re: Just Watched "The Last Days in Vietnam"

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South Vietnam wanted, no begged, for our help. We carry the beacon of freedom for the world. If people want to be free, we should help them achieve that. Much like the French did with us in the Revolution.

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You think the French aided us in the American Revolution because they wanted us to be free?

The French did it for their own national interests. That's how international politics works.

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Should we have told the Brits and French to frick off in WWII and not supplied them or came to their aid?

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Considering that they both declared war on Germany first over the German-Polish conflict? Yes, absolutely. And we did.

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What about the South Koreans in the Korean War? Which, by the way, we should've seen that war all the way through too

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We intervened in Korea as a direct policy stemming from the geopolitical context of the Cold War and blunting the spread of global communism. We didn't intervene out of the goodness of our hearts because we "want people to be free." This is a very dangerous misconception people have about past American motivations for going to war.

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TigerFanInSouthland

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While I agree with a large part of your post, especially the part about allowing politicians to dictate military policy being a recipe for disaster, there was a lot of corruption within the South Vietnamese government. To a large degree, they wanted to USA to fight their battles for them instead of supporting their resistance. Screw spilling American blood for people who don't have the will to fight for themselves.

By and large, the cause in Vietnam was lost because the NVA, with plenty of help from the liberal media here in the states, was much better at distributing their propaganda than the South Vietnamese.

Great documentary. Some real heros were involved in that evacuation.

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We haven't had the stomach for total war since WWII.

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Bullshite

After 9/11 GWB had incredibly high approval ratings for his war in Afghanistan.

I was against the war in Iraq because I felt we were attacking the wrong country. We should have hit Iran who is a REAL state sponsor of terrorism. But even with Iraq, GWB had high public support. If we pushed into Iraq with the numbers needed to occupy a nation, the insurgency would have never happened. I think the public would have supported GWB had he decided to send more troops in initially. Public support for Iraq waned when our boys were being blown to pieces in unarmored HumVees by Iranian supplied IED's

My point is that the US people will support total war when we have been attacked and there is a tangible enemy in desperate need of an arse whooping

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I don't believe the US lost the war in Vietnam.

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"It was a tie!"

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Tet is exactly what was wrong with this war. We decimate the VC but the US media declares it a victory for the north.

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Completely True!

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I know their national interests on the matter, it doesn't change the fact that they still helped us.

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Yeah, I never questioned whether the French helped us.

I questioned the language you used asserting the motivations of the French helping us and applying that to why you think it is our duty to help others in their own wars. You said:
"If people want to be free, we should help them achieve that. Much like the French did with us in the Revolution."

So replying that "it doesn't change the fact that they helped us" really doesn't make any sense.

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Well seeing as it was part of a treaty with some of the smaller countries, they were legally bound to go and help fight with them. Kinda like the Paris peace accords that our spineless politicians threw to the side.

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No, the French were not legally bound to fight for Poland at all. And the British tied their hands to war with Germany completely of their own accord, as a result of a strategy to check Germany's geopolitical ascent and to deter it from using military means to resolve conflicts with Poland. This declaration of a war guarantee in the instance of a German military attack on Poland was made in late March of 1939 and was made unilaterally with no other nation encouraging it except perhaps Poland herself. It wasn't some long standing treaty with made through high mindedness, it was a narrow, specific declaration to influence the power balance in Europe through threat of British military power. It also directly contributed to the Second World War becoming a snowball event like WWI.

Interestingly enough, the British and French didn't really care much for the Polish people's freedoms from a USSR attack, as no guarantee for war was offered in the event of attack from any nation other than Germany. Likewise, they also issued no such declarations when the USSR invaded Finland, Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania. Oh, and Poland as well. The British also willfully agreed to give Stalin a chunk of Poland he had acquired from his 1939 invasion when the war was over. He decided to go ahead and keep it all under Soviet domination instead.

Again, geopolitics is the motivating factor, not altruistic desire to see people be free. And the Poles weren't a free state in any Western democratic sense at the time of the guarantee to begin with.

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Do you quite understand that communism isn't a form of freedom. It's quite the opposite. So essentially, yes, we were fighting for a people's freedom.

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No, I don't know anything about communism. Can you teach me?


You're playing a lot of word games and being a little obtuse. Whether, ipso facto, we contributed to South Korea's freedom was not the point. The point was that we don't fight foreign wars simply because a given people seeks independence or freedom from another. We fight them when our national interests are at stake and the post-WWII world created a very unique atmosphere where intervention in foreign struggles such as Korea and Vietnam had a rational impact on our own national security.

When people start recounting these conflicts as motivated by selflessly freeing those that seek to resist a given power, it paints a false account of history. It's also used in an effort to justify U.S. intervention in places like Iraq, Syria, etc by suggesting that it is our responsibility to do so and that it has been a characteristic of our foreign policy.

Painting humanitarian interventionism as some fundamentally American foreign policy tenet is untrue.

We haven't won anything since the UN.