Hollywood is always attempting to rewrite history. For instance the scene where George Ball is talking about WW 2 and how we (USA) killed and tortured Germans (Dresden) is totally rediculous. Johnson and Mc Namara totally messed up Vietnam because they micro managed the war...picking targets and not letting the military guys do their jobs. Like Barry Goldwater said go in a do the job or get out!
shareYou are correct. It was too political and the military should have been left to do what they do best.
shareThe bottom line is that, short of exterminating the Vietnamese and destroying the entire country, no General or any number of troops could have "won" Vietnam. It was unwinnable. The Viet-Cong actually were South Vietnamese. They were so well entrenched at every level of South Vietnamese government and society it would have been virtually impossible to root them out. The South Vietnamese government and Army, both rife with Viet-Cong, were also rotten with corruption. Forget that Vietnam was an unconventional war. The people were not with us. A peasant sowing his rice paddy would have still been a peasant without regard to who was in power. For the Vietnamese, it was part of their national identity to eject one foreign power or another, they had been doing it for centuries.
Bear in mind that South Vietnam was conquered. By North Vietnam.
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The Allied DID kill and torture a lot of German civilians.
I am not saying that these were wrong decisions,
but you can't dismiss historical facts
just because you don't like them.
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There's nothing RIDICULOUS about what is said of Dresden. The firebombing was completely unnecessary. Had the Allies lost the war, those involved thought they would have been tried for war crimes.
History's a bitch...sometimes it doesn't always jive with your narrow world-view that has the USA as always morally superior.
Uh, sorry, but this was Bomber Command's baby. The US participated, but the bombings of German cities was British revenge for the Blitz and the V1 and V2 attacks.
'Reaping the Whirlwind' ring a bell? I know its fashionable to blame the US for everything, but give credit where credit is due.
Yes, they mixed up Dresden with the fire bombing of Japan which McNamara himself talks about in the documentary he did not long ago, The Fog of War.
shareIf we could do it all over again, I would love to bomb the *beep* at Dresden. Yes I've read SlaughterHaus V and have studied the war extensively, and don't find any excuse for the bombing of civilians. they were a disgusting culture and should be held collectively responsible for the Halocaust. If you believe the German people didn't know what was going on, I guess you probably don't believe that the Halocaust existed nor did we land on the moon.
I don't believe in the Beatles, I just believe in me.
If you seriously think the fire bombing of Dresden wasn't real then you might want to try reading a book or something.
By the way, McNamara did a pretty good job micromanaging the bombing of Tokyo with LeMay during WWII.
Little joke about the fire bombing of Tokyo there. ;)
They actually killed more than the atomic bombs.
How do you propose the U.S. was going to "win the peace" in a place where the vast majority of the North Vietnamese were Communists and half of the South were too? We stopped Ho Chi Mihn from holding a general pan-Vietnam election because we knew he would win. It was wrongheaded from the beginning, which Kennedy was starting to acknowledge very shortly before his death. Just to demonstrate how difficult this sort of thing is - in Iraq the vast majority of the population is actually sympathetic to the idea, if not the substance, behind the U.S. mission there, and yet the country is descending into civil war. You can't "liberate" people from their own entrenched beliefs and loyalties. The U.S. has to learn that democracy is not a panacea to cure all the world's ills, and will reflect the values of the people in whom it is vested. We are shocked by the notion that some people do not want to live under our Constitution - shocked at how ungrateful the people we "liberate" are by turning around and using it against us. We miss the point - democracy and American values are not precisely the same thing, and you can't automatically bring them into a country by bombing it. It was as true now as in the 1960s.
shareWe miss the point - democracy and American values are not precisely the same thing, and you can't automatically bring them into a country by bombing it. It was as true now as in the 1960s.
Seems to have worked for Japan and Germany. Debating politics based upon a Hollywood version of history and in a shortened forum such as this is self-defeating. All anyone can do is argue their side in a limited space. My suggestion would be to read international news, watch the BBC and other non-American newscasts to see how the world view us. There I go, talking politics on a movie board. Sigh.
Very well said, the only thing I disagree with is the idealized version of Kennedy who exists in American Mythology since his death. People almost look at him as this golden-boy savior, when he was already 3-years into his presidency, and hadn't really done anything that would have been seen as "lasting" if he hadn't been killed. His call to land a man on the moon was something he obviously couldn't back up during his presidency, even if it did a great job of rallying America to embrace science, engineering, and technology.
"Well if you wanted to make Syrok the Preparer cry...mission accomplished."
Like Barry Goldwater said
There you go. Turn this guy over and the label on his ass says "100% USDA Certified Lunatic."
I was about to say something very similar. Anyone who quotes Barry Goldwater is someone who automatically loses any substance.
"Well if you wanted to make Syrok the Preparer cry...mission accomplished."
Quick nurse !... 50,000cc's of hangabanga...
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