From: MaxPlumm@aol.com
Date: Fri Jan 24 2003 - 12:37:33 MST
Dickey, Michael F wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Samantha Atkins [mailto:samantha@objectent.com]
>
> Dickey, Michael F wrote:
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Max M [mailto:maxmcorp@worldonline.dk]
>>
>>"So far Bush is doing a very poor job convincing anybody that he is
>
> morally
>
>>right in attacking Irak. Especially the arab countries are
>>convinced it is all just a ploy to get cheap oil. Exactly the situation
>
> that
>
>>turned Osama and many other arabs against the
>>USA. So how can that be a long term solution?"
>>
>>The fact that Sadam is a murderous racist tyrant despotic dictator is
>
> moral
>
>>justification enough.
>
>
> "With no or little consequences and death to only him and his direct guard
> and troops that *might* be enough. But this is far from the case."
>
> So because you feel 'innocents' might be killed, we should do nothing about
> Sadam?
To which Samantha responds:
"You should not do things that make the situation likely worse
for the people, the region and ourselves."
Where is the evidence to support this assertion? As a reader of many foreign
policy annuals, I have heard the argument that US policy in the region would
lead to a series of revolutions that would place extremist followers of Islam
at the head of these countries. This has been a popular argument since before
the Gulf War, and I have yet to see this occur.
>
> So we can not attack IRAQ unless we only kill or remove him and his direct
> guard and troops. What about his Son? What about his supporters? What
> about his political leadership and infrastructure? What about the soliders
> standing in his way, shall we politley ask them to step out of the way?
> What about his aresnal?
>
"So now you want to eliminate all who might think like him. Some
"democracy" and free country you are attempting to set up there."
Oh come on Samantha, now you are just being ridiculous. Michael is obviously
referring to the need to destroy the ruling capabilities and infrastructure
of Saddam and his followers. Do you object that we did the same thing to the
Nazis?
>
>>The fact that Europeans do not find this as a moral
>>justification is a testament to the liberalized moral relativist notions
>>prevalent in Europe at the moment.
>
>
> "This is nothing but empty rhetoric."
>
> Your following response demonstates otherwise.
>
> "The latest polls show that 70% of the American people believe we should
not
> use military means at this time, that we should give more time to
> inspections and diplomatic means. Of course you can make your empty
> accusations against them also. But at some point you really need to notice
> that a great deal of the world and of US people do not believe this is the
> correct course of action. Call them whatever names you will, the numbers
> are against you."
>
> A great deal of people in the world think that thier feelings could manage
> to alter the course of a single spec of dust in the universe, believe that
> stars tell their futures, and drinking urine in the morning is healthy.
"Excuse me. Are you going off on this rant in order to dismiss
the wishes of the majority of the people when you claim to
support democracy? For shame!"
No, as he points out later all he's doing is pointing out that a stance's
popularity does not make it correct.
As
> the numbers were also 'anti war' the vietnam era, and that cost the lives
of
> 3 million indochinese people, I must appeal to the fallacy of logic known
as
> argumentum ad populum, just because more people say something, doesn't make
> it more likely to be right.
"Of course not. But in a democracy the people are supposed to
have a very substantial voice."
And they do, they're called elections. Bush has been chosen to lead this
country for four years, he doesn't need to check back with the chattering
classes every time a large decision comes up. Political leaders cannot be
hamstrung by opinion polls. Using that logic, FDR should never have aided the
British and the Soviets, Truman should have never intervened in Korea, among
a host of other such monumentally important decisions. If Bush does a poor
job, we have a fail- safe mechanism to get rid of him. It too is called an
election. The Iraqis, you might have noticed in spite of what CNN would have
us believe, have no such option.
"How many Indochinese people did we ourselves kill btw?"
This is precisely the moral equivalency nonsense that everyone is calling you
on. By implication you are suggesting that the cause of the United States and
that of the Indochinese totalitarians were morally equivalent. As I have
attempted to point out, ad nauseum, MORE PEOPLE DIED IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS
OF THE COMMUNIST "PEACE" THAN DIED IN THE ELEVEN- YEAR CONFLICT TO PREVENT
THEIR VICTORY. Does our killing of North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia
somehow justify Pol Pot's extermination of 1/3 OF HIS POPULATION? Does our
bombing of Hanoi in December 1972 which killed 1600 people justify Ho's "land
reform" program which caused the deaths of 50,000 of his own people? Does the
My Lai incident, where US troops murdered 100 civilians, justify the North
Vietnamese's occupation of the city of Hue in February 1968, in which they
massacred 4000 people, roughly 25% of the city's population? Again, you act
as an apologist for one of the most sadistic and barbaric regimes of the 20th
Century by attempting to explain away or ignore their atrocities because "we
killed people too." The per-capita income in South Vietnam in 1973 was
roughly 500 dollars. Today, in Communist Vietnam, it has not yet reached 300
dollars! Whatever your opinions of our involvement in the war, whatever
others may believe your role in the outcome might have been, the point
remains the United States was clearly not the villain in Indochina. To argue
that they were, or that is unclear who really was, is absolutely ludicrous.
"How much of the result was made worse by our own actions?"
Again, you shift the blame from those that deserve it. For what purpose I
cannot fathom. Ho's collectivization program had already taken the lives of
50,000 North Vietnamese by 1958, years before the first US combat troops
landed in Danang. In Cambodia, as Molyda Szymusiak ( a Cambodian holocaust
survivor) points out in her powerful book, The Stones Cry Out, the Khmer
Rouge had already begun moving against the Sihanouk government in late 1967,
BEFORE THE US BOMBING CAMPAIGN OR TROOP INCURSION OCCURRED. It was always the
plan of Le Duan and the Hanoi politburo to hand Cambodia to the KR. The US
actions were responsible for delaying this outcome, not causing it.
"These things would be difficult to evaluate well."
This is simply moral relativist hogwash. Some of our actions and tactics in
Indochina can be legitimately debated. The question as to who was to blame
for the holocaust and resulting human hell in that region cannot be.
"But blaming any/all bad results on those who cried for us
to get out of Vietnam and stop the huge drain on this nation is
obviously unbalanced and unfair argumentation."
With all due respect, that is hardly the message that one would take from
demonstrators waving Communist flags and chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh is
gonna win." And to suggest that the protests played no role in improving
Communist morale, as some have done, is also disingenuous. Bui Tin, who
accepted the South Vietnamese surrender in 1975, said in his memoir, "Every
day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 am to
follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by
people like Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark gave us confidence to hold on in the
face of battlefield reverses."
This same majority of people (such as yourself)
> think its ok that 3 million indochinese people were murdered by an
> expansionistic communist regime.
"Boring. I said no such thing and I am damn tired of you being
tiresome enough to make such a silly charge."
But you have yet to refute this assertion by criticizing the Hanoi regime.
Instead, you simply fall back on thirty year old arguments like "how many did
we kill", as if that excuses one of the worst holocausts in the 20th Century.
"I am done with this topic."
There is no reason to take the "I'm taking my ball and going home" stance. It
is not being malicious to ask, as many of us have, that you clarify your
positions on the Indochina Wars with evidence that substantiates your
position.
Everyone's favorite devout anti-Communist,
Max Plumm
______________________________________________________________________
"At every turn, we have been beset by those who find everything wrong with
America and little that is right."
-Richard Nixon
"Don't talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold."
-USSR General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to Czechoslovakian Communist Party
Secretary Alexander Dubcek following Dubcek's attempted reforms. Brezhnev
would order an invasion of Czechoslovakia of 500,000 communist troops to
crush dissent shortly after this conversation in August 1968.
"My warm thanks to all socialist countries of national independence and all
peace and justice-loving peoples, including the American people who have
supported and helped our people in its just struggle. The victory gained
today is also theirs."
-North Vietnamese diplomat Dinh Ba Thi, speaking after the fall
of Saigon in April 1975.
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