Prometheus 6

Powell was clearly at odds with GW Bush.

They diverged strikingly with respect to the Palestinian issue (where I think Bush had the better analysis). I suspect that they diverged in the planning of the war (where I believe Powell would have done far better).

Early in the GW Bush term, it often seemed we had two foreign policies. I predict that won't happen with Condoleezza Rice.

Wouldn't we believe that the power of the office is as strong as the indiviual at the momemnt? It's not as if there's some residual power or impediment which will fall to Rice.

David Brooks said Dr. Rice will have the term Gen. Powell wanted...but Brooks has to say Bush actually wants to do the nation building he so strongly decried when running in 2000, that he didn't really mean what he really said in his inaugural address.

I think Dr. Rice will have the term Gen. Powell was trying to prevent while still being a good soldier.

I think Powell comes out politically weaker because as many progressives as conservatives used to believe in him (80% or so approval rating). He's lost progressive support by being the good soldier...probably cemented conservative support by doing so but now he definitely lives on one side of the USofA's political divide instead of hovering above it.

Anytime you lay with dogs you have a better than average chance of getting up with fleas. If Powell's stature has declined as a result of his serving in the Bush Administration then it is a fate that he has earned and, certainly after the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis, well deserves.

I think Powell comes out politically weaker because as many progressives as conservatives used to believe in him (80% or so approval rating).

I think he comes out politically weaker because whatever you do causes some people to strongly disagree. I've maintained full respect for Powell's ability as a military commander and analyst. But I don't think his appetite for suppressing Islamic terrorism is sufficient to meet the challenge.

So he lost support broadly, but that would have been true of any centrist. Powell showed himself to be above all else a political moderate. People on the left had hoped for more to the left, people on the right had hoped for more to the right.

I disagree with your analysis. More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of our invasion of their country on the trumped up and bogus claim that their government possessed weapons of mass destruction. Let me go further. I don't believe that they deserved to die even if their government did in fact possess such weapons. Your coldhearted and disingenuous reference to Islamic terrorism as if this actually had anything to do with the invasion and conquering of that nation reveals an attitude of devoid of compassion for the suffering of others. We have broken and virtually destroyed a sovereign nation simply because we could and now we are lying and offering up every implausible story that the official spin masters can concoct to justify our monstrously uncivilized behavior toward a militarily, economically and politically weaker nation. For shame!!

Let's be frank here. Colin Powell is an opportunist. I don't mind because all politicians are opportunists. The question is whether they have any talent or not. Powell apparently didn't have enough talent to keep his job in the Bush Administration and he didn't have the decency to resign when he recognized the depths of that Administration's depravity. This revision nonsense that is going to be offered up to the public that Powell was doomed because he was a centrist in a right wing government is simply balderdash because it makes him out to be a victim. If Powell is a victim then he was a victim of his own overweening ambition and pride.

Powell did not lose his job because the American left was displeased with him. Powell, his son, Michael, and people like them could care less about what people on the left think or want. Powell gave George Bush an air of credibility that Bush had not earned or deserved. He knew full well what he was doing from the beginning. Now he can ride off into the sunset playing a 21st Century version of Ralph Bunche as scripted by the Republicans.

My reference to Islamic terrorism wasn't particulary with respect to Iraq, PT. I'm not a fan of the Iraqi war, and I don't observe any important connections between Islamic terrorism and pre-war Iraq.

The problem is that we continue to get ourselves into wars we don't really have to win, and then end up being unwilling and unable to do what it take to win the war.

Bottom line: if you're unwilling to kill every single one of them, you probably don't have a good reason to go to war, and shouldn't start it in the first place. Conversely, if there is a good reason to go to war (think Pearl Harbor), then the more dead enemy the better, with no let up until they captiulate.

I think I'm closer to Powell than to Bush with this analysis.

I would need at least three additional sets of hands to count the number of military actions the United States has been involved in since the end of World War II. Our government killed more than three and one half million Vietnamese and there is still a significant and, perhaps, growing body of opinion among the washed and unwashed in this country that the military could have won that war if the bureaucrats and politicians have left them alone. There are apparently only a few fanatics left like myself who continue to question the entire legitimacy of our involvement there in the first place.

The United States, throughout most of its history, has initiated military actions for reasons that had nothing to do with its security being threatened. The war against Mexico and, later, Spain are two examples of this reckless and, in the nuclear age, highly dangerous enterprise. While I am writing this I am listening to National Public Radio's so-called coverage of the so-called democratic vote in Iraq. This is all preposterous nonsense and we will eventually rue the day we invaded Iraq.

There's not the slightest doubt that we could have won the Vietnam war if it would have been necessary.

1. No one doubts that we maintained the nuclear capability to depopulate N. Vietnam.

2. Even if we were to forego the use of nuclear bombs, an invasion of N. Vietnam accompanied by brutal suppression was well within our power.

The fact that we were unwilling to do anything of the sort is simply a restatement of the fact our national interest did not require winning.

Nuking or brutally suppressing Vietnam would have made EastAsia an immediate reality, and all Africa and the Middle East would become Soviet sattelite nations within a year or so. Even Europe would have had to object.

It would have been the ultimate loss.

What reasons, in your opinion, that would justify our intrusion into Vietnam's internal affairs. The Communist, by the way, weren't the ones who refused to adhere to the Geneva Accords. It was our allies in the south. In any case, the struggle in Vietnam was an issue for the Vietnamese people to settle, not the United States.

Given the history of the Vietnamese with regard to their resistence to various attempts of the Chinese to invade and subjugate them I doubt if the United States would have been successfully able to carry out any such policy. What precisely do you believe that our national interest might have entailed since our actions there caused the deaths, among other things, of more than three million Vietnamese and the deaths of nearly 59,000 Americans some of whom I went to high school with?

Your argument seems to be that since we didn't nuke them it proves that our national interests weren't at stake. My recall of that period of time is markedly different. The supporters of the war argued passionately at the time that our national interests there were at stake. In fact, they managed to convince a majority of the American people that our national interests were at stake. Robert McNamara continues to believe this today.

The German Nazis and their allies killed about one third of the world's Jewish population and they would have murdered every Jew in the world if they had succeeded in their plans. Would you argue that the Nazis' national interests as they perceived it weren't at risk because they did not kill every Jew in Europe? No, you wouldn't make any such argument, but you want to argue that our own government's killing of the Vietnamese was somehow insufficiently diligent because we only killed three and one-half million when we had the capability of killing many millions more. How many Vietnamese would have had to die before you believed that those who implemented this policy believed that our national interests was at stake?

I don't believe it was in our national interest to be in Vietnam.

I don't believe that we were justified in going into Vietnam.

I suggest that "willingness to lose the war rather than use nukes" is a strong indicator that we shouldn't go to war in the first place.

We can find plenty to strongly disagree about, but not likely in this space. I don't think I analyze war way different than you do PT, I just express it a bit differently.

It would have been the ultimate loss.

I agree p6 that it would have alienated us from the world.

The problem with exercising overwhelming force when no on sees your national interest involved is that you become unpredictably fearsome, in the sense that the French revolution became unpredictably fearsome.

Forces aligned with obvious national interest are tolerated, even though brutal, or colonial, because the rest of the world can predict how to stay out of the way. When the rest of the world all fears the power, and doesn't know how to stay out of the way, they will align against it.

That's why it was sensible to lose in Vietnam rather than nuke N. Vietnam.

And sensible to nuke Japan in 1945.

This persistent belief that the U.S. somehow lost in Vietnam is a myth. We demonstrated, for example, that we would and could decimate a Communist nation and that its purported allies, in this case the Soviet Union and Red China, would do very liitle, if anything, to slow down or halt our aggression. We developed, improved and expanded our stock of conventional and non-coventional weapons that were later used to devastating effect in Detroit, Newark, El Salvador and Chile. We didn't of course prevent Vietnam from going communist but we signaled to our friends in South America that we would support in any way we could their efforts to eradicate any political movement or armed insurgency that aimed toward removing the traditional oligarchies from their perches of power.

I'll vote for her.

First woman to be president of the US

Oh, please yes. Draft Condi.

To quote Eddie Murphy: "Dah dum-de-dumBLAM!"

"United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam."

- Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled, 'U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,' September 4, 1967.

I couldn't find any other place to post this quote so I placed it here.

Some Just Voted for Food........,