It's a referendum on the SEVENTIES, so we're making progress.

OKAY for once and for all.

Is CapitOl now become capitAl? Just asking.

William Fulbright knew well President Eisenhower's warnings against getting involved in a land war in SE Asia. 

Fulbright also knew that Ho Chi Min had approached Eisenhower via emissaries in Paris to ask for help in ending the French occupation and war.  Fulbright also knew that Ho Chi Min had requested support from the West to help him keep China at bay and out of his country, Viet Nam.

The U.S. failed to heed the first warning, did not want to"fight the French" and utterly misread the historical Vietnamese hatred of the Chinese because it did not mesh with U.S. anticommunist political positions.

A hellava way to run a foreign policy, never mind a war.

Fulbright still seems rather cavalier about the future of Vietnam under Communism. His is not a congenial tone. It's haughty and patronizing. But the main contours of his argument are also realistic.

Yes, haughty and patronizing. Realistic, no. What earthly right do Americans (William Fulbright included) have to pontificate on whether certain forms of government matter to "uneducated subsistence farmers" and what their "basic requirements" may be? I believe that Asian farmers are more able than an American senator to adjudge their own situations.

Fulbright's 'father knows best' attitude, most recently displayed by Bush, is the sort of thinking that gains the US world-wide displeasure with its arrogance. So here we get back on track: It goes to the root of America's problem in the world: the fatal combination of apocalyptic overreach and desperate panic. Well said, that.

The Vietnam War, which lasted through five presidents was in the end a monumental case of how a nation can deceive itself by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.

America failed to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American good will.

If Bush wants to talk about Vietnam and Iraq in the same breath, he should quote the above from "The March of Folly," by B. Tuchman.

This sense of the limits of power is the genuine radicalism of our time.

You should be aware that some radicals of this type may have been infiltrating our civil service government recently. Just yesterday, I noticed similarly subversive content in this Letter to The Editors of the New York Times on their August 20 editorial on Afghanistan, "The Good War, Still to Be Won":

I’m concerned that your Aug. 20 editorial about American mistakes in Afghanistan tends to blur the definition of winning. You say that “the battle against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies is still winnable,” and I agree. That battle had better be winnable, and we had better figure out how to win it.

But I am doubtful that the broader battle under the heading of nation building — that is, development aid in support of an effective central government — is winnable in the usual sense of the term.

It isn’t our battle to win. Our leaders aren’t wise enough to know what policies are required, and our institutions aren’t efficient and disciplined enough to carry out gargantuan operational policies effectively in a culture so different from our own.

Thinking that we have the answers and the means to carry out the answers may be the ultimate form of arrogance.

It isn’t just a matter of improving Washington’s performance. We have to have realistic objectives and a realistic assessment of the resources available for meeting those objectives.

Larry Lesser

Washington, Aug. 20, 2007

The writer, as a member of an interagency team from the offices of the inspectors general of the State and Defense Departments, was an author of a 2006 report on the training and readiness of the Afghan national police.

Here's what didn't strike me the first time. In Fulbrights list we have a prince, a military dictator or a socialist commissar. There was no mention of a democratically elected leader because we weren't fighting for democracy in Viet Nam. And we're not fighting for democracy in Iraq, either. The point isn't just that the people of Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos had other needs (which might have been well served by socialists) but that we were hardly offering them an American style alternative in any event.

Fulbright was honest about what those people needed, what they likely cared about and what they were being offered. And Bush's speech writers made Fulbright look like Rudyard Kipling or something.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

This sudden linking with Vietnam is, in my opinion, just the ramping up of the stabbed-in-the-back narrative the neocons and their dupes will soon be trying to hang on those of us who knew this war was a bad idea from the day Mr. Bush began to concoct it.

They'll do everything in their considerable power to make certain THEY don't take the fall for thousands of American deaths, many more thousands of maimed Americans and a possibly never-to-be-known number of Iraqi casualties.

It's not gonna be their fault; no damn way!

Sure, but Bush didn't invent American imperialism.

Let's broaden it. If it never ends it can't be anyone's fault, and then there are the financial rewards. It's a win-win for the morally deprived & depraved.

Yep. The propping is the problem. Take a look at the history of the last 60 years.

The U.S. entered WW II when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but FDR knew war was coming and we were prepared. The draft was already in place and the trained people were gathering. The only real surprises at Pearl Harbor were the timing, target and the extent of the damage. The outcome of the war was clear when we won the battle of Midway (June 1942) and the Soviets won the battle of Stalingrad August 1942 to February 1943.) The rest was just totaling up the butcher's bill.

We did come out as a mighty Colossus. We won the Pacific and the Soviets won in Europe. Ours was the only industrial plant not destroyed by the war and we lived on that internationally until Germany and Japan became competitive again in the early 1960's. The soviets had pulled out of the global economy after the Russian civil war that followed the Communist takeover and did not return after WW II. We had the atomic bombs, which the Soviets stole and duplicated by the middle 50's. That limited military competition to proxy wars from then on.

The only real sour notes for the U.S. were the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, the Communist takeover of China, and Korea where MacArthur ignored the threats by China and tried to unify North and South Korea (in my opinion for the purpose of getting himself nominated for President by the Republicans in 1952) and got his head handed to him, first by the Chinese militarily and then by Truman politically.

But we were the world colossus economically, politically and militarily then.

We were (as far as we could tell) stopping the expansion of monolithic Communism (yea, an imaginary enemy) around the world, so when the French pulled out of Vietnam Eisenhower had to step in to replace them. [Our right-wingers demanded it.] The Soviets put the first satellite, first dog and then first man in space and in orbit. So Kennedy had to go to the moon to placate our right-wingers. (Glad he did it.)

The Cuban Revolution was necessary. Batista and the American Mafia (Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky) ran Cuba and were draining the Cuban people to improve their lifestyle. The American government was supporting Batista, and while I can't prove it, probably because the Mafia had some political control over American politicians. Luciano had close ties to the CIA from his support of American operations in Sicily which probably led to the Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA. Since the U.S. government wanted him gone, Castro had little choice but to ally himself with the Soviets. This was a threat to America brought on by our right-wingers. [The missile crisis was our extremists against the Soviet extremists, and ended when the threat of world destruction - or at least mutual destruction - became obvious to everyone else.]

All of this was so that the right-wing American Nationalists could continue to sit around and - like fans of a sports team - shout "We're number one!" Don't forget that JFK defeated Nixon for the Presidency in 1960 in part by creating a non-existent "Missile-Gap" that Ike and Nixon had not dealt with.

Economically the U.S. has gone downhill internationally since the early 60's. Politically our dominance in the UN and other international forums has become more problematic since then. (The Vietnam period was was a major period of decline.)

The military build-up in the Reagan years was an effort to counter the decline in political and economic status. More "propping up of the colossus." We could spend our way to greatness militarily, but we had to depend on the opinion of others outside the U.S. economically and politically, and we were declining sharply in those areas.

So America has spent on the military way beyond our needs or economic ability. We could have had universal health care in the 60's or 70's except for the spending on Vietnam and the resulting stagflation and increased price of oil.

Since Reagan became President military spending has been intended to boost the image of America as "Number One" for the right-wing nationalists. The interior contradictions of a command economy in an authoritarian nation caused the USSR to collapse, not our military spending. But our right-wing Nationalists are still screaming "We're number one!" as a result.

Clinton didn't cater to them enough, so when Bush was appointed to office they had to have a war to show that we were still the international colossus. Any war. Even a stupid war. We were the colossus, we could win even a stupid war - especially over an enemy we had already militarily defeated in 1991, Right? (What's that "Asymmetric War" crap? Don't bug us. We're Number One! Can't defeat us!)

Propping up the image of the colossus? Yep. But the right-wingers have no clue what to do with China. Could we defeat them militarily? Not in Asia, and they aren't coming here. Not only can we not defeat them economically, we are desperately in hock to them economically.

Oh, and the dollar is dropping like a stone. The dollar value is the real measure of whether the U.S. is "Number One." Keep watching it against the Euro, Pound, and Yen. Or watch the price of oil in dollars vs. the price of oil per barrel in Euros.

We can't build enough military power to prop up the dollar. Besides, Bush has destroyed the Army and Marine Corps. The third leg of support of the colossus has been thrown away on Iraq. Our military is effectively gone. The gadgets are still there, aircraft especially, but a military with no infantry is toothless. We can only irritate or anger our enemies. We can no longer defeat them.

There is nothing left to prop up the colossus now that Bush is through destroying everything he touches. Economically and politically our power was in sharp decline. The remaining prop, our military power, has been destroyed by Bush.

All that's left is to pass this disaster off to the Democrats without admitting defeat, so that they can blame someone else. That's what's keeping Bush in Iraq. The reality of international power is gone, but if the Republicans can blame the Democrats maybe they can come back and try again.

Bush has brought the colossus down.

 I go back to the content of "best" in Fulbright's paragraph.  (Full disclosure, I haven't read the book either... sometimes I think it might be better for all of us to look at the whole thing in its whole context before we make final judgments, but oh well. . .)

They need

• governments which will provide medical services,
• education,
• birth control programs,
• fertilizer,
• high-yield seeds and instruction in how to use them.
• They need governments which are honest enough to refrain from robbing
• and exploiting them,
• purposeful enough to want to modernize their societies, and
• efficient enough to have some ideas about how to do it.

Then I ask myself...is there anything in this list with which the majority of the people on the planet would disagree.  With the possible exception of birth control programs, I can't think of a one, and on that one, I think you'd still get a near majority articulating it as a need (especially if you included protection against STD's which were not on Fulbright's mind in the pre-Aids era. 

From that point of view I have a hard time considering the statement patronizing or arrogant.  I think it does articulate and condense the statement in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, certainly oversimplifying it a bit.  I don't think that's any more arrogant than singing What the World Needs Now, is Love, Sweet, Love, but that's just me.

aMike

I heard someone on "Wait, Wait" suggest he was thankful Bush didn't look at the Hundred Years' War.

As opposed to "The Quiet American."

Interesting to think about how a simple example of different practice, using a long-handled broom, was quickly adopted. Now consider the examples of other activities Americans showed, and how unbalancing our interventions can be.

While it's hard to find anything bad about sweeping while standing straight, other effects are less benign, such as replacing native crops seed with proprietary products, as in the Green Revolution, and with patented seed, as in Iraq.

Those who deal face-to-face with members of other cultures typically are sympathetic and cautious about changes; those who make decisions from on high can ignore those messy details like how one sweeps the floor or pumps water.