The fundamental problem with America's retreat

Mar 21, 2014 0:17:38 GMT pjohns1873 said:

Yes, Batista was a dictator; but was Castro (either Fidel or, now, Raul) really preferable?

The Shah of Iran, also, was certainly a dictator; but was the Ayatollah Khomeini, or any of his successors, better?

And the Contras may not have been the very apotheosis of purity; but would you place your imprumater upon the Sandinistas, instead? 

And would you have preferred the government of North Vietnam to that of South Vietnam (when the country was divided)? 

Castro was the result of US support for Batista.

The democratically elected government of Iran, which the US helped overthrow, was preferrable to both the Shah and the Ayatollah.

The Contras, had they succeeded in Nicaragua, would have been far worse than the Sandinistas.

The People of Vietnam would have been far better off had the reunification vote taken place after the French withdrawal but the US was instrumental in preventing that vote which resulted in a divided Vietnam and the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Minh was certainly morally superior to Ike, LBJ and Richard Nixon when it came to the People of Vietnam. I omit Kennedy because he'd actually ordered the withdrawal of the few US troops from Vietnam but that order was reversed by LBIJ when Kenney was assassinated.

Our problem, the American problem, is that we don't hold the moral high ground that we could if we simply followed the ideals established for America in the Declaration of Independence. We are often far worse than the "enemies" we oppose and we certainly don't stand behind a belief in the "inalienable rights of all people" in our international affairs.  

As an American one of the most haunting memories I have was when I read a statement by Osama bin Ladin where he levied a list of indictments against the United States citing direct and indirect cases of Crimes Against Humanity that the United States fundamentally responsible for.... and they were all true. Yes, it was propaganda where half-truths take center stage and the "good things" American has done were omitted but by reverse analogy it's like applauding a murdering bank robber for giving assistance to the poor. In that statement, or a similar one, by bin Ladin he expressed that the United States would be admired around the world if we actually practiced what we preached based upon the ideals upon which America was founded but sadly we don't.  

American has the greatest ideals of any nation clearly established by the Declaration of Independence and our only problem is that we make no attempt to live up to them. Our foreign policy is based upon "Might Makes Right" and that is completely juxtaposed to the foreign policy that the United States should be following. The policy of "Might Makes Right' is the policy of a tyrant and America was founded upon an ideal that opposed tyranny and the tyrant.

Mar 21, 2014 23:13:40 GMT pjohns1873 said:

To conclude that Castro was the direct result of Batista is, well, really quite a leap.

The (somewhat opaque) reference to "[t]he democratically elected government of Iran, which the US helped overthrow," is, presumably, an allusion to "Operation Ajax." Without getting into the historicity of this matter, I do find it fascinating that you would go back 61 years to seek your model for what Iran should be like today.

And to assert that the Contras would have been "far worse than" revolutionary Marxists is almost beyond belief, to me.

Oh, and to attribute moral superiority to Ho Chi Minh, vis-a-vis Eisenhower or LBJ (or probably even Nixon--although that is a bit closer call) is something else that I find utterly astounding...

The Cuban and Iranian people both long suffered the abuses of the dictatorships of Batista and the Shah of Iran before resorting to revolution to overthrow these despots. Sadly, as history has also shown, rarely do such revolutions lead to a better situation for the people of the nation. The "Cause" is just but those that lead the revolution often twist it into the same evil wearing a different mask in the end. There is a great line from the movie The Professionals (as I recall) that states, "The Revolution is a whore." It starts out as a beautiful woman but then degrades over time to being little more than just a whore.

We know why the British and Americans joined to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran. The British were stealing the oil of Iran from the Iranian people and the elected government of Iran reached the point where it said, "Enough is enough" and nationalized the Iranian oil industry. The Shah of Iran was installed to ensure the theft of the natual resources of Iran from the Iranian people would continue.

As for Ho Chi Minh, lest we forget, he was responsible for overthrowing the colonial rule of the French. He was the "George Washington" of Vietnam (although the actual military genius was Vo Nguyen Giap) in freeing the Vietnamese from the tyranncal rule of the French that were exploiting the natural resourses of Vietnam not for the Vietnamese people but for French business interests. With the decisive defeat of the French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 the country was divided with Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Revolution controlling the North and Emperor Bảo Đại (a tyrannical dictator originally installed into power by Japan in WW II and a supporter of the French) in the South. Emperor Bảo Đại was quickly overthrown by Ngô Đình Diệm, another tyrannical dictator. In any case the Geneva Conference on July 21, 1954 divided the country and established that internationally supervised free elections would reunify the nation the following year.  

The vote for reunification of Vietnam never took place as the United States sided with Ngô Đình Diệm, the tyrannical dictator in control of South Vietnam, to prevent the internationally supervised elections. While the South was called the Republic of Vietnam it was never a republic. Power was handed from one despot to another either by coup or by rigged elections. The US propaganda machine referred to North Vietnam as representing the "Soviet" threat against the United States but Ho Chi Minh was never a puppet of the Soviet Union. Ho Chi Minh was never the "great evil" that the US propaganda machine portrayed but instead was the liberator of the Vietnamese People. Yes, he was a socialist and that is not an ecomonic system we support but that still doesn't take away the fact that he was fighting for a free and independent Vietnam for the Vietnamese People. The "Republic of Vietnam" in the south was the puppet regime of the United States but that was not the case in North Vietnam. North Vietnam controlled exclusively by the Vietnamese while South Vietnam was controlled exclusively by the United States.  

So you tell me who was morally superior. A Vietnamese leader that fought virtually his entire life to overthrow foreign occupiers of his nation or the Presidents of the United States that were responsible for foreign military occupation in Vietnam and a war where they were directly responsible for the deaths of between one million and two million innocent Vietnamese people. I would personally call the use of the US military to murder well over one million innocent people in a foreign country as being immoral.

As for the Contras they were nothing but terrorist thugs that were supporters of the tyrannical Somoza dictatorship that the US had also backed. Had the Contras been successful then they would have imposed another US backed dictatorship in Nicaragua. It was the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that lead the revolution to overthrown the Somoza dictatorship and while they controlled the government of Nicaragua for the next 11 years it ultimately resulted in democracy in Nicaragua that would have never occurred had the Contras won. Had it not been for the Contras democracy would have materialized sooner in Nicaragua than it actually did but this was in a time period where the US was highly supportive of tyrannical dictatorships so long as they were "our" tyrannical dictatorships.

Of note the United States still supports tyrannical "dictatorships" today in countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the royal families are tyrannical regimes. It is this support for tyranny by the United States that is objectionable and that violates the ideals upon which America was founded.