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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The_Tom: [QB] No self-respecting historian in the last twenty years would claim containment was a success. The entire policy of containment was an outgrowth of the Domino Theory, which was drafted by a minor foreign policy hack in the Truman administration whose name escapes me (and, yes, was a Democrat) and it was based on the premise that there was an organized conspiracy among the communist nations of the world to conquer the world and impose communism on everyone else. Hence the notion that once a nation "went communist" its neighbors would as well, and from that "better dead than red." 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 [b]hindsight[/b], 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, [b]hindsight[/b], 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 [b]when the war was underway[/b]. 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.[/QUOTE] I wonder what how a Pole would feel about that? Or a Czech? Or anyone else who had their lands occupied by the Soviets in order to create a buffer between them and Germany? 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! [/QB][/QUOTE]
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