i'm not sure where you get your information concerning vietnam but i suggest you get a refund. vietnam had a civil war. the parties in question were the fascist establishment vs the communist upstarts. what we had was an academic philosophy of "containment" that had nothing to do with the people of vietnam, or as it turns out, reality.
the lesson we learned cost 50,000 american lives and an untold number of asians, but it was simple: we can't stop someone else’s civil war by occupation unless we care to send our young there to die indefinitely - and - we fix the problem politically. even then we have no guarantees. the same lesson applies to iraq. perhaps even more so since the internal hatred reaches back to a time america wasn't even a concept. the shiites and the sunnis will have their civil war, whenever we leave, regardless of how efficient we make their militia killing machines. the sunnis will be crushed, the shiites victorious and all this talk about balance forgotten as some kind of absurdist conservative think tank fairy tale the muddled masses swallowed whole. in the meantime more americans will die in the slow waltz to the inevitable.
- js.
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