Chinese / Russian Joint Statement on the "New World Order"

It is astonishing to me that some folks try to paint half of their fellow Americans as in league with the enemy, just because their politics differ. Some seem to be preferring a dictatorship instead of our fine democracy. There will be no bad press or dissident citizens in the Amerika you seem to prefer. No freedom either.

Paranoia runs deep.

 

You're right, I wasn't being clear.

I didn't respond to the Chinese/Russian statements because I really have no strong feelings to contribute. It is not new for major powers to oppose anything that makes their opponents stronger. We do the same thing and have consistently opposed any efforts by Russia and China to become superpowers. It is not surprising that they have common issues with us. I have pointed out in previous posts, we should be currying favor with the Russians, as to prevent the Chinese/Russian alliance in the case of future war. We want the Russians bests interests to be for the US to prevail, not the Chinese. War with China is much more likely that war with the Russians. We need them to sit it out, at the very least.

There are many areas in which the Russians and Chinese have conflicting interests and we exploit them, from time to time. We will continue to do this. It is all part of international geopolitics.

But I am increasingly annoyed by remarks like the one you made. Comparing "the liberal left in our country who seek to undermine everything that has made America great" is part of the divisiveness that is hurting us, even as some of our enemies band together. You should be getting the liberal left to line up beside you instead of considering them the enemy. It makes no sense.

You seem to forget that this country is near equally balanced between left and right, which is how things should be. I think comparing half of your fellow citizens to the enemy is self-defeating and wrong. I think all of us are needed in this fight. I never want to see a totally conservative America nor do I want to see a total liberal one. This is a moderate viewpoint.

It is this neoconservative policy that "everybody who diagrees with us is the enemy" that has moderates like myself often siding with the liberals during this administration.

Better?

 

I don't see a lot of criticism of the war on terror from anybody. I see criticism of the occupation of Iraq. What you don't seem to grasp is that more than half of America feels that this Iraqi debacle is misdirected and not helping the war on terror. Al Qaida was not in Iraq before we went there. Two billion dollars a week is being wasted that could have been used in the real fight.

In a democracy it is the duty of a citizen to demand proper behavior from the government. I believe that favoring this war in Iraq is what is aiding the terrorists. We ain't fighting Al Qaida in Pakistan where they live, we're wasting resources and lives, and we're providing them with easy targets right there in their region.

If you think "hippie crap' is what "lost" the Vietnam war, then you know nothing about Vietnam. That sounds like some scatter-brained Sourdough crap. The responsibility for Vietnam doesn't lie with the military (who did great) or the public (who had no input) but with Lyndon Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

As far as the Giap quote, I'll just repeat what I told Sourdough when he made the same comment.

"You keep repeating this Giap quote like a mantra. The enemy's comments were very self-serving wouldn't you expect? Of course, a free media would surprise a dictator with controlled state media. Try reading a legitimate history of the Vietnam War, like "Vietnam: A History" by Staney Karnow or "Vietnam: the 10,000-day War" by Michael Mclean. Or perhaps an opinion by an American participant like "About Face" by Col. David Hackworth.

We didn't actually lose the Vietnam War militarily. How can you lose a war in which you win every battle? We quit the Vietnam War because it was gaining us nothing for the 58,000 dead young men and the billions of dollars badly needed elsewhere. It was a quagmire guerilla insurgency with no way for us to win. We have failed to learn the lesson of Vietnam, clearly.

It was an unwinnable war, as guerrilla wars often are. And the opposition to Vietnam was much broader than the sterotyped college peace protesters of the movies. Joe and Sue Average were opposed to this war. We were all for Vietnam in the beginning, too. As it went on, the lies and mistakes from the administration became more and more obvious. Anti-war feeling increased and spread from just politically-minded students to Mom'N'Dad and Joe Average and eventually Cronkite himself.

By 1972 nobody in the friggin' country thought we should still be in Vietnam. It went on for eight years, while politicians defended their failed policies. Eventually both Nixon and McNamara admitted their mistakes. Lyndon Johnson never did, although the dropping of his reelection bid in 1968 may have been accepting tacit responsibility. History will be as unkind to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as it has been to Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara."