Drezner Defends Schelling:
Dan Drezner is happy Thomas Schelling won the economics Nobel, and cheerfully defends Schelling's reputation against charges he encouraged "controlled escalation" and "punitive bombing" in Vietnam.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Drezner Defends Schelling:
- The Econ Nobels:
Since when do our attacks on the Communist North Vietnamese need defending?
For everyone else, Dan Drezner's post is trully excellent and very much worth reading.
Ho Chi Minh really was a Communist, and the post-takeover bloodbath/purges/"re-education camps" are pretty good evidence of the "evil" involved. This is not a matter of "somebody" telling him that the North Vietnamese government and forces were "evil communists", but of them being so, at least if the terms "communist" and "evil" have meaning.
Perhaps you should stick to "is it ever okay to bomb a city because it's the capitol of an evil communist nation you're at war with, knowing that bombing will kill many civilians who have no choice in being part of said evil communist state (since Communist states are not, of course, democratically run)?", which is a decent and reasonably thoughtful question, rather than implying that there was neither communism nor the attendant evil thereof involved?
(And let's not forget the problems of bombing a city where military installations are simply interspersed with civilian facilities...)
I was thinking the same thing. The issue of whether we should have been there is one thing. Tactics is another issue. I will not get on the debate train for either issue, but I just wanted to give you a big up for pointing out that this could be handled in an intellectual manner.
The North Vietnamese communists were undoubtedly bad, which is an observation deduced from how they treated their own civilian population. It is indeed self-righteous, ignorant, and unfortunately all too common in certain conservative circles to conclude that murdering the very same civil population through indiscriminate warfare was justified. One has to have a special kind of mind to believe that the communists are evil because they kill and torture, and that this somehow justifies our own attempts to kill the civilians before the communists manage to get to them.
It's my own opinion that this distinction is very much lost on the dead people.
Reckless disregard is essentially the same as intentional.
This clearly implies that you do not believe they are evil or communists.
Perhaps if you laid off the sarcasm, people wouldn't misinterpret you.
At least as stated this is similar to Anonchap's professedly innocent surmisings as well. Problem is there's a very dark and an exceedingly nasty flip side to that coin. For one, as has already been indicated, what of the dead which resulted from the North's various purges? Those already mentioned above refer to the purges which took place post-1975. But, vide this site. E.g., purges which took place circa 1953/4, labeled "land reforms" (think of Mao's land reforms since they were modeled after Mao's purges); or purges, assassinations, etc., circa 1958/59/60 which took place in the South - and instigated by the North - to cull the South of nationalists who were not loyal to Uncle Ho (and which precipitated President Kennedy's further involvement and which similar justifications precipitated Johnson's as well).
Funny how Dan Rather and Uncle Walter never reported on those mass murders, purges, etc. So funny. A real knee slapper.
Our initiative in Vietnam was ill conceived in several ways and certainly subject to some warranted critiques. But unexamined and poorly examined politically correct pontifications do not represent critiques, they merely represent genuflections in the direction of the ideological religionists of the Left and the carefully edited, elided and occluded "histories" they have produced.
Houston Lawyer: How many of "these same critics" do you actually know? I know a few, and they do happen to show a lot of concern for genocide and other mass crimes. And kindly point out where anyone argued that "all attackes are immoral because some innocent civilians may be killed". If you honestly believe that our conduct in the Vietnam War can be described as trying to achieve our goals while minimizing civial casualties then you really need to read up on the military history of this conflict.
To the extent that we have a proven track record of "fixing-up" countries (and I would suggest a history that includes our political forays into Latin America and the Middle East would be less than impressive), It still seems that we offer oppressed peoples a difficult imposition without much choice in the matter.
To us, American-led liberation often seems like something too good to be refused. But we make that decision without bearing much of the risk. Civilian families in the invaded nations, on the other hand, bear the risk that their entire family will be destroyed and impoverished even further. We ask them to weigh this risk against a brighter future that includes the hope of economic prosperity and freedom. We implore them to take a longer view of the situation. But we don't let them choose. Not until after the damage is done, anyway.
Instead, we say, "trust us." Are we growing more or less trustworthy?
Many critics of the current war have stated that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein. They have also complained loudly about the civilian casualties in Iraq while working to downplay the daily slaughter that was going on while he was in charge. Before the latest shooting started, critics were actively working to get the existing sanctions lifted all the while blaming the sanctions, not the regime, for the suffering of the Iraqis. No matter what happens, the US is always the bad guy.
The current difficulties are undeniably monstrous and neither we nor the Iraqis are going to turn the country into a bucolic idyll anytime soon. On the other hand one would need to take the commentary of a Michael Moore, David Letterman, Howard Dean, Jon Stewart, et al. seriously in order to believe the same types of myths the Left perpetrated vis-a-vis Vietnam and are attempting to forward today. Yes, that's a generalization, but it focuses on salient truths nonetheless. It is only an analogy, thus susceptible to the same caveats any generalization is susceptible to, but we or Britain or France would have gone through similarly difficult struggles and self-doubts if we would have militarily interceded with Nazi Germany circa 1937/8 (or earlier!).
"More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media ..."
"The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam — and how they ran and left their agents — is noteworthy. ... We must be ready starting now."
Zawahiri's letter in full (small pdf).
h/t: WindsOfChange