The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(10-18-2021, 11:05 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: With Colin Powel's death, I have seen a number of articles on what he stood for.  CNN mentioned conscience and a pattern of complicated failures.  It is also suggested anything that Trump stood for wasn't it.  

But what I did not see was the Powell Doctrine.  If you are going to war...

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
   
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
   
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
   
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
   
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
   
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
   
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
   
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?
   

That's what should be remembered.

So let's look at World War II and see how that stands up retroactively to the Powell Doctrine.

1. The Axis Powers established beyond any question that they were not going to stop until they conquered the world. The world that they intended to impose was one of complete subjugation of such parts of Humanity as they did not seek to exterminate. They thus stood against every moral value that we cherished and still do. Life was to be a privilege. Liberty would be a farce. Pursuit of Happiness would be an absurdity, as most people would have an unrelieved duty to suffer for the leaders of the Master Race.

2. Extirpation of the Axis Powers would be difficult, and to win the peace we would have to offer something better to the Germans, Italians, and Japanese than what they suffered under.

3. The risks were so extreme that any cost other than the extinction of humanity, the destruction of industrial progress, and the obliteration of the stated values of America would be tolerable.

4. Maybe America could have offered arbitration of some disputes, but that would have only deferred the inevitable conflict.

5. We use overwhelming force against the Axis Powers, establish political orders unlikely to fall to the same thing, and leave in peace.

6. The only way to avoid conflict with them is complicity in their crimes, which is inexcusable.

7. Results suggest so.

8. From other Allies... of course. The language that FDR used against gangsters such as Dillinger could apply without much modification to sociopaths in charge of their countries.

Now, Vietnam:

1. Vietnam was potentially a desirable market for American business and had a copious supply of cheap labor that American corporations could exploit in sweatshops if it had a compliant regime. That fits one of the chronic examples of Orwellian rhetoric composed by American politicians: American interests abroad, which means American corporate investments abroad. If those depend upon the exploitation and degradation of the people who live in those countries, then those American corporate investments will require public expenditures as military force and the backing of hideous puppets to protect them.

The French saw Vietnam much the same way, and look what that did for them! FAIL!

2. Just hold ground so that you can prop up a dictatorial, corrupt regime that can never reform itself. FAIL!

3. That was the doctrine of the domino theory. First goes Vietnam and with it Laos and Cambodia, then Thailand and the Philippines, then Malaysia and Burma, then India and Australia, then... Communist insurgencies have typically succeeded in countries in the early stage of industrialization that have incompetent and corrupt leaders who sponsor a top-down command economy on behalf of economic elites, excessive centralization of power and economic activity, and a political order that can never address social inequity. Since democracy has failed in such societies, the most disciplined demagogues can offer Marx' vision of a State that simply dispenses with the aristocrats who own the land and the plutocrats who see only one criterion of economic progress... that that elite keeps getting everyone. FAIL! There has never been an effective Communist insurgency in Thailand, and the one in the Philippines suggests the moral failure of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

4. The option was to shore up other countries in the region. That was being done anyway, so intervention in the Vietnamese civil war could only be a FAIL!

5. Nobody thought of a time-frame for a decisive result in favor of American Corporate interests. FAIL!

6. So you dispense with some expendable cannon fodder, waging the war largely with troops too dumb to enlist for six years in Europe instead of two in Vietnam,  people like Lieutenant Bill  "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now, or have the delusion that military service in Vietnam will jump-start political and commercial careers. You make an analogy to World War II that just does not fit. You make too few commitments with which to win, yet enough that you fall for the bad gamble of betting to win back one's losses. FAIL!

7. When there are demonstrations and riots against the war, and when draft dodging by smart people is commonplace, with the war creating social divisions, then I'd say that we have a FAIL!

8. Not even NATO members sent troops to Vietnam as gratitude for defending their countries from the dreaded attack through the Fulda Gap in central Germany. They had other priorities, like the Fulda Gap. FAIL!

OK, the Liberation of Kuwait.

1. Saddam Hussein was easy to demonize as a military menace. He had shown his willingness to engage in a brutal war, complete with gassing of the Kurdish people. He could get away with war with Iran (although Henry Kissinger said of the war between Iran and Iraq "I wish they could both lose") because Iran had its own pretensions. Once he started attacking countries that posed no threat to the rest of the world he became a moral nemesis. He had dangerous missiles, poison gas, and no scruples. Stopping an evil empire before it becomes a real menace is the lesson of the Anschluss.

2. End the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait by liberating the country.

3. Easily done in a war game in the Pentagon or the Kremlin.

4. Saddam Hussein got the chance to parley with people who could have gotten settlements. In the end, there was an offer by the Soviet Union that would have allowed Saddam Hussein to extricate his forces, but he would have had to dismantle his missiles. (The range of his missiles reached deep into the Soviet Union, and we all know what the Soviet Union dreads from powerful leaders who have no scruples but great territorial ambitions. The United States and other Coalition members would have likely accepted such.

5. Drive the Iraqi Armed Forces out of Kuwait and get a cease-fire that ensures peace between Iraq and Kuwait.

6. There would be some monitoring, not solely by Americans. 

7. The popular culture was for the demise of Saddam Hussein. "Stick your poison gas up your... sassafras!", as (was it Hank Williams, Jr., put it). Saddam Hussein was easy to demonize for an Axis-style sneak attack.

8. We had plenty of allies. The United Nations called for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait.