Seymour Hersh: The Red Line and the Rat Line

By anna am on Wed, 05/07/2014 - 9:28pm |

Not very new (early April) but this has received surprisingly little attention. From the London Review of Books.

URL:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

Add new comment
6297 reads

Comments

I can't give Obama a lot of credit for the fact that we avoided war in Syria, since he was the one trying to drag us into war. Still, Bush probably wouldn't have listened to people advising him against it.

by Aaron Carine on Mon, 05/12/2014 - 2:51pm

I think we have to give him all the credit, since he was the only one who had the power to go or not go. The fact that he listens to other people only redounds to his credit. Unless we want a president who doesn't need to listen to anyone.

by Peter Schwartz on Mon, 05/12/2014 - 5:06pm

He sort of saw the light, but if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't have come to the brink of war in the first place. And even if we didn't actually bomb, using the threat of war to make Assad obey was a bellicose, imperialistic act.

by Aaron Carine on Mon, 05/12/2014 - 8:48pm

A agree partially- Obama gets 3/4 of a brownie for not being as dumb as Bush but loses 1/4 for almost getting us sucked into something pretty obviously stupid.

On the 2nd, threatening countries with war is a basic tool in the toolkit - it's what got Hussein to comply with inspections, etc. Of course if we're going to threaten countries with war, we should try to be a little wise and moral.

by Anonymous pp (not verified) on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 1:00am

Do we know we were "on the brink" of war?

Not to pick a nit, but...

We're only on the brink IF the other side has the opportunity to miscalculate and escalate or attack us. See Cuban Missile Crisis.

But Assad had no such ability.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:08am

Huh? we were days from a full-on attack. War can be one-sided. We would have initiated.

by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:18am

The only person who can say that is Obama and maybe his closest advisors. It was his decision alone.

However, "brink" or "brinksmanship" or "chicken" requires two players for things to spiral out of control.

Edit to add: Plus an attack does not mean war in the usual sense. See Libya.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:26am

In fact, you could argue that one reason Putin got Assad to agree to give up his weapons is that he, Putin, knew that a missile attack by the US would not be answered by Assad or anyone else. That is, a missile attack would degrade Assad with very little risk to the US or its allies, i.e., that a missile would not bring on war.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:29am

Did you read the article, or are we discussing air?

The article stated 2 days from us unilaterally attacking, when suddenly Obama decided to go to Congress for approval/shared responsibility, and then shortly after canceled thanks to defense intelligence that showed a massive miscalculation.

Yes, "War" would have meant war in its usual sense - us launching massive attacks on Syria. See air war Kosovo/Serbia, Iraq 2x, Afghanistan.

by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 12:00pm

Part of the "brink of war" analysis depends on this notion that Obama simply threw out the "red line" line casually and provoked a chain of events over which he lost control. Policy making by impulse.

But this appears not to have been the case based on this analysis from the former ombudsman of WaPo. Moreover, it's been well-known that reducing weapons of mass destruction has been one of Obama's stated goals for a long time.

http://pbpexton.com/2013/09/11/obamas-red-line-was-no-stumble-no-accident/

Personally, I've never understood the thinking that says that Putin snookered Obama and came out smelling like roses.

The fact is, Obama's actions provoked Putin to unilaterally begin disarming its primary ally--only remaining?--in the Levant. Not his conventional weapons, to be sure, but his gas. How is that a win for Putin? It's not as if Putin woke up one day and decided that Assad had to give up his gas.

The other line of analysis has said that this agreement gave legitimacy to Assad. I don't see it. Has Syria now been embraced by the world community? Hardly. Assad is still murdering his people, which may be the real weakness of what Obama did or didn't do.

Moreover, Assad, like all dictators, doesn't need no stinking legitimacy and might not want it if it meant things like holding real elections. The Assads have been in power since when? The 1950s? Seems like they've done quite well for themselves without legitimacy.

And when you think about it...

We had all kinds of agreements with the USSR without ever giving up the well-known view that the USSR was a dictatorship at the head of a totalitarian regime and social system that should, eventually, disappear--which it did.

In concluding agreements with successive regimes, we "admitted" that those regimes were a reality, had power, and it was prudent--right--to work with them to ameliorate dangers. But in so doing, no one ever said--except maybe the loony right--that we were bestowing legitimacy on that regime.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:21am

"The fact is, Obama's actions provoked Putin to unilaterally begin disarming its primary ally--only remaining?--in the Levant. Not his conventional weapons, to be sure, but his gas."

By all accounts I've seen, "Obama's actions" were actually a flippant remark by John Kerry that Putin perversely took seriously to twist our tail & disrupt our plans. From most indications, Syria wasn't using this gas weaponry in the war anyway (because of Obama? perhaps), and politically/militarily was pretty useless under these circumstances. So giving it up was pretty trivial. But we'll still use it as a sticking point anyway.

PS - looked at Pexton's web blog, and he's pretty bad - actually thinks Fred Hiatt at WaPo deserves to keep his job despite his pro-Iraq War cheerleading, support for the security state, and other problems. Don't trust much of what he says.

by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 12:29pm

You may not "trust" him, but he lays out chapter and verse.

As far as "disrupting our plans," they were all predicated on the purported use of gas. So how forcing Assad to give up his gas disrupts our plans, I don't know. Those were our plans.

Whether gas is militarily useless, it's bad stuff, as we saw, and getting rid of it can only be seen as a step forward.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 4:18pm

His "chapter & verse" ignore the likelihood of rebels having & using gas, and then there's the recent UN investigation noting the gas responses did not comport to a Sarin attack. So #FAIL.

I also found it incredible he goes back to the embassy captives in 1979 to piece his grudges together - how about when we overthrew Mossadegh if he's going to keep score that long? And then decides that we should go after Iran for other demands aside from the rather overhyped nuke program- like not exerting themselves into related Shiite activity on their borders - unlike other countries in the region and the US itself - journalist turned hypocrite it seems.

Re: Assad & gas, if can't use it, doesn't much matter whether he has it or not.

Anyway, I suspect we'll find a reason to keep hounding Assad until we can get back to justifying an attack. We've already started by extending the cooperation Assad needs to supposedly achieve to satisfy us, the unsatisfiable.

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 4:48pm

His "chapter & verse" ignore the likelihood of rebels having & using gas, and then there's the recent UN investigation noting the gas responses did not comport to a Sarin attack. So #FAIL.

PS: This is irrelevant to the question, did Obama "stumble accidentally" into creating a red line.

Re: Assad & gas, if can't use it, doesn't much matter whether he has it or not.

PS: Not sure what you mean here. Gas was used; I think we all agree on this. While it's in his possession, Assad could most definitely use it.

PS: Openly slaughtering his own people is a pretty good reason to hound him.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:57pm

Odd that Daggers can spend a week and 800 or so words on 'red lines and rat lines', and what the right calls 'Obama's Syrian Folly' including nonsense like '3/4 of a brownie'.... and not once mention US casualties or deaths, or the lack of them in Syria.

Critics of how he handled Syria might ask to see the 'Obama's Syrian Folly' section at Arlington, and compare it to the Operation Iraqi Freedom section.

Doing so would of course presume concern about sending fellow citizens in uniform into another bloody conflict we cannot end and do not belong, and Obama's wise decision to avoid deeper involvement.

by NCD on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 11:23am

Not sure why you didn't read the article as point of discussion.

The note was that we were 2 days away from "Obama's Folly" when he backed off.

Which is why he got 3/4 of a brownie - he would have gotten the full brownie if he hadn't been on the brink of launching attacks when he finally woke up and smelled the bullshit - a couple more days and it'd be Colin Powell's Pottery Barn all over again.

Obama's "wise decision" almost didn't come.

by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 12:03pm

Even if that were true, and you've presented no reason to believe it, so what?

Moreover, there is NO indication it would've been Powell's Pottery Barn all over again. That involves invading a country, and there was NO indication that that was ever in the cards.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 4:25pm

READ. THE. FUCKING. ARTICLE.

Why are you hear commenting on a news piece when you can't bother to read the news piece?

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 4:50pm

I did read the article. You're claiming I didn't, which is not a good bet for you to make.

Moreover, do we have to restrict ourselves to the article or take it as accurate as a matter of faith? In this case, I certainly can't.

One of the troubling things about this article--I don't know if this is Hersh's way--but his sources are utterly invisible. With sources like his, he could literally write anything he pleased and no one would be the wiser.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:51pm

You: "Even if that were true, and you've presented no reason to believe it, so what?"

Article, 5th line: "Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike,"

Read. The. Fucking. Article. Again. Slowly.

"Moreover, do we have to restrict ourselves to the article or take it as accurate as a matter of faith? In this case, I certainly can't." Then discuss the accuracy of the article, but preferably not with a year old apologist for the administration.

"With sources like his, he could literally write anything he pleased and no one would be the wiser." And so can the NY Times, who use "a government official" or other pure anonymous sources. (Read Greenwald re: the rise in anonymous reporting.) Or the US government that uses its own funded rebels who have chemical weapons as the source of complaints that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons.

However you do realize that the government has started throwing reporters in jail for leaking confidential info - do you expect that Hirsch is going to get a lot of government insiders going on record about this?

You earlier: "Moreover, there is NO indication it would've been Powell's Pottery Barn all over again." right, through some miracle we might not be incompetent - Islamicist rebels with Stinger missiles now on the Mediterranean coast instead of off in the Hindukush - what could go wrong?

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 2:06am

You: "Even if that were true, and you've presented no reason to believe it, so what?"

Article, 5th line: "Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike,"

PS: But my point has been that, despite the way it's been portrayed, the decision to go to war was always under Obama's control. Instead, the way it's been portrayed is that "Obama lost control of the situation because of a flippant remark." IOW, events spiralled out of control and Putin had to come in and save his bacon, etc. This is generally what is meant by "brinksmanship" or bringing us to the edge of war. I don't see any evidence for this in Hersh's article or elsewhere.

PS: Again, Pexton's thesis is that this was NOT a flippant remark and he provides plenty of back up for it. Is this back up infallible? Let me know when you find infallible back up. Up here in the Peanut Gallery, we only have what we read to believe. But again, I don't see that Hersh argues that the red line was a flippant remark, but perhaps I missed that in the article.

PS: Uncited sources always have a question mark beside their comment.

PS: Yes, that's a problem, but it seems this has been Hersh's way for some time. To me, his articles have long had this feeling--but maybe my impression is wrong. I read him. I like him. But this is a criticism I would make of his articles. I suppose the TLS and New Yorker fact check--I don't know.

PS: One difference is that Assad was openly and extensively slaughtering his own people and had been for some time. This is the Assad way (see Hama slaughter of Palestinians). IOW, if you want to stick with the Powell pottery metaphor, Syria was ALREADY a Pottery Barn in shards. In fact, all dictatorships are Pottery Barns with the shards loosely stuck together, but always on the edge of shattering. Stability is illusory. But Powell made his remark with respect to a full invasion as in Iraq. That's what he meant. He wasn't talking about strikes in support of rebels trying to topple a dictatorship as a way of forcing the dictatorship to go. However, according to Hersh, if we want to take his version as the truth, when the administration saw their understanding of the situation was faulty and Turkey was trying to sucker them into a strike, they took a pause and went home. Seems exemplary to me at least for this kind of situation in which everything is messy.

by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 10:56am

Who says Obama lost control of the situation? he got an easy way out of the showdown with Syria due to a a flippant remark.

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 4:18pm

It has been argued that he lost control...

...In the sense that he required Putin to bail him out. He was going to go to war but, luckily, Putin gave him an out.

Pexton pretty well shows that it was not a flippant, off-the-cuff remark. Not even Hersh's article supports that view.

by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 4:42pm

Pexton's article doesn't even address the issue of Kerry's statement -

here for your reminder is how the chemical weapons de-escalation started

you can dream up some kind of scenario where Obama really designed Kerry's statement, and knew Putin would assist, but Occam's Razor would conclude he (and we) got lucky, as OceanKat said, "he fucked it up right this time"

Take your breaks when you get them, and do a victory dance - or you can try to spin reality like playing Twister to try to make it deterministic, your call.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 2:15am

Once again...

The point I was making was whether the establishment of a red line was the result of an off-the-cuff, flippant remark, policy making by accident.

Pexton shows, pretty clearly, that they were not.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:07am

Here's an interesting section from the article...

"Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said."

PS: I would quibble with Hersh here and elsewhere. It always seemed to me that Obama threw it to Congress IN ORDER that it would die. Why? Because it had long been clear that Congress wasn't going to approve ANYTHING Obama wanted. One reason, I think, he never asked for approval for the Libya strikes. Whatever he wanted, regardless of merit or demerit, Congress was against it, particularly the House. In this case, he made the obstruction work for him.

‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’

As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’)

If we are to believe Hersh, a big "if" I grant you, the off-the-cuff "out" doesn't appear to have been so off-the-cuff. And though we know the NYT is no oracle, Hersh doesn't seem to question the veracity of their reporting here; he cites it and moves on. And it makes some sense: Who else was going to "broker a deal" with Assad except his biggest ally, Putin. And allowing Putin to take credit and a few victory laps isn't necessarily a bad thing for Obama to do, unless you think that the US has to be the hero of every story.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:32am

It's the new standard.

Not only do we criticize Obama for bad decisions he actually took, we criticize him for bad decisions he didn't take but which we presume he almost took.

Even if not taking them ends up with the removal of nerve gas, a good move no matter how one slices it.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 4:28pm

The removal of nerve gas wasn't a good move because 1) It didn't save a single Syrian life. They're still dying. 2) We had no right to threaten Syria with war. Since aggressive war is illegal, threatening aggressive war is also morally dubious.

by Aaron Carine on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 6:17pm

Sitting by while a guy like Assad openly slaughters his people is also morally dubious. Don't you think there's some merit to that position?

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:39pm

Uh, we played this game with Hussein & Qaddafi. The armed rebels were attacking the government and killing civilians (read BBC) - is the government supposed to just allow armed insurrection and sit there?

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 2:10am

It is difficult to sort out the good guys from the bad in these kinds of situations, and they all seem to be a mixture.

It is true that the government won't just sit there...but that's different from calling their actions morally justifiable or their regime justifiable.

When the regime is unjust, "the people" will rebel, and innocent people will be killed, often unjustly. And the government will try to put down the rebellion often in the name of the innocents being killed (see Russian and Ukraine).

That's to be expected, but it skips over (and doesn't exonerate) what the regime has done for the past X years to bring things to the current state.

That's one of the difficulties in overthrowing a dictatorial regime. The regime has so poisoned society that are no pure and innocent actors simply doing good for society. But unless the regime is overthrown, the society has no chance of moving forward.

by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 10:12am

First, we haven't stopped Assad from slaughtering anyone. Second, there is nothing dubious about realizing that American bombs and shells are not a solution to the conflict. It only means that Syrians will be killed by Americans and not just by other Syrians. No American war since 1945 has made things better.

by Aaron Carine on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 8:52am

I'd offer Korea & Iraq I as improvements, and arguably Vietnam as what stopped Communist dominos despite its ugliness and high civilian costs and huge affect on American society.

[with the 10's of millions that Mao killed through his decades of social engineering, and the 100,000+ of civilians that Ho massacred/tortured in the 50's, it's a bit hard to say we should have just done nothing, even though our something was quite sloppy and in the end left the Vietnamese stuck]

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 9:04am

I'm disappointed, PP. In Vietnam, the Americans and their friends killed about 1.7 million people, a lot of them noncombatants, and turned much of the country into a desert. And they did this to impose a regime on an unwilling population(the Communists had far more popular support than the Saigon regime, and would have won the elections in 1956 if Diem hadn't refused to hold them).

The price of getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait was two wars and perhaps three-quarters of a million dead(and still rising), mostly noncombatants. In Korea it was two million, and most of these lives would have been saved if the Americans had ended the war after repelling the invasion, instead of trying to conquer North Korea.

by Aaron Carine on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 9:16am

Certainly agree with you on VN.

Since Iraq was largely a client state, it's possible we could have found a different way to keep them out of Kuwait. In fact, at the time, it was suggested--I don't know if it's true--that mixed signals were sent by our ambassador that led Saddam to think we would wink at the invasion.

Moreover--and again, I don't if, or how much, this is true--but the I-K seemed to center around oil reserves that straddled the borders. Saddam believed the Ks were pumping out more than their share, etc. If true, this is a dispute that, potentially, could have been settled.

As to Korea, I do think you have to consider the millions who've died and been forced into desperate, inhumane lives under the North Korean regime. Arguably, it was worth trying to prevent this. I don't know--again, could be wrong on this--but I'm don't think there was a lot of popular support for the Kims and their regime. I have to think that whatever support they once had has evaporated.

Plus, Korea was ONE country. Splitting it up and splitting up families is not a good solution in general.

by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 10:32am

1) how many people did the Communists kill before and after?

2) how many people did the Communists kill in China (Great Leap/Cultural Revolution) & Russia (Trotsky; Stalin/Beria purges and mass famines) to use as reference; add Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as another example of massive cruelty and slaughter in the name of Socialism/Communism and brotherhood

Pol Pot might have been the most popular before he killed 1 million of his own people. The message being what, the sanctity of popular opinion no matter what the cost? This is why I'm forgiving of Pinochet - a lot of idiots were naïve about Allende's flirtation with Moscow. Gottwald was popular in Czechoslovakia before he led the coup that cost the country 40 years of freedom. Mao was popular before his Great Leap Forward that killed 18 to 32 million.

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 4:15pm

1) In 1972, a Congressional committee said that the Communists had killed 36,000 civilians, not counting the 2800 killed in the Hue massacre. I think it's almost a given that the American Congress wouldn't underestimate the number murdered by Communists. A later committee said that civilian casualties dropped by twenty percent in 1973-74. I'd be very surprised if the Communists killed more than 50,000 civilians in the war. I don't believe the quarter of a million deaths among ARVN soldiers would have occurred if there had been no war.

The number bumped off after the war isn't known, but I doubt it was more than 30,000. The efforts of Desbarats and Jackson to affirm a higher number were refuted by Gareth Porter. R. J. Rummel's six figure estimate also doesn't hold up.

So the cost in lives of allowing the Vietnamese self-determination would have been much less than the cost of denying it to them. That's apart from the other moral costs involved in forcing governments on people.

The deeds of Stalin, Mao, and even Pol Pot seem to me to be irrelevant to what Americans did in Vietnam. Killing Vietnamese didn't save any lives in the Soviet Union or China.

I'm distressed that you support the CIA's overthrow of a democratic government in Chile.

by Aaron Carine on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 4:47pm

1) If the CIA saved Chile 40 years of Communism like East Europe experienced, I'm happy the CIA overthrew Allende. Of course in history, much of speculation is a crapshoot, so I don't know if this would have happened (e.g. while Allende was hanging out in Moscow, I doubt if Mossadegh was heading to Communism, so our overthrow there decapitated a nice Muslim democracy where we now have a theocratic dictatorship)

2) 1950's, before the US was there:

The terror had its real beginning when Red dictator Ho Chi Minh consolidated his power in the North. More than a year before his 1954 victory over the French, he launched a savage campaign against his own people. In virtually every North Vietnamese village, strong-arm squads assembled the populace to witness the “confessions” of landowners. As time went on, businessmen, intellectuals, school teachers, civic leaders — all who represented a potential source of future opposition — were also rounded up and forced to “confess” to “errors of thought.” There followed public “trials,” conviction and, in many cases, execution. People were shot, beheaded, beaten to death; some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death, Ho has renewed his terror in North Vietnam periodically. Between 50,000 and 100,000 are believed to have died in these blood-baths — in a coldly calculated effort to discipline the party and the masses. To be sure, few who escape Ho’s terror now seem likely to tempt his wrath. During the 1950s, however, he had to quell some sizeable uprisings in North Vietnam — most notably one that occurred in early November 1956, in the An province, which included Ho’s birthplace village of Nam Dan. So heavily had he taxed the region that the inhabitants finally banded together and refused to meet his price. Ho sent troops to collect, and then sent in an army division, shooting. About 6,000 unarmed villagers were killed. The survivors scattered, some escaping to the South. The slaughter went largely unnoticed by a world then preoccupied with the Soviet Union’s rape of Hungary.

From Wikipedia:

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Further information: North Vietnam

In the early 1950s, the Communist government in North Vietnam launched a land reform program, which, according to Steven Rosefielde, was "aimed at exterminating class enemies."^[146] Victims were chosen in an arbitrary manner, following a quota of four to five percent.^[147] Torture was used on a wide scale, so much so that by 1954 Ho Chi Minh became concerned, and had it banned.^[147] It is estimated that some 50,000^[147] to 172,000^[146] people perished in the campaigns against wealthy farmers and landowners. Rosefielde discusses much higher estimates that range from 200,000 to 900,000, which includes summary executions of National People's Party members.^[146]

Between 1962 and mid 1965, according to figures released by the International Control Commission, at least 54,235 civilians in the South have been killed, wounded, or kidnapped.

Most of our modern "knowledge" about the Vietnam War starts at about 1967 (with an asterisk about some Marine thingie in 1964), of course from an American perspective. (if a tree falls in the woods and we don't have a military base there, did it exist?). Which makes it hard to come up with reasonable lessons learned or appreciate the actual complexities of that war and its justifications. The Communists did try a coup in Indonesia in the early 1960's, with a well-known bloody retaliation - if that had succeeded, it would have really fucked up the region, and given them a sprawling jungle base touching up to Singapore, and controlling the Malacca Strait, which carries 1/4 of the total global transported goods and 1/4 of all oil moved by sea.

On a side note I still find intriguing, Nixon took 4 years to scale down a massive military effort to 0, full withdrawal. Obama hasn't gotten a much smaller engagement in Afghanistan finished in 6 years (while the withdrawal from Iraq was done exactly as to Bush's time schedule).

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 2:53am

If the CIA saved Chile 40 years of Communism like East Europe experienced

That's a pretty big if there. Its true that many communist dictatorships have a brutal record but many of the right wing dictatorships the US put into power have an equally brutal record. I don't recall reading about any brutality during Allende's time in power. Assuming he would have been another Pol Pot simply because he was communist and connected with Moscow isn't much evidence. But I sure remember reading quite a bit about our replacement in Chile, Pinochet's brutality. Given the history of Pinochet's time in power I'd take a chance on Allende. I doubt he could have been worse.

Its often hard to rank horrors as to which was less horrible. But if I had to choose I'd rather live under 40 years of communism in Eastern Europe than life under Pinochet. So even your hypothesis leaves my cold. I see no reason to be forgiving of his brutality.

by ocean-kat on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 4:56am

Kat's words are wise, except that Allende wasn't a Communist. He was a Marxist; the two aren't synonymous.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 10:02am

Yes, I think I made clear a big "if", and I've never contended that Allende helped any atrocities or brutality. Nor do I say he or anyone would have been Pol Pot. (nothing in East Europe was near Pol Pot, however bad it was).

On the other hand, nice guys were often killed by the Communists (Masaryk) or pushed aside (Benes and Dubcek).

Allende's campaign was backed by the KGB, much as the right's campaign & street activities were funded and orchestrated with CIA involvement. This has been confirmed by later Soviet archives. Despite winning only 36% of the vote in a plurality system, Allende pushed ahead with his much more extreme plan for nationalization than his predecessor, to confiscate all property over 80 hectares. Aside from Allende's visit to Moscow, Castro's 4-week visit probably gave observers a good idea where things were headed.

Regarding your preference for East European Communists over Pinochet, I imagine it a bit shaped by ignorance or the 40 year publicity focus on Pinochet, but I'm not sure - whether it's thinking that the 15 years before Pinochet called elections were all like the first 4 or 5 before he relaxed power? or perhaps thinking the East Europeans didn't torture or kill so much?

In the 1950s, for example, 244 people were executed on political charges in Czechoslovakia and a further 8,500 died as a result of torture or in prison. A minimum of 100,000 people were imprisoned for acts against the Communist state between 1948 and 1956. he growing number of arrests throughout the region resulted in the establishment of a system of concentration camps. In the early 1950s, there were 422 concentration camps in Czechoslovakia in which people were held under gruesome conditions. In 1950, the number of prisoners in such camps amounted to 32,638 men and women. Many Central and Eastern European people were arrested by the Soviet authorities, interrogated, sentenced in the Soviet Union and sent to the GULAG. Some Central and Eastern European countries had their own ‘Siberia' as well: in Czechoslovakia, prisoners were sent to work in uranium mines-in December 1953, the number of people working there reached 16,100.

I don't frankly see much difference, except that Pinochet gave up control much quicker voluntarily rather than knocking down a wall, while rights and living standards under him were overall much much greater than with the Communists - again, after the first 4 or 5 years of hell, which were roughly equivalent to the communists in East Europe (and not nearly as bad as the purges and famines earlier in Ukraine, Georgia, et al, and the atrocities of Pol Pot)

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 12:22pm

Just a rhetorical point...

It's true that "if" is a small word with a big meaning...

However, it's not entirely fair to claim you weren't claiming something because, well, you started off with an "if."

Why? Because you're implying that there's real merit (real reasons) to contemplating your counterfactual. That is, that you're not saying, "But what if Allende had turned out to be Godzilla, huh?"

You really should unpack your reasoning, which you do a bit in your second comment.

by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 2:03pm

I thought Peracles was on the left, but defending the overthrow of Allende is a mark of the ultra-right. I see no reason to think Allende was going to make Chile a Communist state. Even if he had, I don't see that Pinochet was better, and it isn't our right to make these choices for others.

Ho Chi Minh's purges in the fifties do nothing to justify the Vietnam War. The Americans were much more destructive than the Communists during the war, and the (probable) 20-30,000 killed after the Communist victory is much smaller than the number the Americans would have killed if they had pressed the war to victory. How many more would the Americans have had to kill to win? Another million?

And again, we were fighting to force on the South Vietnamese a government they didn't want. That is not our right.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:02am

No need to pigeonhole PP as "on the left."

He tries to think independently.

Based on a number of your comments on the economy, I would have a hard time believing that you were on the left.

No need for ideological purity except in the re-education camps.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:36am

Thanks - I try to evaluate, and not make black-and-white up-down judgements - Pinochet was a cruel asshole despite any good he possibly did - I'd have much preferred that someone much nicer had derailed the trainwreck that was Allende - even though I have many sympathies for building up the peasant class, et al, I think his way was guaranteed to lead to similar atrocities and dive into totalitarianism as happened when nationalizing land in Vietnam, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 12:20pm

Perhaps ironically, I am an admirer of Hugo Chavez, who seemed to do quite a bit to help the underclass without the atrocities or rampant corruption or totalitarian attitude.

And overall sympathetic to the Sandinistas, especially confronted by the likes of Samoza owning almost all wealth in the country, as well as being better than that Chamorro idiot the US ran as part of its overthrow efforts.

Here's an interesting eye-witness diplomatic take on the coup.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 1:29pm

It is remarkable that Peracles is sympathetic to socialists in Venezuela and Nicaragua, but prefers Pinochet to a democratically elected socialist such as Allende. I see no reason to think Allende was more likely to set up a gulag than Chavez was. The Sandinistas were much more repressive than Allende.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 1:52pm

You are mistaken about the Sandinistas.

by Funonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 4:43pm

Under the Sandinistas during the eighties, there were political prisoners, detention without trial, and censorship, at least according to Americas Watch. I hadn't heard that this was happening under Allende--but I admit I don't know much about Chile.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 6:25pm

There were documented abuses under every single government, left or right, US-backed or opposed.

So let's try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

For 40 years we've been fed a black-and-white story about Allende vs. Pinochet that's created great certainty while ignoring context with what was going on in the rest of the world, and historical lessons.

Sandinistas took over in a country 95% controlled by 1 man. Almost anything would be better, and yes, Somoza had a lot more abuses - give the Sandinistas a break.

Pinochet probably was better than Papa Doc Duvalier, Idi Amin, Mobutu in the Congo, etc. - but because of liberal screaming for 40 years, we rank him among the top of the worst. why? it's political - communist-leaning sadness among the left, rather than a real evaluation of who's bad. The rightest fuckers in Guatemala and fundamentalist fuckers in Sudan killed a shitload more people - but we don't even know their names - but because our socialist hope was overthrown by the US, we're still crying. I suggest we finally grow up. Ho Chi Minh was a murderous asshole, not just a freedom fighter, and our participation in the Vietnam War was justified even if not executied the best. As for Chile, as the one link I sent noted, it's likely the Chilenos would have launched this coup themselves, with or without us - it's not like we created the right in Chile and filled their military. Chile was founded on extreme purging of their indigenous peoples and ran their own society for hundreds of years before we got a tiny bit involved over confiscation of mines.

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 2:29am

That Pinochet was better than Amin is hardly an excuse for imposing him on Chile. You haven't provided any evidence that Pinochet was better than Allende. Suggesting that we should prefer a bloody dictatorship(2000-3000 disappearances) to a democracy is, to be kind, eccentric.

As for Vietnam, I can stand on what I said in reply.

by Aaron Carine on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 8:12am

You are mistaken about the Sandinistas.

by Funonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 4:43pm

Chavez had the chance to show his colors, his failures and successes. If the CIA had overthrown him in a year or two before he had a chance to do much and replaced him with a right wing dictator it would be easy to slam him. You know, better the brutal replacement than 40 years of communism like eastern Europe under Chavez.

by ocean-kat on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 7:21pm

Well said, kat. Although I've been advised not to pigeon hole Peracles, I'm surprised that a person can hold humane views about some things, and hold such inhumane, reactionary views about others.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 7:44pm

Inconsistencies, or apparent inconsistencies, in people's views are pretty common, don't you think?

When someone is trying to apply principles to a variety of situations, the particulars of those situations can lead to different conclusions. Or the particulars can lead to ambiguities in how to apply to those principles.

If this weren't true, there would be nothing to discuss. We'd simply pull our principles off the shelf, apply them one for one to situation A, and go home.

Politics isn't algebra where you always get the same answer.

All that said, I agree with you on Allende. I don't get PP's reasoning on that point, but maybe I don't know enough about Chile.

I also agree--in general--on non-intervention, but I am surprised at your apparent indifference to the suffering in Syria.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:21pm

It isn't indifference to suffering to realize that American wars are not a solution.

by Aaron Carine on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 10:10pm

You're arguing this in a vacuum where you're not analyzing the organizations around them, and the strategies of the times. Allende led an alliance - the far left of it would have been as bad as Pinochet given full control, and there was good reason to think they'd end up in control. (similar example to the Czech Gottwald elected by a plurality who then forced through a Communist dictatorship, or the Communists who gained influence around Suharno) - By the time of Chavez, Latin America had pretty well run its course of Castro or Shining Path revolutions (or Argentinian juntas), so that liberalism and revolution is not so much led from the barrel of a gun as Che tried - the worst you get is large Argentianian or Peruvian inflation, so I don't see why the US should play any of that role in toppling S.A. governments anymore.

Sorry I still consider Soviet advisors a threat (viz Crimea, Ossetia, et al), even though the US can be A-1 assholes as well.

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 2:16am

The problem with your argument about Allende is that it's largely a counterfactual. It's built on a lot of suppositions about what would have happened.

But what did happen, as I understand it, is that we assassinated a duly elected head of government and installed a puppet. That's simply wrong and, from a selfish point of view, does little to help our image.

A lot of Chileans voted for the guy. I'm not sure we would've been too happy had a foreign country assassinated GWB and installed someone to their liking. You have to think of it in that way, IMO.

My reading of one Cold War theme...

One big mistake we seemed to make a lot is that we failed to co-opt indigenous leaders and movements like Ho. And then, to make matters worse, we stiff armed (or made war against) them to ensure they never entered our sphere. We sort of pushed them into the arms of the Soviets, who were only too happy to support them.

I've never understood this. We should've been their drug dealer, seducing them and their people with all the goodies of Western democracies and economies. Instead, we actually propped them up by giving them a wall of rejection to lean on. Cuba is a great example of this, IMO. Had we let down the embargo, Castro would've been long gone or, at the least, neutered.

At least at the level of daily life, people want what the West produces. Wouldn't it have been smarter to have seduced Ho, Fidel, Hugo than to have wasted energy and resources on fighting them?

by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 6:58pm

What is counterfactual? Did Allende not visit Moscow for a week asking for military cooperation? Fidel didn't visit Allende for a month touring Chile? Allende got more than 36% of the vote and had universal love except for the military, not opposed in the Chilean Congress?

"That's simply wrong " - welcome to life - a lot of things are simply wrong. Castro sending his troops to Angola was simply wrong - don't blame the US military to notice that he did this and think he's a danger in Chile (yes, the timing's reversed - Che trying to stir up revolt in Bolivia, et al came earlier)

Did it click in your head that Allende was nationalizing all land over 80 hectares? 91 key industries? what this meant to the people who had that land or business? ever known anyone who had their land confiscated, even losing their single cow because it was a sign of being too wealthy? well I have. what else was Allende nationalizing? do you think the country that produced pendejos like Pinochet didn't produce lots of pendejos on the left as well?

The Nation crows about the conclusion, "Chile is bankrupt and destroyed and not because it hasn't been producing. It's bankrupt because its production was plundered and stolen by thieves." Bravo for them - yes, Czechoslovakia produced for 40 years but most was stolen by local cronies or by Russia taking the majority. Much of China's military/communist wealth is drawn off in theft and corruption. Somoza's Nicaragua was simply theft on a vast land-holding scale beyond belief - but does it matter if it's Somoza or the Communist Party holding all the goods and land? History's pretty well said no - the result is pretty much the same.

How does this compare to Chavez in Venezuela? Chavez focused on oil reserves - not unusual - as well as unused/unproductive land rather than simply breaking up large farms/fincas. Where Chavez took over other industries, he typically paid fair rate. And overall, the poor did very well under him- econoomically, education-wise, etc. - while the abuse of the monied and middle-class was minimal. I.e. there is another way.

by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 5:16am

The nationalization of lands and industries doesn't demonstrate that Chile would have ceased to be a democracy, let alone become a tyranny like Pinochet's(3000 killings according to the truth commission). Industries were nationalized by Britain's postwar Labor governments--would Peracles have supported the CIA installing a dictatorship in Britain? Mossadegh nationalized Iran's oil, but Peracles doesn't support his overthrow. These are the inconsistencies that we find so perplexing.

"Welcome to life. A lot of things are simply wrong". What does this mean? That we should support the crimes the state perpetrates because that is just the way the cookie crumbles?

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 8:50pm

I pointed out the difference between Chavez's nationalization program and Allende's. I put post-war UK in the same class as Chavez - some strategic big government ownings to keep the country stable and equitable, vs. a repressive state ownership of nearly everything. That doesn't mean state-owned health or steel or energy doesn't have its own issues and disadvantages, but also has advantages- not the trainwreck that fully centralized socialism is.

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 4:17am

I guess it comes down to whether we think Washington has the right to destroy a democracy because it--or Peracles--doesn't like their economic policies. I think that is a highly immoral attitude. I also don't think it is tenable to tell the government "you can destroy a democracy if it does A, but not if it does B".

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 7:35am

Destroy what didn't exist yet? Read this.

There was no democracy in North or South Vietnam. Not under the French, nor Ho, nor Diem.

An election wasn't going to create democracy.You act like Ho was elected in the North, that they had free elections and not a military government.

1 million Vietnamese fled the North - 50,000 fled the south. That's the election by foot.

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 7:54am

I'm confused. I was talking about Chile and Peracles is talking about Vietnam.

As for Vietnam, I referred to informed people, including those in our government, who thought the Communists had more support than the Saigon regime. That more left the North than left the South may not refute that.

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 8:34am

Between 50,000 and 100,000 are believed to have died in these blood-baths

Almost the number Aaron quotes at least in terms of magnitude (i.e., 100,000 vs 1.7 million). What are you really arguing about here?

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:13am

Don't know what Aaron's 1.7 million refers to, and the 100,000 was just one period - other periods add up to much greater Communist killings, and that's before the 60's.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 12:21pm

The 1.7 million refers to the Vietnamese killed by the Americans and their allies, although there aren't authoritative figures, only plausible ones. The actual number could be even higher.

http://faculty.washington.edu/charles/new%20PUBS/A77.pdf

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 2:01pm

The actual number could also be much smaller.

Do our "allies" include the South Vietnamese themselves? Despite the documented corruption, is it accepted that some South Vietnamese might not have wanted to be under Ho Chi Minh/Viet Cong after they'd massacred ~200K civilians in the 1950's in areas under their control?

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 6:51am

Some South Vietnamese didn't want to be under the Communists, but a lot more liked the Communists than liked the Saigon regime. Eisenhower and Kennedy, who weren't exactly biased towards Communism, both said the Communists would have won a free election(cf. Tuchman, The March of Folly). Douglas Pike, who supported the war, said that in the early sixties, half of South Vietnamese supported the Cong.

The number might have been smaller, but not "much smaller". The most conservative estimate of Vietnamese dead that I've heard is 1.5 million. I doubt Ho's body count was 200K, but I can't speak with authority on the matter. I agree he was a butcher, but, for the reasons I've stated, that doesn't justify the war.

by Aaron Carine on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 8:20am

I gave you pretty well documented numbers for Ho's/Viet Minh 1950's slaughters.

Here's a passage from Wikipedia - how do you explain Viet Cong popularity in South Vietnamese? and we haven't discussed Vietnamese life since 1974 - any regrets?

Many Viet Cong units operated at night,^[45] and employed terror as a standard tactic.^[46] Rice procured at gunpoint sustained the Viet Cong.^[47] Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas.^[48] Government employees, especially village and district heads, were the most common targets. But there were a wide variety of targets, including clinics and medical personnel.^[49] Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế, 48 killed in the bombing of My Canh floating restaurant in Saigon in June 1965^[50] and a massacre of 252 Montagnards in the village of Đắk Sơn in December 1967 using flamethrowers.^[51]During the war, the Viet Cong reportedly sliced off the genitals of village chiefs and sewed them inside their bloody mouths, cut off the tongues of helpless victims, rammed bamboo lances through one ear and out the other, slashed open the wombs of pregnant women, disemboweled random civilians and draped their mutilated bodies on fences, machine gunned children, hacked men and women to pieces with machetes, and cut off the fingers of small children who dared to get an education.^[52] Viet Cong death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam; the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967-72. They also waged a mass murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; in the peak war years, nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.^[53] Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century".^[54]

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 11:51am

First you said Ho killed 50,000-100,000, then you upped it to 200,000. The figure of 50,000 is probably reliable, at least it is frequently cited.

I don't find this wikipedia article very credible. The figure of 37,000 dead isn't just for 1967-72; the Congressional committee that came up with it said it was for the whole period from 1957--1971. To say that the 37,000 killed by the Communists were "a third of civilian casualties " is absurd, many more than 111,000 civilians perished in the war. The lurid stuff about the VC cutting people up and disemboweling pregnant woman comes from Reader's Digest, which was known for repeating outlandish and unsupported anti-Communist propaganda, much of which has since been discredited. The Digest's source was probably the Saigon regime.

I have regrets about Vietnam being a totalitarian state, but I've explained in detail why a Communist Vietnam was better than the alternative. I stand by it.

by Aaron Carine on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 4:49pm

Show me to the link for the Congressional committee. Did they discuss civilians casualties in North Vietnam under Ho, or was it only about civilians killed in South Vietnam during the American period?

I gave you 3 different periods, a campaign in 1954, a followup campaign, and then the period 1962-1965. You add them up. And that doesn't get into the post-1965 heavy days of the war with the US.

Then there's the post-1975 period. Prison camps/re-education camps, etc. where Vietnamese were killed en masse. I don't recall your saying why this was better than the alternative, but if you continually underestimate the number murdered, then it's hard to evaluate properly.

This is the problem I have with all the screaming about Pinochet - I've read enough about Indian slaughters in Guatemala or Czechoslovak prisons to know that they were significantly worse (& East Europe for much longer), but the left has a couple tidbits of of info to grab onto, and that's what gets regurgitated. You think the Reader's Digest reference is exaggerated, but will you take the step to look for actual descriptions of Viet Cong and Viet Minh atrocities? Do you think VC weren't terrorizing South Vietham with assassinations and slaughters? Do you think there wasn't mass collectivization and killing in North Vietnam in the 1950's?

by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 4:50am

Except for the request for a link, just about everything here can be answered by what I've already said. I'll provide the link soon; I have things to do right now.

by Aaron Carine on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 9:24am

It's not letting me post the link; it's frustrating. I'll try to post it later.

by Aaron Carine on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 10:24am

I can't post the furshlugginer link. Google "The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam". The 36,000 figure refers to the whole period from 1957-1971, without including the 2800 killed in the Hue massacre. The reference to "10,000 civilians killed" in the Tet Offensive is rather coy, since outside of Hue the victims were killed by American firepower(and we killed civilians in Hue too). As I've said, the 50,000 killings by Ho in North Vietnam can't be used to justify the war, as a war from 1959-1975 obviously wouldn't have saved anyone killed earlier.

by Aaron Carine on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 11:29am

To protect them?

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 9:00am

Page 7 of the 2nd link you just posted says 500,000 civilians killed by Ho during the 50's (the figure of 50,000 is scoffed at). They also dismiss the figure of 36,000 in the 1960's as a gross underestimate, quoting Stephen Hosmer as noting most civilian deaths unreported.

The also go on at length about Viet Cong atrocities, and estimates that over a million would die in reprisals when the North Vietnamese took over. These reprisals did happen, though the North was more careful than in the 1950's, so not well documented - some effort can be found in the Google book "

Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982

By Van Canh Nguyen, Earle Cooper"

Will you believe your own references?

by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 12:19pm

Okay, I confess that I didn't read the thing all the way through, but this doesn't invalidate my central thesis because

1) On page 7 they didn't "scoff" at Fall's estimate, they cited it along with Van Chi and Tsongas' estimate of half a million. On pg. 36-37 they cite an estimate of 100,000 by Chi and Tsongas. Gareth Porter and Edwin Moise consider Van Chi to be highly unreliable---although Porter and Moise's low numbers for the land reform slaughter aren't considered reliable by many. Anyway, I don't think Ho's killings in the fifties do anything to justify the war that came later. Saddam massacred great numbers in 1979-1991, but Peracles doesn't consider that reason to invade Iraq.

2) They don't say that the 36,000 figure is "a gross underestimate". On pg.7, they say that the official numbers "are, if anything, underestimates". On pg. 55, they say their numbers for 1966-69 "probably significantly understate the actual number".

I myself don't think the U.S. government and military, a highly biased source, would underestimate the number killed by their enemies. I'm inclined to regard 36,000 as a maximum figure. But let's say it was more. Let's say that R.J. Rummel is right in saying that the number of civilians killed by the Communists in the war was somewhat over 200,000(I think Rummel's numbers on Vietnam are highly dubious, but for the sake of argument, let's go with them). Why does that make Peracles find the slaughter of a larger number of civilians by our side, along with the death of a million combatants and the devastation of the countryside, to be acceptable?

3) The excerpt from Vietnam Under Communism that Peracles cites doesn't tell us how many were killed after the Communist victory. Since Gareth Porter refuted Desbarats and Jackson' figure of 65,000 executions("Creating a Bloodbath Through Statistical Manipulation", Pacific Affairs, 1988-- it's a quarterly) I think the number must be a good deal lower. How many more people would the Americans have had to kill to achieve victory? And did Diem and Washington have the right to deny the South Vietnamese free elections in the first place?

Peter thinks that Peracles inconsistencies show that he is "independent-minded".

I'm not sure that is the word I would use. Opposing imperialism in the Middle East and Central America while supporting it in Indochina and Chile, accepting the right of the Iranians to elect Mossadegh while denying Chileans the right to elect Allende--it's confusing.

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 05/17/2014 - 6:29pm

1) please - Bernard Fall put 50,000 deaths for land reform alone - which doesn't contradict 500,000 from Chi & Tsongas - call it 200,000 via Scaruffi (who referred to '53-'56) if you want - which is about 70 times Pinochet, just for the 50's period.

We didn't "invade" Vietnam - we came in on the side of the French and then the South Vietnamese. Whether we had the full support of South Vietnamese, it's extremely naïve to think Ho Chi Minh had all hearts and minds and support of North or South after killing 200,000 North Vietnamese civilians.

I was all for going to war with Hussein for pushing him out of Kuwait. Whether we should have invaded Iraq for internal gassings in 1979-1991 is a different question, & too complex to dive in here. [tied to whether we should have armed him against Iran... there I'm pretty sure I'm against]

2) ok, "significantly underestimate" rather than "gross underestimate"- is that a win? "I'm inclined to regard 36,000 as a maximum figure." - well, I'm inclined to believe there are people living on Mars, and that Stalin was a misunderstood hippie - why exactly?

"Why does that make Peracles find the slaughter of a larger number of civilians by our side, along with the death of a million combatants and the devastation of the countryside, to be acceptable?" Bullshit "larger" - most of our killings were enemy combatants - 2 offensives alone killed over 100,000, and you've blindly dumbed down your figures of Viet Cong atrocities to then make our killings bigger - even as your sources cite that many of our "civilian" toll was enemy combatants. Devastation of the countryside is horrible, including use of Agent Orange, just as Ho Chi Minh's use of neighboring neutral Laos and Cambodia to launch attacks was criminal. Did I say our actions were "acceptable"? No, I think some of it was highly excessive and irresponsible, criminal, especially our use of Agent Orange. On the other hand, we were fighting an army backed by both communist China and the Soviet Union, which leads us to:

3) "The excerpt from Vietnam Under Communism that Peracles cites doesn't tell us how many were killed after the Communist victory. " - Ho's killings plus the results of the last China/Soviet escapade in North Korea, plus the 20+ million Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward, and the 1 million killed/30+ million repressed by the Chinese in the Cultural Revolution, plus the millions killed and imprisoned by the Russians/Soviets in the same period including East Europe...

Xanana Gusmão , the East Timor revolutionary who finally won independence, was wise enough to be forgiving of the West for supporting Indonesia during his Marxist phase - he considers it a period he & his movement had to go through, but one of those "you're known by the company you keep" situations. And friends who've killed 30-50 million civilians over the previous decade are pretty scary. So you wouldn't resist if Ho Chi Minh was coming to your town?

I haven't seen yet your estimate of how many South Vietnamese civilians and ex-military were killed after the North took over - the period 1975-2014 - care to humor us with a low-bound number?

"And did Diem and Washington have the right to deny the South Vietnamese free elections in the first place?" - wow - like in view of the above I give a fuck? free elections to get your people slaughtered? no, I really don't give a shit about it - did the Russians give the East Germans/East Berlin their referendum? Did Burma give the Karin people in the east their referendum? did North Korea stick to its part of the armistice or did it invade the South? Did the Viet Minh stay on its side of the border after the armistice, or did it leave up to 10,000 troops to disrupt the peace in South Vietnam? Do you have any sympathy for a leader of a new country still fighting with the ex-Emperor, internal corrupt regions and a well-supplied communist insurgency while sending off the last of their 300-year colonialist occupiers, or do you live in idealist la-la-land where elections within 1 year are more important to rubber-stamp than real democracy and stability? Do you know that South Vietnam and the US never signed the separate election clause of the agreement? Did you know that 1 million North Vietnamese moved south after the peace, while only 52,000 South Vietnamese moved north?

About 90,000 Viet Minh were evacuated to the North while 5,000 to 10,000 cadre remained in the South, most of them with orders to refocus on political activity and agitation.^[7] The Saigon-Cholon Peace Committee, the first Viet Cong front, was founded in 1954 to provide leadership for this group.^[7] Other front names used by the Viet Cong in the 1950s implied that members were fighting for religious causes, for example, "Executive Committee of the Fatherland Front", which suggested affiliation with the Hòa Hảo sect, or "Vietnam-Cambodian Buddhist Association."^[7] Front groups were favored by the Viet Cong to such an extent that its real leadership remained shadowy until long after the war was over, prompting the expression, "the faceless Vietcong.".^[7]

Situation of the Communist forces in South Vietnam as of early 1964

Led by Ngô Đình Diệm, South Vietnam refused to sign the Geneva Accord. Arguing that a free election was impossible under the conditions that existed in communist-held territory, Diệm announced in July 1955 that the scheduled election on reunification would not be held. After subduing the Bình Xuyên organized crime gang in the Battle for Saigon in 1955, and the Hòa Hảo and other militant religious sects in early 1956, Diệm turned his attention to the Viet Cong.^[11] Within a few months, the Viet Cong had been driven into remote swamps.^[12] The success of this campaign inspired U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower to dub Diệm the "miracle man" when he visited the U.S. in May 1957.^[12] France withdrew its last soldiers from Vietnam in April 1956.^[13]

In March 1956, southern communist leader Lê Duẩn presented a plan to revive the insurgency entitled "The Road to the South" to the other members of the Politburo in Hanoi.^[14] He argued adamantly that war with the United States was necessary to achieve unification.^[15]But as China and the Soviets both opposed confrontation at this time, Lê Duẩn's plan was rejected and communists in the South were ordered to limit themselves to economic struggle.^[14] Leadership divided into a "North first", or pro-Beijing, faction led by Trường Chinh, and a "South first" faction led by Lê Duẩn.

As the Sino-Soviet split widened in the following months, Hanoi began to play the two communist giants off against each other. The North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency in December 1956.^[16] Lê Duẩn's blueprint for revolution in the South was approved in principle, but implementation was conditional on winning international support and on modernizing the army, which was expected to take at least until 1959.^[17] President Hồ Chí Minh stressed that violence was still a last resort.^[18] Nguyễn Hữu Xuyên was assigned military command in the South,^[19] replacing Lê Duẩn, who was appointed North Vietnam's acting party boss. This represented a loss of power for Hồ, who preferred the more moderate Võ Nguyên Giáp, who was defense minister.^[15]

This 23-year-old man, who had defected from the Communist forces and joined the South Vietnam Government side, was recaptured by the Viet Cong and spent a month in a Viet Cong internment camp, 1966.

An assassination campaign, referred to as "extermination of traitors" ^[20] or "armed propaganda" in communist literature, began in April 1957. Tales of sensational murder and mayhem soon crowded the headlines.^[7] Seventeen civilians were killed by machine gun fire at a bar in Châu Đốc in July and in September a district chief was killed with his entire family on a main highway in broad daylight.^[7] In October 1957, a series of bombs exploded in Saigon and left 13 Americans wounded.^[7]

In a speech given on September 2, 1957, Hồ reiterated the "North first" line of economic struggle.^[21] The launch of Sputnik in October boosted Soviet confidence and led to a reassessment of policy regarding Indochina, long treated as a Chinese sphere of influence. In November, Hồ traveled to Moscow with Lê Duẩn and gained approval for a more militant line.^[22] In early 1958, Lê Duẩn met with the leaders of "Inter-zone V" (northern South Vietnam) and ordered the establishment of patrols and safe areas to provide logistical support for activity in the Mekong Delta and in urban areas.^[22] In June 1958, the Viet Cong created a command structure for the eastern Mekong Delta.^[23] French scholar Bernard Fall published an influential article in July 1958 which analyzed the pattern of rising violence and concluded that a new war had begun.^[7]

Launches "armed struggle"

The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a "people's war" on the South at a session in January 1959 and this decision was confirmed by the Politburo in March.^[13] In May 1959, Group 559 was established to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at this time a six-month mountain trek through Laos. About 500 of the "regroupees" of 1954 were sent south on the trail during its first year of operation.^[24] The first arms delivery via the trail, a few dozen rifles, was completed in August 1959.^[25]

Two regional command centers were merged to create the Central Office for South Vietnam (Trung ương Cục miền Nam), a unified communist party headquarters for the South.^[13] COSVN was initially located in Tây Ninh Province near the Cambodian border. On July 8, the Viet Cong killed two U.S. military advisors at Biên Hòa, the first American dead of the Vietnam War.^{[nb 4]} The "2d Liberation Battalion" ambushed two companies of South Vietnamese soldiers in September 1959, the first large unit military action of the war.^[7] This was considered the beginning of the "armed struggle" in communist accounts.^[7]

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 5:22am

Lot of stuff. I now see the problem in citing the U.S. government as a source. I referred to their 36,000 number because the Americans would have been the last to underestimate the number killed by the Communists. I didn't mean that we should accept all the bullshit propaganda our government put out--like the civilian victims really being soldiers. If I cite the Wehrmacht's estimate of civilians killed by Tito's partisans as a maximum figure, that doesn't mean we should believe everything else the Nazis said.

It is "bullshit" that our side killed more civilians than the Communists? The highest estimate of civilians killed by the Communists that I've heard is Rummel's 213,000. Collier's encyclopedia and the Columbia Encyclopedia of the Vietnam war put the total civilian dead at half a million, and that is quite a conservative estimate. Then there are all the combatants killed. So Peracles saying we should have fought the war to "prevent slaughter" is insane.

I don't know how many the Communists killed after their victory, but I know that Porter proved that the figure of 65,000 was much too high. And I doubt the Communists would have killed as many if they had been allowed to take power without bloodshed. I don't see what relevance the millions killed by Stalin and Mao have to Vietnam. Those millions weren't Vietnamese.

Peracles said there wouldn't have been true democracy if Ho had won elections. He thinks there was true democracy under the Saigon dictatorship? If the country was going to get a dictatorship either way, why not a dictatorship that the majority supported? Elections also would have spared Vietnam the carnage of the war. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Pike thought the Communists had more support than Diem, and there were other people who thought so, including McNamara himself(see the Pentagon papers). Other people who thought so are cited in Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.

We didn't exactly invade South Vietnam, but we were imposing our will on them, and mucking around in their affairs, which isn't a good thing.

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 8:07am

I laid down references, believe as you want - Ho was popular and peaceful, there was no worry about a ruthless China, we were bloodier and selfish, Allende was on his way to a worker's paradise and Cuba/Russia were just there to help. USA-destroying democracies since 1776.

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 8:58am

Peracles is clearly getting desperate. I don't remember saying anything about a worker's paradise in Chile, or about Ho being "peaceful". His gibes can be answered by re-reading what I actually wrote.

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 9:12am

Are you PS or Aaron?

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 1:10pm

Aaron. I think I should say "Porter proved there wasn't a basis for claiming 65,000" rather than "Porter proved it wasn't 65,000".

by Aaron Carine on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 2:21pm

Again, careful about the friends you keep.

In 1976, George C. Hildebrand and Porter wrote a book titled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, challenging early accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities and ideological fanaticism during the Cambodian genocide. They argued that the Khmer Rouge had a "coherent, well-developed plan for developing the economy,"^[18] dismissed Western media reports of grave crimes as a "systematic process of mythmaking,"^[19] labelled Sydney Schanberg's account for the New York Times 'a weak foundation for the massive historical judgment rendered by the news media',^[20] and disputed charges of government-inflicted famine: "It is the officially inspired propaganda of starvation for which no proof has been produced... Thus the starvation myth has come full circle to haunt its authors."^[19] While other sources reported that the Khmer Rouge's forced evacuation of Phnom Penh cost tens of thousands of lives,^[21]^[22] Porter and Hildebrand stated that the evacuation "was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia" rather than "a backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred".^[23] Due to years of civil war and an influx of refugees, Phnom Penh had limited supplies, with François Ponchaud estimating that the city had no more than two months worth of food in April 1975.^[24] The Khmer Rouge had been forcibly evacuating the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied since 1972,^[25] contributed to Phnom Penh's dire situation by shelling the city for more than a year,^[26] and rejected offers of foreign aid.^[27] Author William Shawcross wrote that "arguments about the precise quantities of food available in the city" were "somewhat academic", citing a statement by Pol Pot that the evacuation had been planned in advance to assist in the Khmer Rouge policy of "smashing... all sorts of enemy spy organizations."^[28] By contrast, Porter and Hildebrand suggested that the evacuation may have been undertaken for humanitarian purposes, and "undoubtedly saved the lives of many thousands of Cambodians."^[23]

^{An apologist for the Khmer Rouge - just humanitarians trying to save lives? I'm less than impressed with your source.}

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 4:01pm

I'm aware that much of Porter's stuff has been debunked(his old claim that 800 were killed in Ho's land reform is ridiculous) but no one has refuted "Creating a Bloodbath Through Statistical Manipulation". It holds up.

by Aaron Carine on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 5:36pm

This article, which has juicy stuff about Communist brutality, supports Porter's numbers for the inmates in the re-education camps.

http://indomemoires.hypotheses.org/23

by Aaron Carine on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 6:52pm

Not sure which article you were trying to link to.

1 I did find searching "re-education" said 100,000 to 200,000 still imprisoned as of 1982.

Searching on their reference to camp Z30-D, this article concludes 165,000 killed in camps based on US & European studies.

Forget Porter.

by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 05/19/2014 - 12:36am

I should have mentioned that in Porter's article, he is mostly attacking the authors' methodology, rather than presenting data about Indochina, which is indeed a matter on which he is not at all reliable.

by Aaron Carine on Mon, 05/19/2014 - 9:08am

Democracy, North Vietnamese style

1976–present: reunification and reforms

In the aftermath of the war, under Lê Duẩn's administration, the government embarked on a mass campaign of collectivization of farms and factories.^[73] This caused economic chaos and resulted in triple-digit inflation, while national reconstruction efforts progressed slowly. At least one million South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, with an estimated 165,000 prisoners dying.^[74]^[75] Between 100,000^[74]^[76]^[77] and 200,000^[78] South Vietnamese were executed in extrajudicial killings;^[79] another 50,000 died performing hard labor in "New Economic Zones".^[74]^[80] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, millions of people fled the country in crudely built boats, creating aninternational humanitarian crisis;^[81]^[82] hundreds of thousands died at sea.^[83

]

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 8:07am

Desbarats and Jackson were refuted by Porter, who also showed that the figure of one million going in the reeducation camps was erroneous--the one million figure was mainly people in day centers. He cited three Vietnamese sources who put the number in the camps at 200-300,000. The Americans bore a lot of responsibility for the boat people. Many of them were fleeing the ruin the Americans made of the country, and it is questionable if there would have been as many political refugees if there had been no war.

by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 8:41am

Re: Iraq, the 2nd war was unnecessary - blame that on W.

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 4:20pm

Sorry, long reply lost to a fat finger.

by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 10:22am

The removal of nerve gas wasn't a good move...

A strange comment. It flies in the face of the rationale for the nuclear disarmament movement. No one since WWII has died from a nuclear bomb, and yet the clear and reasonable rationale for reducing nuclear arms, or eliminating them, is to save lives.

Reducing nuclear arms is pretty clearly a good, even though it pretty clearly didn't stop people from dying in conventional wars and genocidal campaigns around the world. But no one has said (that I know of) that we shouldn't eliminate nuclear arms because we still have tanks.

Were we able to "convince" Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons, even at the point of the spear, most people would consider that justified because it made the world safer and, perhaps, saved lives by eliminating the possibility of their use in the future.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 10:31am

I think Assad is killing as many people with conventional weapons as he would with poison gas. And he may not have even used chemical weapons.

As for nuclear weapons, they are vastly more destructive than poison gas.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 2:04pm

Anyway, most of the people who advocate nuclear disarmament aren't saying we should achieve it through war or the threat of war.

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 3:11pm

Aaron, I don't know how old you are, but we lived under the constant threat of nuclear war. Those weapons weren't/aren't just sitting in some dusty room. They are at some stage of alert. MAD was a function of mutual parity between the USSR and the US, so neither could force the other to disarm unilaterally.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:05pm

Yes and yes, but so what?

There was a reason that, after using them, the world turned its back, or tried to turn its back, on the use of chemical weapons and "allowed" the use of other kinds of weapons.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:03pm

I don't see any point in stripping them of chemical weapons when it has done nothing to stop the killing. And aggressive war, which was what Obama was planning, is in violation of international law(and my own sense of morality).

by Aaron Carine on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:16pm

Well, a few things...

• At first, it wasn't necessarily clear that they weren't using the weapons, and I'm not sure how clear it is even now.

• The Assad reign has been brutal for many decades and now is openly slaughtering their people. Seems like a bad idea to let them keep those weapons. It would be nice to disarm them entirely and somehow stop the killing--but how would you do that?

• If the regime in fact did not use chemical weapons, then one reason--that Assad himself put forward as I recall as a kind of proof that he had not--is that they feared retaliation by the West and, specifically, the US for crossing the red line.

• So arguably, it was the threat of US bombing that has checked the use of those weapons. Seems kind of moral to me. I think we can agree that the Assads have shown no compunction about slaughtering great masses of innocents (Palestinians, Syrians) whenever it suited their purposes. So it's not hard to imagine their using chemicals if they thought there would be no consequences.

I don't know much about international law, but I would hope there'd be a distinction between a war or military action whose purpose was to aggress against another nation, and an action which was not to defend one's own country, but to defend an innocent population against the depredations of its totalitarian government.

To my mind, at least, there is also a distinction between a regime that is repressive in nature and carries out a certain amount of killing to maintain its own power and a regime that is openly slaughtering--bombing--great masses of its own people. Perhaps this is only an armchair distinction, but I think it matters.

by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 05/15/2014 - 9:44pm

The Assad reign has been brutal for many decades and now is openly slaughtering their people

Wikiepedia: Al Jazeera journalist Nir Rosen reported that many of the deaths reported daily by activists are in fact armed insurgents falsely presented as civilian deaths, but confirmed that real civilian deaths do occur on a regular basis.^[20] A number of Middle East political analysts, including those from the Lebanese Al Akhbar newspaper, have also urged caution.^[21]^[22]^[23]

This was later confirmed when in late May 2012, Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is one of the opposition-affiliated groups counting the number of those killed in the uprising, stated that civilians who had taken up arms during the conflict were being counted under the category of "civilians".^[24]^[25]^[26]

In May 2013, SOHR stated that at least 41,000 of those killed during the conflict were Alawites.^[27]

PP: n.b. Alawites are Assad's people/tribe - i.e. likely civilians killed by rebels. Just like the use of chemical weapons, reports of attacks on civilians is politiical, not just factual - it's what justified NATO/US overthrowing Qaddafi, and everyone knows it's one of those red lines to get the west to overthrow Assad. Unlike Libya, the rebels in Syria are much less indigenous.

Plus one-sided outrage over killing of civilians is pretty common - the rebels have been at this too all along:

http://news.sky.com/story/1091428/syria-civilians-come-under-fire-from-r...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24486627

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25370803

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/13/us-syria-crisis-alawites-idUSB...

Civil Wars are much harder to assess than ugly divorces - this thought that we're always going to easily pick who's right & wrong leads to pretty bone-headed decisions.

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 7:07am

Your last paragraph is definitely.

Not sure what the stuff above it shows.

The operative word was "decades."

Part of the ambiguity in a civil war like this is that civilians will pick up arms. How else are they going to rebel against a regime like this one?

IOW, I'm not sure there's always a clear separation between civilians and armed combatants.

by Anonymous PS (not verified) on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 6:47pm

Its not a new standard. Its been around for years. We even have cliches to describe it. In the army we used "He fucked it up right this time." Another common cliche is "He stepped in shit and came up smelling like roses."They've been around longer than I have, probably for centuries. After a series of blunders Obama stumbled into a good outcome. I'm not inclined to criticize too much since I think the outcome was good. But your attempt to totally ignore the blunders has gotten a bit too much for me.

by ocean-kat on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 6:54pm

As I read the article, I don't see a lot of blunders. Assuming what Hersh says here is correct, the intelligence was bad AND it was corrected AND there was a course correction, both on Syria and on Turkey.

Given that we're watching Assad slaughter his people, and the situation is inherently volatile, and there may be false flags, I don't see the series of events pictured in this article as particularly bad.

If by "stumble" you mean the "red line," then I don't agree, per the above, that Obama stumbled into it. As red lines go, the use of gas strikes me as a pretty good one.

by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 05/13/2014 - 9:46pm

Your facts are muddled and you're pushing towards 2-3 conclusions no matter what.

Not worth continuing.

by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 05/14/2014 - 2:14am

Whether or not Obama... 'fucked it up right this time'...

How many US Marine boots and US Army boots have been on the ground in Syria?

How many coffins have been brought back to the US from a war/conflict in Syria?

Peter Schwartz 5/14/2014 posted:

"However, according to Hersh, if we want to take his version as the truth, when the administration saw their understanding of the situation was faulty and Turkey was trying to sucker them into a strike, they took a pause and went home."

From Hersh's article (my bold):

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbors, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

--snip--

There was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16 May 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, ‘it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get more specific information about what exactly is happening there.’ The red line was still intact.

An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints that Obama was reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon, the national security adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.

The foreign policy expert told me that the account he heard originated with Donilon. (It was later corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior Turkish diplomat.) According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your red line has been crossed!’ and, the expert told me, ‘Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and said: ‘We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.’

End of discussion... and the... End of the "Red Line"...

I'll stick with Sy's 'version' . . .

~OGD~
.

by oldenGoldenDecoy on Fri, 05/16/2014 - 2:38pm

Ok, to put this to rest -

1) I gave Obama points for stopping short of war, but dinned him slightly for almost getting suckered in. I thought that a bit fair.

2) "I'd be very surprised if the Communists killed more than 50,000 civilians in the war. I don't believe the quarter of a million deaths among ARVN soldiers would have occurred if there had been no war. The number bumped off after the war isn't known, but I doubt it was more than 30,000." "and the (probable) 20-30,000 killed after the Communist victory is much smaller than the number the Americans would have killed if they had pressed the war to victory." Ignoring more accurate numbers, in the 50's, 60's after '74 - each era minimum 10x that amount. US always bad, ignoring for example that Nixon drew troops down drastically from 1969-1972 - who the fuck "pressed the war to victory"? he did withdraw much faster than anyone could have hoped.

3) Pinochet - once again people conform to habit and scream about a guy who killed 3000 and tortured numerous more, but somehow think he's worse than regimes like North Vietnam that killed at least 100x more or Czechoslovakia that killed roughly 2-3x as many but imprisoned many for much longer and held the society captive for 40+ years rather than Pinochet's 15 (and Pinochet voluntarily resigned, wasn't overthrown)

4) Democracy - like our Constitution, it's not a suicide pact. Voting isn't the most important thing in the universe, as the latest Crimea and Ukraine referendums show (as well as our staged votes in Iraq and Nicaragua)

5) Redistribution of wealth - fine to some extent - see #4 - if your plan leads to economic meltdown or relative genocide (e.g. Catholics/Montagnards in Vietname), then your socialist plans ain't worth shit. If you have someone brilliant like Hugo Chavez who threads the line between crony corruption and a police state and state-sponsored theft of property, you just may have a winner. If you have a fucker like Somoza or Mobutu, you just might not have a choice.

6) Gusmão - be careful about the company you keep, even if you have a good cause - taking support from an ideology that's killed 10's of millions of innocents just in the last 5-10 years is not the way to engender trust or broker peace. If you have a situation like Indonesia in the 60's, paybacks may be hell. See #3 above - it could have been much worse, but people are whining for 40 years since - stupid is as stupid does.

7) It's been nice talking to you. Enjoy.

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/18/2014 - 1:38pm

In the News

Russia plays weak hand in Palestine
Russia plays weak hand in Palestine

submitted by PeraclesPlease 8 months ago

The intra-Palestinian meeting in Moscow has precedent

Russia's hosted such meetings in the past, most recently Feb 2019

Russia has long lamented the US' "monopolization" of the peace process & tried to carve out a niche for itself: mediating among the disunited Palestinians/2
— Hanna Notte (@HannaNotte) February 29, 2024

Read the article at https://twitter.com/HannaNotte/status/1763116222256701787

Add new comment
Mother Jones is Reaching out to Alternative Party Voters
Mother Jones is Reaching out to Alternative Party Voters

submitted by HSG 8 months ago

Here's what I told them: https://halginsberg.com/vote-for-jill-stein-again/

Read the article at https://halginsberg.com/vote-for-jill-stein-again/

2 comments

Add new comment
Controversial Brazil law curbing Indigenous rights comes...
Controversial Brazil law curbing Indigenous rights comes into force

submitted by artappraiser 10 months ago

Controversial Brazil law curbing Indigenous rights comes into force https://t.co/pCoDg05irX
— Gareth Harris (@garethharr) December 28, 2023

Read the article at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/28/brazil-law-indigenous-land-rights-claim-time-marker?CMP=share_btn_tw

1 comment

Add new comment
Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince, Haiti (...
Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince, Haiti (December 25, 2023)

submitted by artappraiser 10 months ago

Location: U.S. Embassy and residential compounds

Events: Heavy gunfire is occuring around the area of the U.S. Embassy and residential compounds adjacent to the Trutier area of Tabarre. All Embassy personnel have been instructed to remain indoors and shelter-in-place until further notice. All others should avoid the area.

Actions to take:

Avoid the area;

Avoid demonstrations and any large gatherings of people;

Do not attempt to drive through roadblocks; and

If you encounter a roadblock, turn around and get to a safe area.

Read the article at https://ht.usembassy.gov/security-alert-u-s-embassy-port-au-prince-haiti-december-25-2023/

3 comments

Add new comment
Pakistan Is Creating the World’s Next Refugee Crisis
Pakistan Is Creating the World’s Next Refugee Crisis

submitted by artappraiser 10 months ago

By The Editorial Board @ Bloomberg.com, December 8, 2023

A mass expulsion of Afghan migrants could destabilize the region and fuel radicalization. The West should pressure Islamabad to change course.

Read the article at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-08/pakistan-s-expulsion-of-afghan-refugees-risks-another-crisis

6 comments

Add new comment
Internet shut down in Chad
Internet shut down in Chad

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

All eyes on #Chad right now
Chad has two internet trunks coming into the country: One from the Red Sea via Sudan; the other from Cameroon. Not possible for the totality of the country's internet network to be shut unless done centrally. A lot of rumors swirling; few facts. https://t.co/N6bDJZ2ixO

Read the article at https://x.com/_hudsonc/status/1732891968709992511?s=20

2 comments

Add new comment
[Economy] where Joe's success falls short
[Economy] where Joe's success falls short

submitted by PeraclesPlease 11 months ago

Read the article at

3 comments

Add new comment
[CRIME News] 3 loss-prevention employees in Macy’s across...
[CRIME News] 3 loss-prevention employees in Macy’s across the street from Philadelphia City Hall stabbed

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

BREAKING: Three loss prevention employees in Macy’s across the street from Philadelphia City Hall stabbed, one of them has died from stab wounds, @PhillyPolice sources tell me. Police converged on the store as the three workers were rushed to Jefferson Hospital. pic.twitter.com/4U1eKycL4W

Read the article at https://x.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1731713272942940365?s=20

38 comments

Add new comment
Former U.S. Ambassador Arrested, Charged With Working As...
Former U.S. Ambassador Arrested, Charged With Working As Secret Agent For Cuba

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

Former US Ambassador Arrested, Charged With Working As Secret Agent For Cuba https://t.co/LDwo4ZJI1K
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) December 4, 2023

Read the article at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/manuel-rocha-ambassador-arrested-cuba_n_656d1e2ae4b028b0f3d07478

Add new comment
[War in Israel, Chapter II] UNRWA under scrutiny
[War in Israel, Chapter II] UNRWA under scrutiny

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

[Chapter I news is HERE, Oct. 7 til today]

You don’t get it.
It’s not about an UNRWA teacher who held an Israeli kid hostage in his house.
It’s all about how for 75 years you have destroyed the future of generations of Palestinians, including my family.
My cousins in Arab countries are still not citizens - not even the… https://t.co/nv6anubGhc
— George Deek (@GeorgeDeek) December 2, 2023

Note 'Community Notes' attached to UNWRA's statement.

Read the article at https://x.com/GeorgeDeek/status/1731020551328579863?s=20

58 comments

Add new comment
Maduro, Under Pressure, Holds Vote to Annex Territory From...
Maduro, Under Pressure, Holds Vote to Annex Territory From a Neighbor

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

Imperialism for me but not for thee?

It's wild that Venezuela is now holding a vote on whether 2/3 of Guyana actually belongs to them! Analysts suggest that Modoru may want military action to pump up his sinking popularity.

Could we have a war in South America?!?

"The people who live in Essequibo are largely… pic.twitter.com/QvMEjkkgwy

Read the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/world/americas/maduro-vote-essequibo-guyana.html

6 comments

Add new comment
[Where is the GOP headed?] Divisions leave Florida’s House...
[Where is the GOP headed?] Divisions leave Florida’s House Republicans powerless

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

The lack of a cohesive delegation has allowed attention-seeking lawmakers to act on their own.

McCarthy: “You have [Rep. Matt] Gaetz, who belongs in jail…”

Gaetz: “Tough words from a guy who sucker punches people in the back. The only assault I committed was against Kevin’s fragile ego.”https://t.co/LctPuz6Pcf

Read the article at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/29/divisions-leave-floridas-house-republicans-powerless-00129200

10 comments

Add new comment
‘She got so mad at me’: book on the ‘Squad’ details AOC-...
‘She got so mad at me’: book on the ‘Squad’ details AOC-Pelosi clashes

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

By Martinn Pengelly in Washington DC for TheGuardian.com, Nov. 30

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells Ryan Grim life in Congress ‘completely transformed’ after Democratic leader stepped down

Read the article at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/30/squad-book-aoc-nancy-pelosi?CMP=share_btn_tw

15 comments

Add new comment
US health insurers Humana, Cigna in talks to merge -source
US health insurers Humana, Cigna in talks to merge -source

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

@ Reuters, Nov. 29

Read the article at https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/us-health-insurers-humana-cigna-talks-merge-wsj-2023-11-29/

3 comments

Add new comment
Central Africa’s dinosaur regimes and the art of coup-...
Central Africa’s dinosaur regimes and the art of coup-proofing

submitted by artappraiser 11 months ago

"Both the AU and the intl community place more weight on whether elections are held than whether they are free and fair. Sanctions/expulsions occur when there is a coup but not necessarily when elections are rigged or if an “institutional coup” occurs." https://t.co/m9dNimJP0D
— Cameron Hudson (@_hudsonc) November 28, 2023

Read the article at https://africanarguments.org/2023/11/central-africas-dinosaur-regimes-and-the-art-of-coup-proofing/

Add new comment

From the Readers

Creative corner

From the Dagbloggers

Hits of the Day

Seymour Hersh: The Red Line and the Rat Line

Comments

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982

Launches "armed struggle"

1976–present: reunification and reforms

In the News

From the Readers

Creative corner

From the Dagbloggers

Hits of the Day

Seymour Hersh: The Red Line and the Rat Line

Comments

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982

Launches "armed struggle"

1976–present: reunification and reforms

Search form

In the News