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The Coffee Shop

  • Thread starter The Fallen Angel
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In the US this is 'Memorial Day' weekend. As with every holiday every store is offering their best sale ever, people party, and life goes on...

Except for who the holiday is named for and their families and friends who live with the loss of their loved ones. Right war or wrong one men and women have given their lives for a cause they may not even have understood.

Tree Tips a straw hat to them and wish the surviving family and friends comfort and a debt of gratitude for something I never had to face...
 
I know Tree loves to travel so may I offer him some advice courtesy of Flanders and Swan -

Oh, it's hard to say... "Oly-ma-kitty-luca-chi-chi-chi"
But in Tonga, that means... "No"! If I ever have the money, 'tis to Tonga I shall go
For each lovely Tongan maiden there, will gladly make a date. And by the time she's said: "Oly-ma-kitty-luca-chi-chi-chi",
It is usually too late!

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thehangingtree said:
In the US this is 'Memorial Day' weekend. As with every holiday every store is offering their best sale ever, people party, and life goes on...

Except for who the holiday is named for and their families and friends who live with the loss of their loved ones. Right war or wrong one men and women have given their lives for a cause they may not even have understood.

Tree Tips a straw hat to them and wish the surviving family and friends comfort and a debt of gratitude for something I never had to face...
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Of course there are then the commanders who either cynically screwed up or favored their own interests over those of their troops. Stalin is on top (along with maybe Zhukhov) and myriad Nazi generals, as well as Mao. One can make a case for including both Petain and MacArthur (spend lives to enhance reputations and get more command responsibility). Montgomery made some inane decisions and optimistic, avoidable mistakes based on politics. So did Sir Arthur Harris. Curtis LeMay maybe did what he thought was necessary, but had a tin ear when it came to understanding how to achieve goals without maximum violence. I certainly agree that a good general has to be able to put aside some human reactions in order to be effective, but some people went way over the line. Frederick the Great's (he was enormously competent, even better than Napolean) "Forward, you dogs, do you want to live forever!" comes to mind--and all his wars were fought to enhance his power, not to defend anything.
For me, Bejamin Franklin's "there never was a good war or a bad peace" means that one needs to give mushy diplomacy every chance to work and try to overcome righteous indignation to do so--wars tend to be all or nothing, and as Bruce Catton once said about Shiloh, they "get out of control" very quickly. But, you can go too far and end up like Neville Chamberlain.
Unfortunately, wisdom is not always in the skill set of good politicians, or I guess in the skill sets of most people, and after-the-fact carping is easy.
 
Gibbs505 said:
Benjamin Franklin was wrong, there are good wars and a bad peace. Would you really want to be living under Nazi rule for example?
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Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.
No one would like to be living under Saddam Hussein, either, but that didn't turn out as well. (Maybe in the end it will, but not so far.)
And no one (at least not anyone sane) would want to live under Stalin, but I think Patton's supposed suggestion to "continue right on through the Soviet Union" after Germany was defeated would have been a "problem" to say the least. Not living under Nazi rule actually led to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and to Mao's misrule in China (with millions of deaths) and the Korean War. I wouldn't say World War II could have been prevented easily, but I will say that if Versailles had been handled differently, if the Depression hadn't led to militarism in Japan, things might have been different. The United States shunned the League of Nations. Peace is messy and uncertain, and sometimes isn't possible (Chamberlain was clearly wrong to allow Czechoslovakia to go under--he should have called Hitler's bluff, which given the fallout from World War I was politically very hard to do). But we can certainly try harder. World War II was really a continuation of World War I, which should have been prevented. There were no reasons for it other than nationalist jockeying and big power imperialist competition (the United States was no innocent here, especially in Latin America) and dynastic egos.
Unfortunately the world seems to be heading back toward competition instead of cooperation, and not only in American policy. Xi and Xyulo - wanted by criminal international court in The Hague are pushing very hard for "interests" that are very dubious. And as hateful as the Iranian regime is, containment is the only feasible option. If Iraq couldn't be effectively handled with a military solution, then Iran certainly cannot. Internally, Iran is pretty shaky, and the regime can't last forever.
 
Frank Petrexa said:
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.
No one would like to be living under Saddam Hussein, either, but that didn't turn out as well. (Maybe in the end it will, but not so far.)
And no one (at least not anyone sane) would want to live under Stalin, but I think Patton's supposed suggestion to "continue right on through the Soviet Union" after Germany was defeated would have been a "problem" to say the least. Not living under Nazi rule actually led to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and to Mao's misrule in China (with millions of deaths) and the Korean War. I wouldn't say World War II could have been prevented easily, but I will say that if Versailles had been handled differently, if the Depression hadn't led to militarism in Japan, things might have been different. The United States shunned the League of Nations. Peace is messy and uncertain, and sometimes isn't possible (Chamberlain was clearly wrong to allow Czechoslovakia to go under--he should have called Hitler's bluff, which given the fallout from World War I was politically very hard to do). But we can certainly try harder. World War II was really a continuation of World War I, which should have been prevented. There were no reasons for it other than nationalist jockeying and big power imperialist competition (the United States was no innocent here, especially in Latin America) and dynastic egos.
Unfortunately the world seems to be heading back toward competition instead of cooperation, and not only in American policy. Xi and Xyulo - wanted by criminal international court in The Hague are pushing very hard for "interests" that are very dubious. And as hateful as the Iranian regime is, containment is the only feasible option. If Iraq couldn't be effectively handled with a military solution, then Iran certainly cannot. Internally, Iran is pretty shaky, and the regime can't last forever.
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You post is interesting and yes some 'peace' can be ugly.

The end of WW I caused WW II which led to the Cold War. The US really won (militarily) the Viet Nam 'Tet Offensive' but lost the media war in the US. The North Viets couldn't believe how they had their asses kicked yet even Walter Cronkite reported they had won the war...

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by demanding a SDM system that as far as I know still hasn't been built but the Berlin Wall (and the rest of the border fences) are mostly gone.

Peace can often lead to strange wars...
 
thehangingtree said:
You post is interesting and yes some 'peace' can be ugly.

The end of WW I caused WW II which led to the Cold War. The US really won (militarily) the Viet Nam 'Tet Offensive' but lost the media war in the US. The North Viets couldn't believe how they had their asses kicked yet even Walter Cronkite reported they had won the war...

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by demanding a SDM system that as far as I know still hasn't been built but the Berlin Wall (and the rest of the border fences) are mostly gone.

Peace can often lead to strange wars...
Click to expand...

Yes, Tet was an example of a high command (Giap and the North Vietnamese) exploiting ordinary soldiers in a dubious enterprise. The United States did "win" the battle, even if the American command was MacArthuresque in its assessment of the situation. North Vietnam (and its backers) played a long game, and would have kept fighting no matter what. Their cynical support of Pol Pot in response to Nixon's Cambodia offensive is proof of that (they went to war with Pol Pot, and with their backer China, after they won the Vietnam war--Vietnam, not ideology, was what mattered to the Vietnamese). It was really a matter of who was willing to spend more resources. "Hanoi" was willing to put nationalism over communism and lose whatever was necessary to win that war (much as the Soviet Union did in World War II--nationalism was their main motivation, and they accepted enormous sacrifice to defend their country), and they had done the same against the French after World War II. The United States, by contrast, didn't have the strong "interests" the Vietnamese did. Vietnam today is not a state run by gangsters, like North Korea. Nor is it a particular ally of the old Communist bloc, and is mildly antagonistic to China. The party still runs things though, and the apparatchiks still get their goodies.
Yes, I think SDI (which was unworkable then and still probably is) scared Gorbachev--he knew Soviet technology couldn't compete. What happened to the Soviet Union scared other people (like Castro), who realized that opening up could be the death of a totalitarian regime. I think the possibility of US technological superiority producing an effective ABM system still scares Xyulo - wanted by criminal international court in The Hague, and the Chinese with a much smaller arsenal are also very worried. That was Gates' suggestion for handling North Korea--tell the Chinese that if nuclearization persisted, we would build out our anti-missile capabilities. I think that and the prospect of South Korea and Japan getting the bomb (which from what I have read would take no time at all once the decision was made, and Japan already has a space program and rocketry expertise) pushed China to bring North Korea to the table by enforcing economic sanctions strictly (apparently the Chinese population refers to Kim Jong Un as "the third fattie"). I don't think China particularly cares about North Korea's bombs, only about their bellicose threats to use them, and I also don't think China wants a unified Korea--certainly not one allied to the United States.
Thinking about what motivates other people and how far you can go without triggering a decisive conflict is what keeps the peace, not posturing and "righteousness". The question is when keeping the peace that way becomes untenable.

(There's a tragicomic tale in Oberdorfer's book on Tet. Apparently a Marine guard at the American embassy in Saigon, armed with a shotgun, held his post as the Viet Cong surrounded the place--the "redoubtable" Sergeant Harper. Westmoreland's Marine adjutant kept ringing him up on the field telephone for updates, and he'd leap at it to stop the noise so it wouldn't reveal his position to the enemy right outside the door. After a couple of calls, the strutting Marine major uses a little sarcasm. "Scared, sergeant?" "You bet your ass I am!")
 
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