| gatorpower |
08-30-2004 04:49 PM |
IMHO, the best interests of the United States rests on our ability to maintain a military presence there as long as we're a country. This doesn't mean that it's going to be another Vietnam, just that it makes strategic sense to have a base or two there (like we do in Germany, Japan, Phillipens, Cuba, Korea..etc..)
There are a couple reasons why this can turn into Vietnam and a couple reasons why it can't.
1) Vietnam's biggest alley was China (same could be said of Korea). China was a huge organized country with a developed military that had more ground troops than the US had citizens. This was one of the biggest reasons the entire war was political to begin with.
1) The Parallel: Iraq has the entire muslim nation and the middle east, which boosts ranks in the hundreds of millions. Many muslims see this as a type of holy war against the United States.
The difference is that China was a country, with organized leadership and a heirarchy system that was pretty sophisticated (as most countries tend to be). It has citizens, a military with training, one ultimate voice and autonomous governing powers. This not only made the US very cautious, it also largely influenced the decisions of the surrounding countries.
All the other countries in the muslim world are fragmented and are spread over dozens of different governents all of whom have their own objective. As long as the US doesn't start using nukes, you will never see an organized effort against the US. That was the threat only China could make. Saudi Arabi, for example, has an extremely low chance of waging any type of war against the US.
2) Vietnam used guerilla tactics against the US and was able to terrorize the pysche of our soldiers. Isreal has tried, and failed, at just about every tactic to stop these terror attacks in their own country. This is the only area that I think can be compared to Vietnam. This pretty much goes on everywhere though.
This is not so much Iraq imitating Vietnam as it is Vietnam and Iraq imitating pretty much what most conflicts end up being in modern warfare. 200 years ago, a few radical terrorists with swords and knives were wiped out and their damage was minimal (albeit in some communities, a raging horde controlled a region). In todays world, all you need is a bomb or a machine gun and suddenly a few people are 300 times more effective than 1000 bandits. It's extremely easy to use modern weaponry to make much more of an impact. It's a phenomonon that simply didn't exist before.
In any case, this war is horrible and should never have been waged. But we have no choice but to stay in there until some kind of effective government is formed. Iraq can very easily turn into Somalia or other african nations (most of whom are muslim as well) with war lords and starvation and death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. If we leave before a government can establish itself, while quilling the uprisings, then we leave only to watch them destroy themselves in coup after coup.
If anyone likes war, he's a freaking loser. Bush is a loser for getting us into this and I hope he is voted out of office, but we are left to clean up after his mistake.
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