History final

[Revolution0918]

So i got my final questions for tomorrow and thought you guys may want to throw some of our great conservative insight into these for my teacher.

" What were the long and short term effects of 9/11, to what extent were the 9/11 attacks a failure of American foreign policy, and to what extent was this a failure of American intel and security forces?"

and the next 2 are,

"Why the U.S. failed to win the war in Nam.....Military, domestic, and diplomaticly"

"What factors do you think played the largest role in making the U.S. gov, and society more conservative after the 1960's?"

Have at it ladies and gents!

[Epic]

"What factors do you think played the largest role in making the U.S. gov, and society more conservative after the 1960's?"


Uhhh, to the extent that conservative means smaller government, this never happened!

In 1960, government spending was approximately 24%. Now it is 45%.

Some conservative era! And the Great Society was implemented in the 1960s.

[Aratus]

kevin phillips and nixon's southern strategy --- a must read. after LBJ bows out of the race in april of 1968, the g.o.p had an edge in most of the elections. jimmy carter is a one termer in late 70s. go figure! jerry ford is post watergate era and interum!

your three questions morph together. viet-nam becoming 'nam in part hints at the guns and butter failure of LBJ's Great Society. curiously, after FDR is elected to four terms, the only fellow Democrat to go two full terms is william jefferson clinton. the g.o.p romp after the TET offensive of 1968 is like the g.o.p romp after the Civil War. now that barack obama has stepped into a war quicker than you can say woodrow wilson, can we see cycles of history?

911 triggered our slump/crash if de-regulation didn't. you do know our "war on terror" is a trillion dollar bill, and of this amount, we borrowed 800,ooo,ooo,ooo from the CHINESE and i do not refer to some of the people on taiwan!!! --- vietnam was a landwar in asia... as was korea... to not namedrop gen'l macArthur is to not have the long vision on lights at the end of tunnels. if your paper is bold, you look at auld saigon, and compare afganistan now to Sun Yat Sen's China in the roaring 20s, and all opium & warlordism...

[Aratus]

when bill mckinley was our potus, anarchism was a worry. bomb throwers and a dead russian tsar. our explosives have gotten better in the century after the BIG MACK's death. admittedly its two planes that brought the two NYC towers down, yet we are not at all brighter than our grandparents or our great-grandparents or great-great grandparents! our profound fears and unprofound hysterias are identical. did our pinkertons fail or were we attacked by something or somebody? O! the fortress america that smedley butler truely loved! lets remember billy mitchell... also! FDR = G.W Bush? 1941 = 2001 or maybe 1898 = 911 and we have al qaeda attacking us almost a total exact century after bill mckinley is shot. he dies on sept 14th of 1901 and spent that sept 11th that year then with a festering wound to his gut. does this all say things to us? we have had an AMERICAN century, a PAX AMERICA! we see britain fade by mid-century after we wrestle spain's last few colonies from her auld & wise and tired empire... so is our theme a sprawling enlargening gov't incompetancy that squanders our better hearts & minds and souls & bodies on foreign soil or is this all deserving a paeon of praise for heroic deeds, always? (or both?)

[AuH20]

"Why the U.S. failed to win the war in Nam.....Military, domestic, and diplomaticly"


War is a racket.

http://centerformoralliberalism.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/why-we-lost-in-vietnam-the-untold-story/


Enter the “Rules of Engagement.” Co-authored by fellow internationalists and Council on Foreign Relations members Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, these rules insured that we could not win and that the communists could not lose. Understandably, the rules were kept secret for 20 years. As we review the rules, you’ll see why.

It took a subpoena and a lot of arm twisting from Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz. to finally have these “rules of engagement” hauled out of the State Department’s vaults, declassified and published in the Congressional Record for all the world to see, a decade after the war was over.

The rules were startling. Here’s a sample:

- U.S. pilots were forbidden to bomb Soviet-made SAM missile sites under construction but could risk their lives firing at those same sites after they were fully operational.

- Pilots and ground forces were commanded not to destroy communist aircraft on the ground, but wait until they were armed and dangerous in the air.

- Truck depots 200 yards away from main roads were off-limits for American firepower; only trucks driving on the road could be blown up.

- Pilots flying over supply ships laden with war materials on their way to North Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor were ordered to look the other way, even though the weapons on board would soon be used to kill American boys.

- Throughout the war, returning troops told of being ordered not to shoot until shot at, not to attack the enemy’s “safe” areas [another U.N.-styled war oddity], and not to hold terrain that had been won at considerable cost in lives and labor.

- And there was the incredible on-again, off-again policy of ammunition “quotas,” which halted attacks and reversed victories when an elusive daily quota had been met, while paradoxically on other days the policy was abandoned for the equally ridiculous order to fire vast quantities of ammunition at “undefined targets.”

Quite a series of “misjudgments”! The commander in chief, Lyndon B. Johnson, wasn’t content, though, he insisted on one more big mistake: With one stroke of the pen, he single-handedly reversed U.S. trade policy, authorizing the wartime sale of U.S. “non-military” hardware to the East European communist-bloc nations. These nations taking this for what it was: ‘a go-ahead-and-do-as-you-please nod’ converted the same into military hardware and shipped it to North Vietnam 10 where these made-in-the-USA weapons killed American boys. What goes around comes around.

No wonder, then, that Congressman H.R. Gross, R-Iowa, summed up these “mistakes” as “a betrayal to international politics and intrigue.” 11 For it was.

This was the second U.S. war officially fought in the name of the International Order (Korea being the first), both supposedly to check communism, both by design preserving communism and both assuring another loss for liberty. Had we fought the war alone, under traditional terms, the North Vietnamese and the Chinese Communists who fought alongside them wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“The war against Vietnam [could have been] irrevocably won in six weeks” was the collective opinion of a prestigious panel of former and current (at the time) Joint Chiefs of Staff and generals interviewed in the March 1968 issue of Science & Mechanics.