dagblog - Comments for "McMaster's dissertation: Don't lie, don't blame media, don't rely on inner circle"

Except we did have good cause

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 12:40:43 +0000

Except we did have good cause to intervene in this "anti-colonial civil war" - as it was always a proxy war for the Soviet Union and China. You only have to look at the results in Korea - North Korea as a rump buffer state bolstered by China after all these years - and the near catastrophe that almost happened when the UN was pushed back to only 100 square miles at the tip of South Korea. Or to look at how the Soviet grab in East Europe lasted for 40 years.

The Domino Theory was in fact correct - and despite the incompetence of the Vietnam War and the spillover into other neighbors, it kept the Communists from entrenching themselves into other countries - Indonesia handled its own affairs by slaughtering Communists in 1965, while the Phillippines and Thailand and Malaysia were spared.through some effort. Vietnam is still digging out, and it wasn't the West that forced Ho Chi Minh to slaughter 100,000+ farmers in rural relocation and revenge killings in the 1950's before we got involved.

Almost 70 years on, we're still on the receiving end of a lot of pat pro-Communist marketing that simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Try "still deceiving on Vietnam, so a sucker on more pressing modern problems". Again, that doesn't mean our conduct of the war on terror is intelligent - it's been grossly tone-deaf and self-defeating. But the left's inability to analyze things with any degree of accuracy has condemned us to not having a security adult in the room to thread the needle of protecting our vital interests while at the same time curbing overreactions and upholding human rights. Instead it's jingoism on one side, knee-jerk idiocy on the other. Whither the twain shall meet?

And the beat goes on.

A Guy Called LULU — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 18:44:57 +0000

In reply to I agree with you about the

But the beat goes on, tap tap tapping the same old cadence. Way past time ime to change the one note drummers.

https://lobelog.com/wrong-on-nam-wrong-on-terror/

Here is a good column which I

A Guy Called LULU — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:49:52 +0000

In reply to McMaster's dissertation: Don't lie, don't blame media, don't rely on inner circle

Here is a good column which I think fits here and is about a Public Intellectual Word Warrior who was hired away from writing for Bill Kristol, who has never been right about anything important ever, by the NYT.

[Again, in preview, the link opens somewhere in the middle of the page.]

McMasters may be the Maxwell

Flavius — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:49:09 +0000

In reply to McMaster's dissertation: Don't lie, don't blame media, don't rely on inner circle

McMasters may be the Maxwell Taylor of our time.

If you check Taylor's 1960 descriptions he was a philospher general. Fit comfortably with the best and the brightest in JFK's White House:McGeorge Bundy, the Rostows, Roswell Gilpatrick, Schlesinger etc.

Taylor supposedly had disapproved of Eisenhower's stodgy foreign policy. Oh good!.

We know how that all worked out.

Bobby Kennedy named a son Maxwell after Taylor.

.Bolton? Thank you God.But just possibly we might have been better off with an ineffective Bolton rather than Philosopher General Mark 2.

Or we would have had

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 08:26:21 +0000

In reply to If Wilson had given them

Or we would have had Bolshevism in Asia 25-30 years earlier than it got there. With the 10's of millions of deaths in the Stalin purges, Georgian ethnic cleansing & Ukrainian hlodomor, Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution, Cambodia's Killing Fields, and Ho's extermination of at least 50,000 montagnards when he did get power, I'm quite content he got turned down. Yeah, we could have done it better, but the questions include how, to what end, and vs. what alternatives. Think 1919's Ho would have made Vietnam freer than the largely repressed state it is today? I don't. Though I guess at least it's not Burma.

Thanks NCD. There is always a

A Guy Called LULU — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 05:03:11 +0000

In reply to Well stated. Little known

Thanks NCD. There is always a "play" going on. Someone is always playin' the other guy who is playing the best game he can with what he's got to play with.

We are sure together about

A Guy Called LULU — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 04:39:38 +0000

In reply to I agree with you about the

We are sure together about the nut cases Bannon, Flynn, or Bolton, Bolton being the scariest to me considering all having equal influence. Your consideration of McMaster makes me think of my consideration of Jim Webb early on. He expressed a more hawkish policy than I would like but he seemed, to my way of thinking, to aim it better and with a more intelligent idea of what could be/should be decided by military threats or actual actions. And yeah, on the big picture, or maybe I should say 'eventually', you are absolutely correct, time will tell.

If Wilson had given them

NCD — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 01:33:29 +0000

In reply to Ho was already leaning

If Wilson had given them democracy, recognition and indepedence, no Vietnam war and likely a very determined ally against Japanese imperialism in WW2.

Ho was already leaning

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:48:24 +0000

In reply to Well stated. Little known

Ho was already leaning Bolshevik by Versailles. Better dead than red. Defeating the Japanese military was more important than whether Vietnam lived on in chaos, 10 years later, similar to arming bin Laden and others to defeat the Soviet army, whatever terrorism happened 15 years later.

I agree with you about the

Michael Wolraich — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 21:36:00 +0000

In reply to Zen and the Fart of

I agree with you about the "intellectual" baloney. I'm more interested in what the dissertation says about his independence than his erudition.

He is said to have the reputation of being intellectually brave enough to speak his mind to those above him in rank. That is a significant quality but only a significantly ‘good’ quality if his advice is good.

A fair point. For starters, even if his ideas are utterly conventional, his counsel would be far superior to that of nutcases like Bannon, Flynn, or Bolton. That's a low bar, but we're living in a low bar world.

Second, there's at least some evidence that his ideas are better than conventional, such as OGD's article on Russia's new generation warfare and artappraiser's piece from the other thread about his counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq.

Time will tell, but at least I'm not despairing the way I would if it were Bolton. And as for Flynn, I was truly afraid of that guy, so I'm relieved that he'll be replaced.