[quote=“sbmoor262004”]
Flipper, you seem to not acknowledge Chomsky’s ironic voice. Of course he isn’t arguing for hiring mercenaries.[/quote]
please show me how you got that from this passage:
[quote]The Vietnam experience, I think, is the first time in the history of European imperialism that an imperial power tried to fight a colonial war with a citizen
You missed the following in your quote.
Chomsky is arguing here that the draft won’t be reinstated. What you quoted is his reasoning: 1. Colonial wars are brutal. 2. So, an imperial power needs soldiers who are trained to be brutal. 3. Vietnam showed that drafted civilians aren’t brutal. Thus, there won’t be a draft.
In the last paragraph, Chomsky is explaining what ultimately happens when conscripts are used to fight a colonial war: the army breaks. He concludes that there are signs in the Reserves that the army is beginning to break
[quote=“NeonNoodle”]You missed the following in your quote.
Chomsky is arguing here that the draft won’t be reinstated. What you quoted is his reasoning: 1. Colonial wars are brutal. 2. So, an imperial power needs soldiers who are trained to be brutal. 3. Vietnam showed that drafted civilians aren’t brutal. Thus, there won’t be a draft.
In the last paragraph, Chomsky is explaining what ultimately happens when conscripts are used to fight a colonial war: the army breaks. He concludes that there are signs in the Reserves that the army is beginning to break[/quote]
Vietnam was not a colonial war and the only thing it showed was that wavering politicians can lose a war already won on the battlefield.
As far as civilians not being brutal… 
they are the ones with the least discipline and are the most likely to run amok.
so chomsky is arguing that conscription WON’T be reinstated? 
Quite right. Nearly 60 million went and voted for Bush. Sorry, that’s not lack of discipline, just stupidity.
BroonAmok
Quite right. Nearly 60 million went and voted for Bush. Sorry, that’s not lack of discipline, just stupidity.
BroonAmok[/quote]
[quote=“BroonAle”]Quite right. Nearly 60 million went and voted for Bush. Sorry, that’s not lack of discipline, just stupidity.
BroonAmok[/quote]
Learn it…Live it…Love it…GW Bush won
:bravo:
More and More Pres Bush is starting to sound like another famous TV personality
Stalin,
Vietnam wasn’t a colonial war? What was it, then?
Moreover, [quote] the only thing it showed was that wavering politicians can lose a war already won on the battlefield.
[/quote]
:bravo: Yeah, right! Can you in ANY way back this up? Basically, if we had carpet bombed and napalmed the entire country and then forced all the survivors into work camps we might have held the insurgency at bay. It was a nationalist movement - people were fighting us because they saw us as an occupier. Dien Bien Phu was not a democratic leader, so what were we supporting? Even if we had won, would it really have been worth the loss of over a tenth of the entire Vietnamese population of 38 million? rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html
Again, the arrogant militant voice that feels ‘any loss’ is acceptable (except his own!) in the fight for ‘democracy,’ which wasn’t really the case anyway. Please remember there are also the lingering effects of Agent Orange,
natcath.com/NCR_Online/archi … 42800a.htm
and many unexploded bombs still lingering off frequently-used trails and roads. Stalin, are you arguing that if we had killed everyone in the country, wrote a democratic constitution and left it on their rotting corpses that it would have been a victory? Hm. How Republican :s .
Dien Bien Phu is a place. I agree with the thrust of your argument though about Vietnam being a nationalist insurgency without end. It’s hard for me to imagine how anybody who experienced combat in Viet Nam could argue that there was light at the end of that tunnel.
He might mean President Diem.
Here’s a challenge and one that I hope somone can meet. Can anyone give me any new thinking on the left regarding any of the following topics:
Crime control
Education
Foreign Policy
Social Security Reform
Tort Reform
Budget Deficit
Govt involvement in the Economy
Just would like to see if there is any creative thought on these issues going on in the left. The choice to “spend more money” or “create more diversity” would in my opinion not count.
[quote=“sbmoor262004”]Stalin,
Vietnam wasn’t a colonial war? What was it, then?
Moreover, [quote] the only thing it showed was that wavering politicians can lose a war already won on the battlefield.
[/quote]
:bravo: Yeah, right! Can you in ANY way back this up? Basically, if we had carpet bombed and napalmed the entire country and then forced all the survivors into work camps we might have held the insurgency at bay. It was a nationalist movement - people were fighting us because they saw us as an occupier. Dien Bien Phu was not a democratic leader, so what were we supporting? Even if we had won, would it really have been worth the loss of over a tenth of the entire Vietnamese population of 38 million? rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html
Again, the arrogant militant voice that feels ‘any loss’ is acceptable (except his own!) in the fight for ‘democracy,’ which wasn’t really the case
anyway. Please remember there are also the lingering effects of Agent Orange,
natcath.com/NCR_Online/archi … 42800a.htm
and many unexploded bombs still lingering off frequently-used trails and roads. Stalin, are you arguing that if we had killed everyone in the country, wrote a democratic constitution and left it on their rotting corpses that it would have been a victory? Hm. How Republican :s .[/quote]
Jesus Christ and General Jackson. I think you
Must be Republican logic - since I was against US intervention I support Ho Chi Minh. Yes, Ho did give a strong ideological aspect to the struggle, but had it been a pro-democracy struggle the French would have fought all the same and we would have probably labeled it Marxist. The Republican argument continues - to be against senseless violence is to support the bad guys. And I wasn’t aware that New Zealand planes were dropping Agent Orange in Vietnam and Laos. I forgot how many tons of TNT per capita we dropped in Laos (lots of it still causing deaths - why don’t we go in and clean it up?).
sbmoor:
I disagree that Chewy Corns is making the assertion that you claim he is. I think that he is pointing out that the Vietnamese Revolution was not necessarily ONLY about nationalism but had a strong communist element as well. Therefore the struggle involved both aspects but I think that when the struggle was reaching its climax (Tet) that the population at least in South Vietnam had turned against communism. From 1968 onward the Viet Cong was pretty much a spent force. This is why it took an invasion in 1975 to end the South Vietnamese government. It was not a domestic uprising. I believe that this has now been extensively documented and we have corroborating support of this theory from North Vietnamese generals themselves.
[quote]The Tet offensive, which coincided with the lunar New Year holiday Tet, was a heavy defeat for the communist forces in strictly military terms.
However, it gave them a psychological and propaganda victory which vividly rebutted the Johnson administration’s rosy portrayal of the fighting, broke the will of U.S. political elites, and triggered a steady erosion in American public support for the war. Two months later, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election.
Roughly 80,000 communist fighters – Viet Cong insurgents and North Vietnamese troops – staged surprise attacks on the major cities of South Vietnam, dozens of provincial capitals, and countless smaller towns. Commandos raided the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
The offensive was repelled within days in most places. However, communist forces seized the imperial capital Hue and executed 3,000 people. U.S. troops fought street-by-street for a month to regain control of the city.
About 1,100 U.S. troops died in the offensive, and South Vietnamese forces lost 2,300. An estimated 40,000 communist fighters were killed.[/quote]
dailynews.muzi.com/ll/english/1345192.shtml
What would you call at 50% attrition rate spook?
[quote]Historians agree that the 1968 Tet offensive resulted in the worst defeat North Vietnam suffered in the long war. The administration and military stated this at the time. However, the American people received a much different picture, for the press portrayed the offensive as a decisive communist victory and an American-ARVN disaster. The erroneous impression helped topple an incumbent president and accelerated the process of American withdrawal from Indochina. How did the media err? Why did their quest for the true story go so far awry? Braestrup, who was the Washington Post Saigon station chief in 1968 and is now editor of The Wilson Quarterly, attempts to answer this difficult question. His book may inspire as much controversy as the subject with which it deals. He pulls no punches, names names, praises, admonishes, explains, and condemns. Nor does he spare himself in his critique. Braestrup rejects the hawks’ charge that the media were uniformly hostile to the conflict and thus ideology jaundiced their objectivity. The fault, he demonstrates, is more complex and lay with the structures and practices of press and television journalists in Vietnam, the military’s information services, and the whole nature of news production and dissemination in contemporary America.
Most, correspondents in Vietnam were not qualified for their positions as war reporters. They lacked military experience and did not comprehend the complexity of warfare. Although the country seemed inundated with journalists, individual bureaus were understaffed, and the constant demand for instant, simple, dramatic news led to hasty reports, superficial perspective, and overblown interpretive analysis. The fault lay not only with on-scene reporters but all the way up the news chain of command.[/quote]
airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airc … /dunn.html
Sound familiar? Plus ca change… Seems like we have the same type of reporters in Iraq. Oh goodie.
The Viet Cong wasn’t a static group so it’s a mirage to gauge its strength on the basis of numbers of active guerillas from any given year. It was a peasant militia constantly being depleted and replenished and was used to taking heavy casualties from the days of the French Indo-China War. After 1968, its confidence and fighting skill increased significantly when it became clear Nixon was going to withdraw U.S. troops and Cuban advisors came on the scene to advise them in their war with U.S. special forces. The NVA also began to assert more local control so they became less visible but you won’t find anyone who was on the ground in Viet Nam circa 1970 who would tell you the threat of death from VC bullets, booby traps and mortar barrages had diminished over the years. Hence the smily face.
About the only thing which was a ‘spent force’ circa 1969 was the morale of U.S. troops (see ‘fragging’) and the will of the American people to stay the course in Viet Nam.
My personal view is that the U.S. went to war in Viet Nam to help the South Vietnamese people fight off aggression and domination by the totalitarian North and the majority of U.S. soldiers believed that that’s why they were fighting. The problem occurred when troops in Viet Nam saw first-hand though how corrupt the South Vietnamese government was and how little support and understanding the South Vietnamese people had for American notions of freedom and self-government. It was just too new and foreign a concept for them in the 1960’s and that was profoundly disillusioning to U.S. troops who were giving their lives for a one-sided cause. The strongest force among Vietnamese people was nationalism, not international democracy and a belief in political and religious freedom and the U.S. was just unavoidably on the wrong side of this equation no matter how well-meaning its motives.