. The "talking heads" of the time were saying containment was flawed, in hindsight correctly, and American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, were too arrogant to admit the heads might be right.

I have neither the patience nor the motivation to pull apart your thoughts on the justification of Israeli aggression. Yet.

Nonetheless, this little nugget needs to be questioned:

quote:

---

There is a moral difference between aggresively conquering your neighbors (which Israel didn't do) and being ganged-up-upon by several other countries, defeating them anyway, and then creating 'buffer zones' to preserve your central core's security.

---

Your arguments seem to boil down to "Israel beat the Arab states in war and it is therefore justified to occupy Palestinean territory" Apparently military might therefore gives one the right to rule over others who have no wish to be ruled by you.

At last First of Two is unmasked as Franz Joseph Hapsburg!

[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]

Some of their failures were largely due to our intervention.
Our intervention was largely due to our policy of Containment -- to keep Communism from spreading any farther, whenever and wherever we could.

Both sides spent a hellacious amount of capital, men, and resources on these struggles.

In the end, we outspent them. Resources they spent fighhting us in Vietnam could not them be re-used in other places.

As for 'conquest by war' you are totally missing the point. We're not talking about annexxing smaller countries to use as a buffer zone. We're talking about using the captured territory of the people who attacked FIRST.

If you want to know the truth, I believe that if a man tries to mug me, and I knock him down and out, I'm entitled to HIS wallet. If cops bust a drug dealer and take his briefcase full of cash, they should be able to use that money to finance more antidrug efforts. If another country attacks you and you kick its ass, you have the right to hold any territory you sieze during the war.

*Crazy hypothetical speculation follows*

If Canada were to attack Maine (although I can't see why anybody would want to), and the US were to beat the Canadian forces back across the St. Lawrence, then everything south of that river is OURS, man. Fairly won. Because they attacked first, and when you accept a course of action, you accept its consequences.

quote:

---

The Communists attempted to foment revolutions across the glome in numerous small countries. In a few cases they succeeded (Nicaragua, Vietnam), in other cases they failed.

---

No, they didn't. In almost every single case, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, the revolutions were caused by nationalist groups that revolted in most cases against a wealthy ruling elite, never democratic and usually corrupt, an elite which drew its power from American business interests and ran an economy in which the vast majority of the population was incredibly disadvantaged. They were therefore labeled Marxists.

So yeah, these rebels have a revolution going. They need arms. During the cold war, they could get them from one of two camps, the West or the Communist bloc (Angola being a notable exception where there was a third camp, South Africa, present). If the rebels were enemies of the interests of the West, as they usually were, that narrowed things down to who their choices for supporters could be. If the rebels were enemies of the interest of the Communist bloc, as they were in Afghanistan during the eighties, that narrowed things down to who their choices for supporters could be.

And, the Cold War being the Cold War, the various camps were usually all-too-willing to contribute. Did that mean that the rebels and their sponsors were part of a masterplan together? Of course not. In many cases the rebels hated their sponsor's guts, the most obvious examples being Iraq and the Afghani Mujahideen. The North Vietnamese recieved piles of money from the Chinese, then promptly pissed them off to the point that they were invaded by them, for heaven's sake.

quote:

---

As for 'conquest by war' you are totally missing the point. We're not talking about annexxing smaller countries to use as a buffer zone. We're talking about using the captured territory of the people who attacked FIRST.

---

quote:

---

Here we see a double-standard at work. The talking heads can criticize everything and anything, but nobody can criticize the talking heads.

---

No, the double-standard is that you criticize the talking heads and call it freedom of speech, but when you're criticized in turn, you call it 'censorship'. That's the real double-standard here, isn't it?

If you recall, I said I'd stop wayyy back in the 9-11 thread... and even THEN, I talked about GORE.

quote:

---

Oh, and mentions of Clinton in retaliation for mentions of Reagan/Bush etc don't count.

---

Fine. By that logic, I win any polticial discussions from here on out.

On a more serious note ...

And since Omega agrees with you, it'll be double the fun!

[ October 20, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]

quote:

---

That's exactly what the Soviet Union did after WW2.

---