NYT Barnum
PT Barnum: “You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
NYT: “In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.”
Is your historical memory of the negative repercussions from the abandonment of Southeast Asia challenged? Mine isn’t:
1975: U.S. ally South Vietnam, overrun by North Vietnamese regulars when the ammo and the air cover stopped. U.S. allies Laos and Cambodia, taken over by Chinese and Soviet-backed Communist insurgencies.
1975-early 1980s: Untold thousands upon thousands in Vietnam and Laos executed or sent to “re-education” camps. Hundreds of thousands flee, in overcrowded boats that sank or were attacked by pirates; swimming the Mekong to Thailand; walking through minefields to Thailand. Phnom Penn emptied out by gun-toting teenagers, who drove the people into the fields were 2 million were worked and starved to death, or executed outright. (NYT in its article astonishingly presents this as “tens of thousands,” while Bush in his speech cites “hundreds of thousands.”)
1979: Afghanistan, invaded by an emboldened Soviet Union, which knew a humiliated, war-weary United States led by a handwringing peacenik would do nothing.
1979: U.S. embassy in Tehran overrun by “students,” including the current president of Iran. American diplomatic staff held hostage, subjected to isolation and beatings, for 444 days. Handwringing peacenik president did nothing. A single rescue attempt failed disastrously.
1979-2001: Muslim extremists attack and kill U.S. military missions and personnel in Lebanon, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. U.S. withdraws, occasionally fires missiles. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, citing Vietnam, Beirut and Mogadishu, base their strategies on the notion that the United States has no stomach for a fight and will blink.
NYT has been attempting to prove Barnum’s adage for some time, with its premise that genocide isn’t that big a deal … an odd argument to make in a nation that includes among its citizens the survivors of genocides against Jews, Armenians, Cambodians and American Indians. But not so surprising, when you consider that in the United States Congress, elected officials have actually stated that the abandonment of Vietnam had no negative repercussions — all of whom were alive at that time, some of whom were serving at that time.
I was only 15 then. I remember. But then again, I was only a couple hundred miles away from where all that was happening, listening to the radio in Bangkok, wondering just like all the grownups whether this meant they were going to pour over the border. Sure enough, they did. The tens of thousands of refugees, those that made it. Then there were the cross-border artillery duels and raids, as the Khmer Rouge and then the occupying Vietnamese confronted the Royal Thai Army.
Then I moved to the States. Little Vietnamese restaurants were popping up in storefronts. They were good, and cheap. You like Arab food? I do. Look for an Iraqi restaurant to open near you. In Little Baghdad, when the survivors show up. If our political leaders, so eager to dole out citizenship to anyone who can climb a fence or wade a river, choose magnanimously to find a place here for the Iraqis they want to abandon.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that the New York Times expects us to have forgotten all that, when Americans apparently know and care so little about the world they live in. Maybe Barnum, the New York Times and the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress are right. Maybe they won’t go broke underestimating our intelligence.
Surber: Clinton lied, people died.
Driscoll: No wonder there isn’t any historical memory. TV ignored it.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:30 am on Thursday, August 23, 2007
39 Responses to “NYT Barnum”
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August 23rd, 2007 at 9:48 am
Sigh. Here we go one more time:
The Killing Fields in Cambodia were not a result of America’s pullout from Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge came to power in reaction to an American-backed rightwing coup and US incursions into the country. The Killing Fields genocide was stopped by the Vietcong, the hated enemy of the Khmer Rouge.
Similarly, this one just makes no sense: “1979: Afghanistan, invaded by an emboldened Soviet Union, which knew a humiliated, war-weary United States led by a handwringing peacenik would do nothing.” Um, from 1979 to 1988, the US armed the mujahadin to the hilt, giving them Stinger missiles and massive aid to take down the Soviets. This is where al Qaeda, which grew out of the mujahadin, learned its strategies.
Also, al Qaeda’s strategy is not based “on the notion that the United States has no stomach for a fight and will blink”. That’s all trash talking. The strategy actually is based on the mujahadin’s success against the Soviets in Afghanistan - draw the US into a costly, unwinnable war that will drain the US of its power.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am
Doing the math on the aftermath of Vietnam
As I expected and talked about last night on The MacRanger Show, the MSM is up in arms that President Bush would dare to use their oft comparison of Iraq to Vietnam against them. Proving the adage, they can dish it out but won’t take it, is the …
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:45 am
The Soviet Union walked away from the fight in Afghanistan shorlty after Saudi Arabia ended price controls on oil and the value plummeted to 11 dollars a barrel. With their economy set to self-destruct they lost interest in a rocky piece of landscape with little or no natural resources. Their leader in Kabul was informed of their imminent departure and promptly switched sides.
This in combination with disastrous grain production policies via Stalin created an unsustainable economic scenario. It ended in 5 years of desperate borrowing of 20 billion dollars a year to stay afloat. No loose affilliation of Mujahadin brought down the Soviet Union. It’s a nice bedtime story though–told across the mideast to future jihadists I’m sure.
From “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil” by Yegor Gaidar (Who? look him up)
“The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive…”
As for grain production—it was a collectivist utopia, except of the mass starvations and brutal Stalinist production tactics.
“The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants’ property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: “In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war.” Stalin answered, “I will do it nonetheless.”
The result of the disastrous agriculture policy implemented between the late 1920s and the early 1950s was the sharpest fall of productivity experienced by a major country in the twentieth century. The key problem confronting the Soviet Union was well-expressed in the letter sent by Nikita Khrushchev to his colleagues in the leadership of the party. The letter fundamentally stated: “In the last fifteen years, we have not increased the collection of grain. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a radical increase of urban population. How can we resolve this problem?”
This piece has an abundance of graphs to back it up. Google the title “grain and oil” for the link.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Jeez, I guess Ronald Reagan didn’t end the Cold War after all.
I’ll leave it to Jeffy to take a crack at “Yegor Gaidar”. Heh-heh-heh-heh.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:56 pm
“a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”
Part of the “unsustainable economic scenario” which left a 20 billion dollar shortfall would be the massive military industrial complex of the Soviet Union.
They could in no way compete let alone tread water with our defense budgets.
Socialism/Marxism is a proven failure. But Hillary and Obama want to give it another go.
“From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need”
— Democratic truth in advertising for 2008.
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
“… walking through minefields to Thailand…”
Must be those “American laid” minefields that corndog keeps harping about. Conveniently placed, of course, to impede refugees attempting to flee the enlightend reign of the Vietnamese Communist regime. And well before we abandoned South Vietnam, er, ah, reprioritized our military budget, I mean, back in the early 1970’s..
And maybe we planted a few chemical mines as well, filled with Agent Orange to really clamp down on those gosh darned North Vietnamese.
All this, just to give corndog a strawman to argue long discredited talking points with illiterate neocon Rethuglicans. Ah, the benevolence of the US government!
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald smacks NYT down for glossing over the slaughter of millions af…. Hey, as the NYT says, genocide [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Also, al Qaeda’s strategy is not based “on the notion that the United States has no stomach for a fight and will blink”. That’s all trash talking.
Hardly trash talking, corndog. It’s the core of their strategies. Why else do they focus so much energy on publishing their exploits? It ain’t just for their contributors.
As noted by others, the (thankfully) former Soviet Union didn’t have the economic muscle to sustain itself internally (thanks, in large part, to the long standing American Cold War stratgey of letting the Soviets shoot themselves in the bank account), let alone in an external war. But it still invaded Afghanistan because they thought they could get away with it. Jimmah Cahtah did little more than make faces at them.
The mujahadin played a key role in driving out the Soviets, but the history of insurgency teaches one very important lesson: there is no way a small guerilla force can defeat a numerically and/or technologically superior military force without some form of outside aid. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the gist.
The mujahadin had help on several fronts. First, and most obviously, there was the direct military support provided by the United States. Second, and more importantly, the Soviet Union was falling apart before they invaded Afghanistan, due to the failed Communist economic “policies”. The invasion merely hastened the end of the USSR.
Why am I saying all of this? ‘Cuz of what corndog said:
Um, from 1979 to 1988, the US armed the mujahadin to the hilt, giving them Stinger missiles and massive aid to take down the Soviets.
First of all, “massive aid”? Puh-lease! Look at a map of Afghanistan. It’s completely landlocked. Even today, WITH the support of the Pakistanis, supplying our forces there is the real “massive” effort. When the Soviets occupied The ‘Stan, we couldn’t fly in there and drop off supplies. Most of them were transported into the country on mules.
Instead, we supplied mostly critical munitions, such as Stingers; that crippled the Soviet’s only real advantage: air superiority. Most of the weapons that the mujahadin actually had were Soviet, mostly captured, or manufactured in country (weapons making is a long tradition there). I presume Iran supported them as well, but certainly not in coordination with the US.
Second, going back to my first point, as brave as they were, the mujahadin simply couldn’t defeat a Soviet Army head on. Instead, they turned guerilla, and sapped the Soviets of their will to fight. The economic problems back home (heaped on top of the many problems that the Soviet Army had for a long time) added to that.
So the idea that the mujahadin won the war single handedly is a romantic notion. They deserve much credit because of the price they paid in blood, but not all of the credit. They were not “unilateral” by any means.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Meanwhile back at the Peace Cooperative, a New York Times reporter is checking out…
The Soviet Union and Chicoms aims were noble and had nothing to with (fill in country or region). Check
Uncle Ho and Pol Pot were just patriotic progressive peasants who wanted to unify their countries. Check
Everything bad that ever happened in (fill in country or region) was America’s fault because it either did or did not intervene or because it supported United Fruit/Dow Chemical/Haliburton. Check
If Kennedy had lived, he would have seen the folly of Vietnam and got out. Check
JFK’s tax cuts were broad based and not just targeted at the top marginal rate. Check
An avowed Communist did not kill JFK, racist reactionary Amerikkka did. Check
A Palestinian terrorist did not kill RFK, racist reactionary Amerikkka did. Check
Millions of people starved under Communism because they had 70 years of bad weather. Check.
Gorby ended the Cold War. Reagan was just an amiable dunce who was probably in the throes of Alzheimer’s in his second term. Check.
Paper or plastic and will there be anything else today Mr. Duranty?
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Jeffy says: “First of all, “massive aid”? Puh-lease! Look at a map of Afghanistan.”
Zoinks, Jeffy, that means someone’s made off with a massive amount of money. “Somewhere between $3–$20 billion in US funds were funneled into the country to train and equip troops with weapons, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles.” (from wikipedia)
Jeffy says: “Jimmah Cahtah did little more than make faces at them.”
But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in his memoirs From the Shadows that American aid to the rebel factions in Afghanistan began 6 months before the Soviet deployment. Carter advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap… [...] The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War”
Most importantly, Jeffy says: “going back to my first point, as brave as they were, the mujahadin simply couldn’t defeat a Soviet Army head on. Instead, they turned guerilla, and sapped the Soviets of their will to fight. ”
Yes, Jeffy, exactly. Exactly my point. What was that, again, about al Qaeda’s strategy?
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
The Unnewsworthy Holocaust:
Even as the New York Times has the gall to claim “the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies”, Brent Baker opens up the legacy media’s memory hole to remind the rest of…
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:53 pm
I remember those days. I even remember John Kerry throwing his medals over the fence. I remember him running his mouth in front of the Senate and I remember him on Dick Cavett saying that if we left Viet Nam the war woud leave with us.
The liar. Needless to say the abandonment of South East Asia helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power because it was not just Viet Nam they abandoned.
The following is a letter from Prince Matak, written shortly before he was murdered by the communists:
Letter to US Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean:
“Dear Excellency and Friend, I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people, which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad, because we are all born and must die one day. I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
Prince Sirik Matak.
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Jules:
I agree with much of what you said, but it should be remembered that Bush McCain have both fought long and hard to keep the faith in Iraq and both of them supported immigration reform, whereas a lot of socalled conservatives out there have shown a willingness to throw both Bush and the Iraqis to the wolves…so I think the whole thing about giving citizenship to anyone who crosses a rive might be tad misplaced.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm
I posted this once but I do not see it here now.
corndog is wrong {no surprise there}, of course the US abandonment of South East Asia led to the communist take over in Cambodia. I remember.
This is a letter from Prince Salak of Cambodia, it was written shortly before his murder by the communists:
Letter to US Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean: “Dear Excellency and Friend, I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people, which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad, because we are all born and must die one day. I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
Prince Sirik Matak.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Osama Bin Laden, May, 1998:
Allah has ordered us to glorify the truth and to defend Muslim land, especially the Arab peninsula … against the unbelievers. After World War II, the Americans grew more unfair and more oppressive towards people in general and Muslims in particular. … The Americans started it and retaliation and punishment should be carried out following the principle of reciprocity, especially when women and children are involved. Through history, American has not been known to differentiate between the military and the civilians or between men and women or adults and children. Those who threw atomic bombs and used the weapons of mass destruction against Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the Americans. Can the bombs differentiate between military and women and infants and children? America has no religion that can deter her from exterminating whole peoples. Your position against Muslims in Palestine is despicable and disgraceful. America has no shame. … We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says … . The fatwah is general (comprehensive) and it includes all those who participate in, or help the Jewish occupiers in killing Muslims.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Terrye,
Please tell me more about Prince Salak. I’ve googled him and can find no trace of him, and I’ve never heard of him. If he was in a position of influence, you’d think he would be cited somewhere.
If Salak was part of the right wing dictatorship, however, this letter does jibe with history, in that Nixon tried to keep the dictator propped up and it was this, along with American bombing of their country, that drove Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge, which was the only organized resistance at the time. This is why the Cambodian genocide was independent of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, and a result, instead, of our own actions in Cambodia.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:53 pm
[...] Crittenden sets ‘em straight here: 1975: U.S. ally South Vietnam, overrun by North Vietnamese regulars when the ammo and the air [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:06 pm
corndog:
I am not responsible for the fact that you are a dumbass. Look it up yourself.
By the way, after the man was gut shot it took three days for him to die.
I remember those days. I am approaching my 56th birthday. I remember the Killing Fields and the fall of Cambodia.
I even remember John Kerry saying that if we left southeast asia the killing would stop. There would be no problems. I also remember him running his mouth for the Senate and throwing his medals over the fence.
And since when did the left have a problem with dictators? As a general rule you never met one whose butt you all would not kiss.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Corndog,
Its Prince Sirik Matak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisowath_Sirik_Matak
Also interesting how the history of Cambodia in the 60’s and 70’s isn’t so clear cut as you make it seem. Lots of fence sitting and side switching going on.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:21 pm
And the Prince’s name was not Salak, I maybe brilliant, but my typing skills suck, his name of course was Matak. Preview is for the faint of heart. However, if our intrepid little corndog here was actually paying attention to the letter…I am sure he saw who signed the thing. I think he is just being cute. Some people are so desperate to look superior that they love to make fun of typos and such. It is the best they can do.
Bush made the following comments in his speech:
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”
There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”
His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.”
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
OK, I wasn’t smart enough to stay out of the Navy*, and admittedly I don’t read near as much as Patsy Schroeder, but even I had read this compelling passage before.
Prince Sirik Matak stood by his country and his people when he could have cut and run and saved his own hide from a most gruesome death.
Now in the vernacular of the Left, he’s a “right wing” shill. Figures.
*And hey, neither was jon cary!
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Most importantly, Jeffy says: “going back to my first point, as brave as they were, the mujahadin simply couldn’t defeat a Soviet Army head on. Instead, they turned guerilla, and sapped the Soviets of their will to fight. ”
Yes, Jeffy, exactly. Exactly my point. What was that, again, about al Qaeda’s strategy?
Tsk, tsk, corndog, cherry picking answers ill becomes you. Besides, quoting out of context is sooooo 2004.
Just as a reminder, the complete quote should be:
Second, going back to my first point, as brave as they were, the mujahadin simply couldn’t defeat a Soviet Army head on. Instead, they turned guerilla, and sapped the Soviets of their will to fight. The economic problems back home (heaped on top of the many problems that the Soviet Army had for a long time) added to that.
Please note the last sentence. I’d rephrase in monosyllable terms, but that would be condescending. The point being, the mujahadin could not have won alone. And certainly not if the Soviet economy was as healthy as you seem to think it was.
Somewhere between $3–$20 billion in US funds were funneled into the country to train and equip troops with weapons, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles.”
Well, now, all that happened between 1979 and 1988. Also, your Wikipedia* citation gives a pretty wide range for the aid, which makes me want to grab a salt shaker. Still…..
At the low end, that averages out to about $330 million dollars a year. At the high end, $2.2 billion a year. Possibly the real value is somewhere in between. But $330 million a year to support an insurgency campaign ain’t much, corndog. $2.2 billion might do it, but it’s possible that figure covered ALL expensese related to undermining the Soviet occupation. Like, administrative costs within the CIA. Or hiring ships to haul the weapons to Pakistan. Or paying bakeesh to get the shipments through Pakistani officials. Not every dollar was spent on the actual fight. Never is, not even in Iraq.
Then, that money was spent to “…train and equip troops with weapons, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles.” “Training” is wide open for interpretation. Did the CIA send in teams to train the trainers? Were camps set up outside of Afganistan for this purpose? Some combination of both? In any case, training need not be all that expensive. Were the recruits paid? Unlikely. Fed and clothed? Certainly, but not at the standards you or I would expect. And so on. My point being, don’t take too much from that, because there isn’t too much there.
Also, from Wikipedia**, the basic Stinger cost about $62,000 each in 1987. As of 1987, a total of 16,000 missiles were produced, for a total cost of nearly $1 billion dollars. Since the Stinger was deployed with US forces around the world (the Cold War was still in full swing, remember), considerably less than that were sent to The ‘Stan. So it’s not like the mujahadin were inundated with them.
In fact, according to that link, the CIA gave no more than 2,000 Stingers to the mujahadin, accounting for maybe $124 million of your “$3 to $20 billion”. Can’t shoot down an entire air force with that many, corndog. Their main job was to deny the Soviets free air movement through Afghanistan.
Finally, there’s all that distance to cover simply to get everything into Afghanistan. Logistics is seldom impossible, always complex, and more expensive when nearly impossible and complex. The cost per ton per mile to haul supplies. equipment, and munitions over the mountains, without getting caught, is a lot higher than you think.
So, when you say “Zoinks, Jeffy, that means someone’s made off with a massive amount of money“, you may be closer to the truth than you imagine. Not a little went to administration, salaries, travel, etc (the CIA don’t work for free, me bucko). Next, middle men to cross borders, or hauling the stuff into the country. Training was the next biggest cost, IMHO. Last, the actual cost of the weapons.
And, to put it bluntly, that “$3 - $20 billion” (I’d bet closer to $3 billion myself) was not enough, in and of itself, to defeat the Soviets. The Soviets were borrowing that much just to keep their country afloat.
========================
*: Remember? Wikipedia is not exactly 100% reliable?
**: Yeah, I know!
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Jeffy,
I’m not cherrypicking so much as I’m sideslipping. Your point is about what actually caused the Soviets to pull out. My point is about what the mujahadin think caused the Soviets to pull out (themselves, of course). And perhaps you’ve noticed the fatal human characteristic of never changing a once-successful strategy. And also that people always fight the last war.
To your point about the million-billion debate, I won’t give the Everett Dirkson quote, but just say that it sure sounds like a lot of money to me.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Isn’t it interesting (in a car-accident sort of way)?
For many on the Left (and, admittedly, some on the Right): When friends of America do bad things, America is to blame.
But when enemies of America do bad things, America is also to blame.
Apparently, the actual perpetrators of crimes aren’t culpable. The US either assists in their acts, or fails to prevent their acts, or creates the conditions for their acts.
But the actors themselves aren’t responsible.
Quite odd…
SMG
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 pm
To Terry, Vanguard and Roach,
I fail to see how your Satak, Matak “point” proves anything at all. As I said before, all this shows is that the right-wing dictatorship had no support and that Cambodians threw their support behind the only viable army, the Khmer Rouge. If you have some facts to refute it, please show some guts and do it. And Terrye, citing Bush for facts is a loser’s proposition.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:19 pm
“Cambodians threw their support behind the only viable army, the Khmer Rouge.”
Are the Khmer Rouge culpable in any way for their acts?
You’ve posted numerous comments here but I’ve yet to read a single sentence from you even suggesting in any way that they were resonsible for the 1-2 million deaths.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:19 pm
re: “1979-2001: Muslim extremists attack and kill U.S. military missions and personnel in Lebanon, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. U.S. withdraws, occasionally fires missiles. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, citing Vietnam, Beirut and Mogadishu, base their strategies on the notion that the United States has no stomach for a fight and will blink.”
You inadvertently omitted UBL’s attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in 1998: http://www.state.gov/m/ds/rls/91189.htm
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:00 pm
You’ve posted numerous comments here but I’ve yet to read a single sentence from you even suggesting in any way that they were resonsible for the 1-2 million deaths.
In corndog’s eye, Steve, the Khmer Rouge were enlightened rulers who only gave their people the best, out of the kindness of their hearts.
Like Stalin did in the Ukraine.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 pm
corndog:
Better Bush than Kerry. And so I take it then that you are a fan of the Khmer Rouge? I bet they had all kinds of support from the people after they wiped out a sizable portion of the population.
The point is that the likes of Kerry etc are trying to say that abandoning Viet Nam and South East Asia without so much as a kiss my behind after 57,000 Americans died there was not big deal. Not for us and not for the people who lived there. The fact that is on its face an absurd proposition is beside the point.
Fast forward, now the left is pissed off that we did not support and tolerate dictator Saddam but they are all sanctimonious about the murdered Prince who did not abandon his people. You guys have such class.
What is next? A field trip to Venezuala to congratulate Chavez on his efforts to turn his country into a banana republic? Perhaps a telethon for Mugabe, after all he hates the West and he treats his people like crap and he spouts all sorts of power to the people crap. Once again, your kind of crap..
And btw, corndog, the quotes Bush used in his speech were real, including the ones from the terrorists and the dictator loving anti war Senator.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
JeffS, “we supplied mostly critical munitions, such as Stingers” “In fact, according to that link, the CIA gave no more than 2,000 Stingers to the mujahadin”
The mujahadin were also supplied with a lot of British “Blowpipe” SAM’s. While they were not nearly as good as Stinger they will have strongly interfered with Soviet helicopter gunship support - without them the mujahadin had almost nothing to threaten the relatively well armoured Soviet attack helicopters. You don’t have to hit them to make them cautious and reduce their effectiveness, denying the Soviets their big advantage.
Wikepedia (yeah I know) says Blowpipe was more deniable, being open market. Supplying Stingers required admitting the support.
Corndog does seem very ‘upset’ about the overthrow of dictator for life Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 by his own ‘”National Assembly” Perhaps he’s a closet royalist.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Thanks for the info, David. I didn’t know about the “Blowpipe”, but even 2000 Stingers would have impacted Soviet air ops. The mere threat of such missiles would curtail flights.
And choppers weren’t the only target, I think. Cargo aircraft were DEFINITELY vulnerable to Stingers, back then.
Anywho, the point remains that Stingers and Blowpipes weren’t the sole means of fighting the occupation, just as the muhjahadin weren’t the only ones fighting the Soviets…..it’s just that the mujahadin did most of the dying.
Corndog’s assertion otherwise remains a romantic notion…..that (oddly enough)fits into the leftie meme that AQ can defeat the US in Iraq militarily. That’s not so, which corndog has alluded* to in other threads….it’s the politicians (American and Iraqi) and diplomats that will f**k things up.
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*: Well, OK, he didn’t say that the US military can’t be defeated, he thinks the surge isn’t working because the politicians are f**king things up, and the military is the same thing as the politicians. Or something like that. corndog merely alludes to the fact that politicians can loose a war, although, in his universe, soldiers are still to blame somehow.
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:05 pm
TRJ, don’t you realize that by fighting back you will only create more corndogs. Instead we should consider root causes and ask instead, “why does corndog hate us?”
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Corndog,
Not sure your the best candidates to claim others need to provide facts.
My point regarding Matak was you claimed you couldn’t find him via google and seemed to raise doubts about the validity of the letter posted. In reality his name (as signed on the letter) and the letter itself were rather easy to find.
I would bet that as in most civil wars the majority of the population sat on the sidelines hoping to be left to their everyday lives. Those that joined the stuggle on either side probably did so for a variety of reasons.
While some historians (Kiernen and Owen most famously) have claimed that it was US bombing that drove support for the KR, others believe that many people in rural Cambodia supported the Khmer Rouge because they thought it would restore Sihanouk to power (he became a figurehead for the KR after being removed from office) not because they support their ideology. Your “right wing dictator” was a partner of the communists (both in Cambodia, Vietnam, and China)
If the government of Lon Nol (not Matak, he was never the head of state) had no support (as you claim) how did they hold till 1975 (two years after US aid was cut off)? If everyone was so happy with the Khmer Rouge why the need to kil 20% of the population after they came to power? Why the need for support from the NVA and China if everyone was on their side?
August 24th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Talking about right-wingers and left-wingers is a bit disingenuous. Socialism has both left and right wings; for instance, Hitler was a right-wing socialist, Stalin was a left-wing socialist. They had much more in common, of course, and that is that in practice, socialism always–ALWAYS–leads to slavery and death. Like the Sunni and Shi’a are doing right now, they allied against the common enemy.
Leftists don’t like right-wing socialists because right-wingers don’t overtly take over the economy by confiscating the supposed means of production (the Soviets learned that a manufacturing plant wasn’t the actual “means” of production). They leave an illusion of private ownership of business, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and socialism (a mixed economy). It is but an illusion that gives business owners all the responsibility for doing what the government tells it. Capitalism only works when people are free to conduct business, and the rule of law protects contracts. Right-wing socialists fails the test on both questions.
No matter how you play it, the bodies piled up when we bugged out because we left murdering tyrants to take advantage of the chaos. The most dangerous time for most civilians is during the chaos at the beginning and the end of war. If there isn’t a sufficient power to keep the chaos from taking over, there will be somebody there to take advantage of it. This is something we forgot when we went into Iraq–another lesson that went unlearned, and for which we, as well as the Iraqis, are paying now.
August 24th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Instead we should consider root causes and ask instead, “why does corndog hate us?”
I think he hates us because we are all better at Googling than he is.
Which, in the tradtion of Protein Wisdom, causes me to cry out:
GOOGLIST!!!!!
August 24th, 2007 at 9:15 am
This is your refutation? That’s all you got? I’ll take your points in batches of themes:
1. Jeffy says, “In corndog’s eye, Steve, the Khmer Rouge were enlightened rulers who only gave their people the best, out of the kindness of their hearts.” (Steve MG makes same point). First off, Jeffy, you’re better than that, come on.
More importantly, though, you’re missing the point. You guys are saying that the Khmer Rouge genocide was a result of our withdrawal from Vietnam. At least now you’re down to saying, well, the Khmer Rouge did it, but corndog loves the Khmer Rouge. If you want to make the “ultimate responsibility” argument, then that should apply as well to your fatuous claim that the US withdrawal from Vietnam caused the Killing Fields genocide of Cambodia.
2. Shorter Jeffy at 10:44 pm: “Gee, this car works great if you just work the power windows!”
3. Roach has hidden the fact that the “rightwing dictator” was aided in his overthrow by Kissinger and Nixon. If I am to believe Roach, then Kissinger and Nixon must have been in bed with the commies, who were against Prince Sihuanok, who was allied with the, um, communists. Darn Republicans!
Problem is, Roach is flat wrong (as he should have known if he’d just thought about what he was saying.
Here’s from the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “After having overthrown Norodom Sihanouk in a CIA-led coup, Lon Nol demanded that the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong leave Cambodia”.
“When Lon Nol took power in March, he appealed to nationalist feeling by encouraging not only attacks on the North Vietnamese embassy, but also harrassment of Cambodia’s half million ethnic Vietnamese, most of whom had lived there for long periods and were politically neutral, or supporters of Thieu… From the first [Nixon] saw Lon Nol as a special charge, someone who had gone out on a limb to change his country’s policy and align himself with America.” (William Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Nixon’s Foreign Policy at 222).
I will eagerly await Roach’s superior Googling skills that will prove, slam-door, that the Khmer Rouge did not come to power due to Nixon’s support for Lon Nol.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Corndog,
You need to read in more detail (remember victim does not equal dead).
Me: “Also interesting how the history of Cambodia in the 60’s and 70’s isn’t so clear cut as you make it seem. Lots of fence sitting and side switching going on”
Seeing as how the Vietnemese were in Cambodia proir to Nol coming to power one can assume (and the history supports) that they did so with the approval of the Sihanouk government. That doesn’t make him a communist just someone who profited from a relationship (rice sales, etc)
Me: “(he became a figurehead for the KR after being removed from office)”
Spend a minute researching GRUNK for more details. If Nixon supported his removal and then he sides with the communists, how does that put Nixon on the side of the communists?
The Khmer Rouge trace their start back to the 50’s and 60’s and started their nationwide insurgency in 1968, 2 years before Nol came to power. US aid to Lon Nol was cut off in 1973 and the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975.
While US bombing in Cambodia may have increased popular support for the Khmer Rouge (and these bombings were in support of the war effort in Vietnam more so then in support of Nol), the inability of Nol’s goverment to arm itself without US aid played a far larger role in their defeat militarily, just as happened to the South Vietnemese government. Pretty hard to win a war with no bullets.
August 24th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Roach,
You haven’t even begun to address the point. Did the U.S.’s withdrawal from Vietnam cause the Killing Fields of Cambodia? Yes or no.
August 24th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Corndog,
Clearly the KR caused the Killing Fields so I’m guessing you actually mean did our withdrawal set the conditions for the Killing Fields to occur.
Do you not read? “the inability of Nol’s goverment to arm itself without US aid played a far larger role in their defeat militarily, just as happened to the South Vietnemese government. Pretty hard to win a war with no bullets.” How does that address the question?
Our withdrawal, both in terms of actual combat forces and overall military support, from South East Asia was certainly a cause. No KR n power, no killing fields.