Was the vietnam war a huge mistake or was it the start of the death knell for the Soviet union?
Was the domino effect a real strategy of Global Communism and did the commitment of the US and the Billions of dollars it spent ( As well as the many lives it lost) show that it would go to the wire in it's fight against the spread of Communism?

It was stupid to keep Vietnam going as long as it went. But us fighting them may have kept other countrys from going communist from fear that they would have to fight us for a long time.

It was a huge crime.
The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities, including 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.
What for?

Would the war have been just if we had one? Sometimes I feel that wars are made "just" only if we are the one's who leave victorious.

__________________
"Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives."
-Ronald Reagan
"Life is a story; if you stay on the same page forever you will never finish it."
"There are days you are the pigeon and days you are the statue."

I think that there is a tendency to try to simplify the judgement of particular wars in viewing them as either purely bad or purely good. Reality is rarely that simple. I used to think of Vietnam as purely a mistake but then I met someone from Thailand that claimed that the Thai are glad that the Vietnam War happened since it gave them time to properly protect themselves from the spread of Communism. World War II, on the other hand, is considered a "good" war, and I agree that it did much more good than harm, but there were moral complications - from the moral question of whether it was right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the resentment of local French villagers around Normandy for the bombing of their towns that happened as part of the D-day invasion.

Wars are rarely purely "good" or "bad". It may let our consciences rest easier in such simple judgements, but such judgments rarely fully reflect the reality on the ground.

Our reasons for the war were just, but not in the way the U.S. conducted itself. In a just war a country cannot simply do as it pleases to achieve its objective. The means should NEVER undermine the ends.

An untestable hypothesis.

Another untestable hypothesis.

This mirrors Hermann Goering's comments at Nuremberg, but it, too is yet one more untestable hypothesis.

Ask the Vietnamese whose country was at war for over 35 years.

Michel Foucault said that history is written by the victors.

If I or my family were in Hiroshima when the atom bomb dropped, I don't think I'd appreciate the possibility otherwise, as but one more untestable hypothesis.

Second guess Truman? Who says I can't!

What kind of humanitarian teacher would teach their students they shouldn't?

The idea was to swap opinions about it , not test it.

__________________
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing—they believe in anything
G.K.Chesterton

From:Kevin Trenberth U.S climate expert.
Date:Mon,12 Oct,2009

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
(In an email debate over a BBC report on the apparent dip in global warming since 2001)

Originally Posted by gansao
Was the vietnam war a huge mistake or was it the start of the death knell for the Soviet union?




Why should the vietamese be able to answer that question?

__________________
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing—they believe in anything
G.K.Chesterton

From:Kevin Trenberth U.S climate expert.
Date:Mon,12 Oct,2009

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
(In an email debate over a BBC report on the apparent dip in global warming since 2001)

[quote=antonia;359913]Michel Foucault said that history is written by the victors.

I think that maybe Michel Foucault was stating the obvious.

__________________
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing—they believe in anything
G.K.Chesterton

From:Kevin Trenberth U.S climate expert.
Date:Mon,12 Oct,2009

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
(In an email debate over a BBC report on the apparent dip in global warming since 2001)

[quote=gansao;360200]Perhaps. Though my point was moreso directed at Chester's insinuated comparison of Lakrite to a fascist. That is, many people have said this about history, so I don't think it makes one a fascist.

Though I was opposed to the Vietnam War before it was popular in the United States to be so, and when social studies teachers allowed students to be lynch mobbed in their classrooms for expressing their opinions as thus. Dogs of the State that they usually are.