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Tim Cavanaugh | October 5, 2004

Cathy Young goes back to 'Nam.

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|10.5.04 @ 11:40AM|#

I think a more clever headline would have been, "Saigon... I can't believe we're still in Saigon."

|10.5.04 @ 11:49AM|#

Someone was asking me recently if I thought it was unpatriotic, as Dubya implies, to call for declaring victory and getting out of Iraq.
It caused me to recall I was assigned to get into my dress blues and be an official honorary pall bearer at the funeral at Arlington National Cemetary of a lieutenant killed in Vietnam.
I did this with a 13 month tour of duty as an infantry officer staring me in the face.
So I was a pall bearer and shortly after tromping down the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Has the statute of limitations expired on the psychological damage that was inflicted on me?
Is there a lawyer in the audience?

|10.5.04 @ 12:01PM|#

vietnam can be characterized as a war to impose at gunpoint democracy on a communist dictatorship -- and therefore atrocities can be diminished in good conscience and the aims of the war can be seen as "good"? hmm.

imo, the lesson of vietnam is the one no one seems willing to learn: the united states is a poor, uncommitted direct imperialist that should instead continue to concentrate on trade and aid to build/maintain its indirect 'empire of the willing' client states, using military power as sparingly as possible because every military operation is a significant opportunity for an expensive failure.

|10.5.04 @ 3:02PM|#

Democracy at gun point is like clear cutting a forest. You have to remove everything, then plant your new trees, then spend years of nuturing and managing to get back to that once mighty stand. In the early years, you have to fight off all other pioneer species of shrubs and grasses and protect against opportunistic feeders in order to get the tree to take root and grow. In the middle years, you have to occasionally remove the weak and undesireable to allow the strong and healthy to grow larger. In the later years, you have to protect against fire and disease so you can protect your investment. If you don't invest the time and energy in doing this, you end up with a completely worthless and unmanageable conglomerate of growth, far removed from what you started with and likely have caused an unintended shift in the environment.

Step one is to clear cut, remove everything, I don't think that is morally possible, even in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq.

|10.5.04 @ 10:04PM|#

vietnam can be characterized as a war to impose at gunpoint democracy on a communist dictatorship

If you don't know anything about the Vietnam war, sure.

The Vietnam War began with North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam in an attempt to impose communist dictatorship on it. Our involvement in the war was an attempt to prevent this from happening. Imposing "gunpoint democracy" on North Vietnam was never part of the agenda; the Vietnam War was a defensive war, fought to protect an ally from communist aggression.