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Honestly, I think y'all are kind of overestimating how much impression the Iraq War is really going to make in American history. It's gone on forever, but its actual impact on the US has been fairly minimal. It's just another one of those minor foreign adventures that'll barely merit being mentioned at all in a history book twenty years in the future, much like Desert Storm is now.
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Jan 27, 2015 04:16
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PittTheElder posted:Then in Season 4 Sherman comes and burns their house down. Or doesn't, cause that's not how he rolls, but all their slaves run off and we get a comedy series about how they now have to learn how to cook, clean, and take care of the farm without any slave labor.
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Jan 27, 2015 04:20
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Main Paineframe posted:Honestly, I think y'all are kind of overestimating how much impression the Iraq War is really going to make in American history. It's gone on forever, but its actual impact on the US has been fairly minimal. It's just another one of those minor foreign adventures that'll barely merit being mentioned at all in a history book twenty years in the future, much like Desert Storm is now. It will not be forgotten because it's linked to an event, 9/11, that will be remembered and written about for a long time. I think all of this stuff will probably end up being whitewashed, and it's going to end up looking like, "Well.. Bush tried the best he could to keep America safe!" instead of what it was in reality. It will be remembered for sure, though.
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Jan 27, 2015 04:27
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Main Paineframe posted:Honestly, I think y'all are kind of overestimating how much impression the Iraq War is really going to make in American history. It's gone on forever, but its actual impact on the US has been fairly minimal. It's just another one of those minor foreign adventures that'll barely merit being mentioned at all in a history book twenty years in the future, much like Desert Storm is now. Lol at someone talking about the obscurity of evil American wars against guerrillas without mentioning the Philippine war. Guess he's right! Brb, just going to stick my head in the oven.
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Jan 27, 2015 06:56
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baw posted:Perlstein's "Invisible Bridge" lays out not only how Vietnam was whitewashed as the war was winding down in order to give Nixon some political talking points, and then explains how Reagan changed the national dialogue from "what have we done?" to "America is always the best no matter what!" I compare America's experience after Vietnam with Europe's after WW2. European governments (generally) reached a point where they finally said "ok killing each other over territory is dumb and bad" and had to have an honest reckoning with what they had allowed to happen (this process took decades and is still ongoing in some ways.) America never had an introspective moment like that. Maybe you can blame Reagan for it, maybe it's just because the wars aren't fought on our soil, but in the 70's after Watergate and Vietnam (and the various investigations finding out that the CIA had been doing heinous poo poo since the 50's) there should have been a time for sober reflection of the evil we had done, and an honest attempt to say "we can not let these things happen again." But then the dialogue changed to the current City on a Hill bullshit and has never looked back, even after the two disastrous wars of the 21st century. This actually gets me excited to get to Invisible Bridge I've been working through Before The Storm and that's been a tough read because I feel like throwing that book in anger every now and than. I'm planning on doing Nixonland after it and finishing up with Invisible Bridge. I've gone over a few history books that talk about the beginnings of the POW/MIA movement were based a lot in conspiracy theories of the right wing of captured Americans being spirited off to gulags in the Soviet Union. Which I can't remember if I read that in Dominic Sandbrooks Mad As Hell, a history about the birth of the populist right in the 70s, or in a book about conspiracy theories I was reading when I did my undergrad thesis, but I feel like its the former. Having grown up and seeing the black POW/MIA flags all over government buildings when I was just a kid in the 90s really floored me that that was all based off paranoid fantasy. I think Reagan does play a major part in the recast of the rah rah narrative of the Vietnam war. David Sirota in his book Back to Our Future covers the change in pop culture of one that was skeptical toward the military to one of hero worship. That we couldn't win the Vietnam War in real life, so in movies in the 80s we refought the war over in all of those back to Vietnam movies like First Blood Part 2, which the rescuing POWs still in Vietnam feels like it was its own genre of movie for much of the 80s or something like '91's Flight of the Intruder. Where all of these movies show we could have won the war, if only Washington/those loving hippies weren't keeping us back.. icantfindaname posted:The opinions of academic historians are not the same as a societal consensus. Subjectively speaking I would say a large minority of Americans actively believe the stab-in-the-back myth, and only a small minority are meaningfully antiwar This is what I'm talking about when I say revisionist history. Any historian who isn't a conservative is going to give you the reality that Vietnam was lovely thing to do on our part where we wasted the lives of 58,000 Americans and an unknown number that has to reach into the low millions at least, Vietnamese for nothing. There are people I know in their mid to late 20s who think the Peace Movement held us back from winning in Vietnam. So it is awful that this myth has burrowed its self into the American subconscious. Volkerball posted:Ironically enough, it seems DnD's base is about the only group of people I've heard who try to claim Nixon was somewhat of a good guy. My history teacher was pretty liberal, but we spent a lot of time on McCarthyism and the driving fears behind the Cold War, and the overall tone was "Everyone involved in this was a grade A piece of poo poo." YMMV. I think its a reaction to how far right and loony conservatives have gotten in America post Reagan, they were always assholes. But someone as vile and self serving as Richard Nixon was still at least willing to do things that helped regular people as long as it made him popular, or at least made his administration look favorable. Compared to the modern one's in power who seem more than happy to offer us all up as sacrifice to the glorious "Job Creators." There is also well time, more younger people are going to actively dislike or hate Reagan and not really care much about Nixon. On Facebook me and a bunch of people were talking about Hunter S. Thompson and I linked his obituary for Nixon, which I think is his best bit of writing, and the consensus was people really couldn't get worked up about Nixon cause Reagan was worse. Theres also I think some people took the absurd Nixon is further the Left than modern republicans and ran with it forgetting that it was used to point out to people how absurd modern republicans are because Nixon was a monster.
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Jan 27, 2015 11:11
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Argument that is debatably true: America actually did have a slim chance to win the war in the closing years because of North Vietnamese military blunders and increasing South Vietnamese military competence, and that chance was diminished by public pressure that in part stemmed from media coverage; America didn't want to continue to support the South Vietnamese. Nonetheless, America (a) shouldn't have been there in the first place (b) didn't deserve to win for any reason (c) American Southern Vietnamese possible regimes were loving terrible (d) had prosecuted the war with incompetence and criminal brutality for its duration. I think it's entirely possible to argue that America could have won the war with better strategy and tactics and by staying in Vietnam for longer with that strategy, but to argue at the same time that the war was wrong and not dogwhistle about cultural Marxism. That just isn't a very big rhetorical space in American dialogue about Vietnam for ideological reasons.
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Jan 27, 2015 11:52
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KomradeX posted:This actually gets me excited to get to Invisible Bridge I've been working through Before The Storm and that's been a tough read because I feel like throwing that book in anger every now and than. I'm planning on doing Nixonland after it and finishing up with Invisible Bridge. I've gone over a few history books that talk about the beginnings of the POW/MIA movement were based a lot in conspiracy theories of the right wing of captured Americans being spirited off to gulags in the Soviet Union. Which I can't remember if I read that in Dominic Sandbrooks Mad As Hell, a history about the birth of the populist right in the 70s, or in a book about conspiracy theories I was reading when I did my undergrad thesis, but I feel like its the former. Having grown up and seeing the black POW/MIA flags all over government buildings when I was just a kid in the 90s really floored me that that was all based off paranoid fantasy. The POW conspiracy was the result of a political maneuver engineered by Nixon who's administration began inflating the numbers of reported American POWs by classifying every downed American pilot as a potential prisoner of war. He used the POWs as the justification for continued American involvement. This meant that when the war finally ended there were a whole bunch of soldiers on the POW list that were actually dead. Miltank fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 27, 2015 |
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Jan 27, 2015 12:57
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Jan 27, 2015 13:24
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Miltank posted:Nixonland spoilers belowVVV Okay, and that explains where the idea of those guys being hid in Soviet gulags or Chinese prison camps come from, if you have these dead guys lasted as POWs and the people who you think have them tell you they don't abs you think they're lying. It is possible that the US could have won, but so much about US actions going back to the mid 50s, maybe even the end of World War II would have needed to be changed and just owing to the ideological blinders of the Cold War I don't think those changes could have been enough. The only change that could have been made was increased bombing of North Vietnam, Linebacker II from the get go. I'm not sure how effective that would have been if the North was able to adapt to that. The problem with the South's military competency seems to be that their best low level military leaders never got to be on charge because they fought with a corrupt civil/military government. So you see the NVA tossed back during the '73 Easter Offensive but you see them get steamrolled two years later. As for Iraq, back in high school I was saying that when Americans left out would go the way of South Vietnam, and the poor performance of the new American trained Iraqi army and massive corruption with it add the civil government just about lead to that with ISIS. Back than of course I made that prediction without knowing about ISIS and all years before The Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War.
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Jan 27, 2015 18:18
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KomradeX posted:Okay, and that explains where the idea of those guys being hid in Soviet gulags or Chinese prison camps come from, if you have these dead guys lasted as POWs and the people who you think have them tell you they don't abs you think they're lying. Yeah part of the reason Vietnam keeps getting rewritten is that Bush's wars have a lot of very uncomfortable parallels. As for Vietnam the main reason America lost was that it became apparent America wasn't fighting North Vietnam but the Vietnamese people as a whole. It also became quickly apparent that American interests didn't match Vietnamese interests at all. The corruption also went deeper than just plain old corruption. Ngo Dihn Diem's regime was also not at all democratic or freedom-loving. Elections were cancelled all over the place. There was also supposed to be a popular vote about when to put the two Vietnams back together, now to do it, and who would run it and Diem just went "lol nope." Vietnam also had a pretty big Buddhist majority at the time but Diem was a Catholic that only put Catholics in positions of power and influence, up to and including the military. The government was also running around imprisoning dissidents and anybody that was accused of opposing Diem's policy. While American leaders were blathering about how much America loves freedom and democracy they were also supporting a brutally repressive, partially theocratic government that was elective in name only. Ho Chi Mihn had a gently caress load of popular support basically everywhere. Part of it was because his stated purpose was to liberate Vietnam from all outside influence. His end goal was a totally independent Vietnam run for the Vietnamese. America was ultimately on the side of France, who was previously trying to keep a colony. Which is a funny thing the conservatives talking about how proper and just the war was don't seem to understand. We were on France's side on this one as the area was French Indochina. To the Vietnamese the Americans were just the successors to France and in light of how much American business was drooling to get at the nation and even making footholds economically it's understandable that the Vietnamese were a bit miffed. America could have won Vietnam, sort of, if it managed to hide what it was up to and practically exterminated the Vietnamese people. It rapidly became fighting the people of Vietnam as a whole rather than North Vietnam. The Vietnamese were extremely motivated to kick foreign occupation the gently caress out while America was basically trying to maintain western control and influence. But really, even if America had expended what was needed to win what would it have gained? By that point it would have been a pile of sawdust and dead bodies.
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Jan 27, 2015 21:15
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Well Iraq was a bit different in that a fair portion of hostilities didn't directly involve the US, but more the tensions between the Shiite and Sunni populations. Now the US is inextricably bound up in that tension, especially the de-Ba'athifaction effort, but there was less unified animosity towards America than existed during Vietnam.
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Jan 27, 2015 21:22
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The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan are almost totally opposite to those of Vietnam. In Vietnam only one political group existed with the political credibility to govern a united Vietnam - the Vietminh, who had a great store of credibility and strength after the war, and substantial popular support. In Iraq and Afghanistan, America is faced with the post-colonial reality that it's possible no government can competently and legitimately govern the whole of either country, despite the fact it removed highly unpopular governments. (Polling suggests Iraqis still consider the violent removal of Saddam as a good thing, but also that they wish the USA hadn't been the foreign agent to do it and they also wish that the US hadn't stayed for as long as it did). In addition, the United States was at war with another country in Vietnam, and one that was financed and equipped by an opposing superpower, with a regular army. It was a much bigger war, with much higher casualties and in much more challenging circumstances. The United States also fought with much greater constraints against its ability to achieve a military victory in Vietnam - namely, the impossibility of invading the North. It's wrong to see too great a continuity in American policy from Bush to the Cold War era. That is extremely historically forgetful, since the people behind Bush's foreign policy had been major opponents to a great deal of White House Cold War foreign policy - they come from a ravenously opposed faction. The only similarity is that the policy is interventionist. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jan 27, 2015 |
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Jan 27, 2015 21:33
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There is a high level parallel in that both Vietnam and the GWoT were sold to the American public based largely on national security and nationalism to mask the deep disconnect between American military planning and reality.
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Jan 27, 2015 21:35
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Popular Thug Drink posted:There is a high level parallel in that both Vietnam and the GWoT were sold to the American public based largely on national security and nationalism to mask the deep disconnect between American military planning and reality. Almost every war ever is sold on baloney terms, but that doesn't really have much to do with how or why they're waged. And, in actuality, the ways in which they were sold were very different, even if nationalism and national security were both involved. Plus, the US had been de-facto at war in Vietnam in some capacity for years before the war even was sold at all; plus, the public needed much less justification back then anyway.
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Jan 27, 2015 21:42
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ErIog posted:It will not be forgotten because it's linked to an event, 9/11, that will be remembered and written about for a long time. I think all of this stuff will probably end up being whitewashed, and it's going to end up looking like, "Well.. Bush tried the best he could to keep America safe!" instead of what it was in reality. It will be remembered for sure, though. 9/11 is what puts the "barely" in that "barely mentioned". It'll mention that the World Trade Center was bombed on 9/11, spend a couple paragraphs talking about that day, briefly mention that it kicked off a "Global War on Terror" including invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, point out that we caught Osama, and then it'll move on to more important details like the Communist Muslim Revolution of 2016 carried out by the glorious Kenyan Imam-King, B. Hussein Obama on Nov 3, 2016, after which the class will adjourn for the daily mandatory burning of the American flag.
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Jan 28, 2015 00:35
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Disinterested posted:Almost every war ever is sold on baloney terms, but that doesn't really have much to do with how or why they're waged. And, in actuality, the ways in which they were sold were very different, even if nationalism and national security were both involved. Plus, the US had been de-facto at war in Vietnam in some capacity for years before the war even was sold at all; plus, the public needed much less justification back then anyway. I will say if there's one easy parallel it's the weak governments we were/are propping up in all the wars. The Iraqi government is closer to that of the Republic of Vietnam, where they had a lavishly funded and equipped army that ended up being not of much use in the end.
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Jan 28, 2015 00:40
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Panzeh posted:I will say if there's one easy parallel it's the weak governments we were/are propping up in all the wars. The Iraqi government is closer to that of the Republic of Vietnam, where they had a lavishly funded and equipped army that ended up being not of much use in the end. Yes, although no effort was previously made by the US in the Cold War - and particularly in Vietnam - to ensure the least democratic participation. Instead the Americans I think genuinely naively believed that Iraq could spontaneously accept democracy quickly and successfully, and got burned fast by how easily the system they set up was corrupted and used for sectarian purposes (although Iraqi democracy has not been a 100% total and categorical failure, either, in its federal dimension). The Cold War process is more: We need to stop communism -> Install Dictator to prevent communism -> Dictator goes rogue/fails -> Replace with another dictator Humanitarian intervention a la Wolfowitz is: We need to undo the mistake of these dictators we installed -> Remove dictator -> Install democracy -> Democracy fails for complex of reasons including sectarian politics, corruption, US meddling -> Acquire new dictator/corrupt sectarian dictator candidate as a product of this failed process Disinterested fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jan 28, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 00:54
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Disinterested posted:Yes, although no effort was previously made by the US in the Cold War - and particularly in Vietnam - to ensure the least democratic participation. Instead the Americans I think genuinely naively believed that Iraq could spontaneously accept democracy quickly and successfully, and got burned fast by how easily the system they set up was corrupted and used for sectarian purposes (although Iraqi democracy has not been a 100% total and categorical failure, either, in its federal dimension). Well, even the Republic of Vietnam eventually managed to "elect" Thieu, but it was just window dressing and everyone knew it. It was obvious that democracy in Iraq would favor the Shias, but I don't think the US was expecting the level of dominance they had in the government institutions. I think if Bush and Rummy knew the Shias would be so dominant they might not have done it given their animus against Iran.
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Jan 28, 2015 00:55
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Disinterested posted:Yes, although no effort was previously made by the US in the Cold War - and particularly in Vietnam - to ensure the least democratic participation. Instead the Americans I think genuinely naively believed that Iraq could spontaneously accept democracy quickly and successfully, and got burned fast by how easily the system they set up was corrupted and used for sectarian purposes (although Iraqi democracy has not been a 100% total and categorical failure, either, in its federal dimension). Installing democracy was never part of the plan when invading Iraq. Prior to the invasion, the agreed upon goal was "Remove Saddam, give Iraq to the Iraqi's." They didn't care what happened after that. They just wanted to knock out Saddam and get the hell out. Then Bush made Bremer his personal man on the ground, skipping right over the DoD and the agreed upon plan, and Bremer was accountable to no one but Bush. Then Bremer did what Bremer wanted, and the glorious idea of "De-Baathification" was born.
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Jan 28, 2015 01:30
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How much does that have to do with the thinking that "we will be greeted as liberators." Were they really lazy with their planning because they had fantasies of miraculous spontaneous democracy formation?
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Jan 28, 2015 01:39
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It's the same thinking as the Cold War where when confronted with the fact that our hand picked leaders were actually authoritarian right wing dictators and that the native populations actually hated us our response was to just shut our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears and wish really really hard those things weren't true Disinterested mentioned this about Iraq but ai think it's important to emphasize the exact same naivite was what drove both events icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jan 28, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 01:51
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ErIog posted:How much does that have to do with the thinking that "we will be greeted as liberators." Were they really lazy with their planning because they had fantasies of miraculous spontaneous democracy formation? We kind of were greeted as liberators in the initial invasion. It was the whole occupation thing that changed perceptions. Shia's outside of the extremist "Nope, it's the west, gently caress em all forever no matter what" types were on board because they were gaining power, and US/Kurd relations, well, look up the al-Anfal campain. It's hard to explain in words how much the Kurds hated Saddam.  Sunni's were apprehensive, but there was no denying Saddam was unbelievably disgusting, except among the most nationalist, easiest manipulated bunch. The insurgency was mostly just a bunch of militias like ISIS that no one has ever claimed were rational who gained strength because of US policies towards "monday morning quarterbacking are troops" and poo poo like that, which burned a lot of bridges. Had we gone with the initial plan of "OK we're done here. Good luck, guys," that likely wouldn't have happened, and instead the resentment would've grown over time due to the US breaking it and not fixing it, like how a lot of Libyans see their current crisis. Of course, had we gone with the initial plan, it's a coin toss at best that Iraq would've been better for it. Edit: I honestly don't think there was a whole lot of delusion about what was going to happen in Iraq if we just left it. They knew it would be bad, but they also knew it wouldn't pose a threat to the US like they felt Saddam did. An improvement over the status quo. Volkerball fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jan 28, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 01:59
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Correct me if i'm wrong here and got this from the Onion or something, but didn't Bush initially not understand that Sunnis and Shia were two different groups or why that might be an issue?
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Jan 29, 2015 05:26
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Kellsterik posted:Correct me if i'm wrong here and got this from the Onion or something, but didn't Bush initially not understand that Sunnis and Shia were two different groups or why that might be an issue? Are you refering to the over-estimation of the strength of Iraqi nationalism as a cohesive institution of society in Iraq, contributing to the misunderstanding of the ethnic purges in Baghdad until sufficient interventionary force would be politically unacceptable? Of course Bush knew Sunni and Shia were separate groups; the policy briefs talked up Iraqi nationalism and talked down the possibilities for sectarian cleansing, and with a pre-ISIL mindset, who can blame the Bush admin on that?
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Jan 29, 2015 05:30
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Kellsterik posted:Correct me if i'm wrong here and got this from the Onion or something, but didn't Bush initially not understand that Sunnis and Shia were two different groups or why that might be an issue? Since 2000, the Onion has run into a lot of that Poe's law poo poo. Even preemptively, as evidenced by that depressing-rear end article about the national nightmare of peace and prosperity.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:31
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My Imaginary GF posted:Are you refering to the over-estimation of the strength of Iraqi nationalism as a cohesive institution of society in Iraq, contributing to the misunderstanding of the ethnic purges in Baghdad until sufficient interventionary force would be politically unacceptable? Of course Bush knew Sunni and Shia were separate groups; the policy briefs talked up Iraqi nationalism and talked down the possibilities for sectarian cleansing, and with a pre-ISIL mindset, who can blame the Bush admin on that? The only way to avoid these mistakes happening again would be purging out all the elements that enabled them. Sometimes when you have lung cancer you have to saw off the patient's leg, just in case.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:39
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Panzeh posted:The only way to avoid these mistakes happening again would be purging out all the elements that enabled them. Sometimes when you have lung cancer you have to saw off the patient's leg, just in case. Why would a doctor with lung cancer be sawing off a patient's leg
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Jan 29, 2015 05:43
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Panzeh posted:The only way to avoid these mistakes happening again would be purging out all the elements that enabled them. Sometimes when you have lung cancer you have to saw off the patient's leg, just in case. Well, yes, that was de-Ba'athification as a policy. FAUXTON posted:Why would a doctor with lung cancer be sawing off a patient's leg I think Panzeh is angry that individuals concerned with issues of policy and the history leading to their development do not share his ideological worldview.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:45
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My Imaginary GF posted:Well, yes, that was de-Ba'athification as a policy. Nice deflection.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:45
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My Imaginary GF posted:Are you refering to the over-estimation of the strength of Iraqi nationalism as a cohesive institution of society in Iraq, contributing to the misunderstanding of the ethnic purges in Baghdad until sufficient interventionary force would be politically unacceptable? Of course Bush knew Sunni and Shia were separate groups; the policy briefs talked up Iraqi nationalism and talked down the possibilities for sectarian cleansing, and with a pre-ISIL mindset, who can blame the Bush admin on that? The problem wasn't that the policy briefs were inaccurate, it's that nobody was reading them. I've heard that Bush didn't realize that the Sunni and Shia were separate groups before we invaded as well, and I think that was one of the many infuriating facts put down in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, which is pretty much the go-to book for seeing how every aspect of the occupation planning was, to put it mildly, non-existent. Time after time people would try to send poo poo up to the Bush White House to try and make them understand just what they were getting/had gotten into, and time after time they'd simply be swept aside. Goddamn enraging in retrospect.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:46
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My Imaginary GF posted:I think Panzeh is angry that individuals concerned with issues of policy and the history leading to their development do not share his ideological worldview. My ideology is America being #1. I bleed red, white and blue. If anyone in US politics does not share that ideology, they should not be in US politics.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:52
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The problem wasn't that the policy briefs were inaccurate, it's that nobody was reading them. I've heard that Bush didn't realize that the Sunni and Shia were separate groups before we invaded as well, and I think that was one of the many infuriating facts put down in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, which is pretty much the go-to book for seeing how every aspect of the occupation planning was, to put it mildly, non-existent. Time after time people would try to send poo poo up to the Bush White House to try and make them understand just what they were getting/had gotten into, and time after time they'd simply be swept aside. Goddamn enraging in retrospect. When one of Bush's top general informed the president that they'd need to double the total troops in Iraq to achieve their goals he was fired for "being negative."
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Jan 29, 2015 05:55
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My Imaginary GF posted:Are you refering to the over-estimation of the strength of Iraqi nationalism as a cohesive institution of society in Iraq, contributing to the misunderstanding of the ethnic purges in Baghdad until sufficient interventionary force would be politically unacceptable? Of course Bush knew Sunni and Shia were separate groups; the policy briefs talked up Iraqi nationalism and talked down the possibilities for sectarian cleansing, and with a pre-ISIL mindset, who can blame the Bush admin on that? The same Iraqi nationalism that pretty much got ginned up as a reaction to the fall of the Ottoman Empire to try and hold together a province which had its borders created along administrative lines? I'm confused how anybody would confuse that for a relevant thing after everything that happened with the secular group identity movements that got tried out during the Cold War.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:05
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The problem wasn't that the policy briefs were inaccurate, it's that nobody was reading them. I've heard that Bush didn't realize that the Sunni and Shia were separate groups before we invaded as well, and I think that was one of the many infuriating facts put down in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, which is pretty much the go-to book for seeing how every aspect of the occupation planning was, to put it mildly, non-existent. Time after time people would try to send poo poo up to the Bush White House to try and make them understand just what they were getting/had gotten into, and time after time they'd simply be swept aside. Goddamn enraging in retrospect. Imperial Life In The Emerald City is even worse about how the initial stage of the occupation under Viceroy (seriously we named him a viceroy!) L.Paul Bremer was such an unplanned poo poo show of just rewarding Republican staffers and backers, that we sent people that had never been over seas before to rebuild Iraq, that the 19 year old kid we tapped to rebuild their stock market said his most rewarding previous job had been last summer when he was an Ice Cream truck driver!
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Jan 29, 2015 06:23
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KomradeX posted:Imperial Life In The Emerald City is even worse about how the initial stage of the occupation under Viceroy (seriously we named him a viceroy!) L.Paul Bremer was such an unplanned poo poo show of just rewarding Republican staffers and backers, that we sent people that had never been over seas before to rebuild Iraq, that the 19 year old kid we tapped to rebuild their stock market said his most rewarding previous job had been last summer when he was an Ice Cream truck driver! That's not even getting into how we had that stock market running before any other piece of vital civic infrastructure. On every level it's a poo poo show.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:24
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I really hope Paul Bremer goes down in history, if only so people will get to enjoy the morbid fascination reading his story, watching the trainwreck unfold. He's the Long-Term Capital Management of foreign policy.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:29
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Main Paineframe posted:9/11 is what puts the "barely" in that "barely mentioned". It'll mention that the World Trade Center was bombed on 9/11, spend a couple paragraphs talking about that day, briefly mention that it kicked off a "Global War on Terror" including invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, point out that we caught Osama, and then it'll move on to more important details like the Communist Muslim Revolution of 2016 carried out by the glorious Kenyan Imam-King, B. Hussein Obama on Nov 3, 2016, after which the class will adjourn for the daily mandatory burning of the American flag. I doubt it. 9/11 was one of the only two attacks on American soil in modern history, and the one with the largest number of American civilian casualties. It was also a terrorist attack vs. a war-time attack. It will be a major part of the American psyche for decades, probably at least as long as Pearl Harbor was.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:30
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It's also the start of an entirely new chapter in American history.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:32
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:That's not even getting into how we had that stock market running before any other piece of vital civic infrastructure. On every level it's a poo poo show. Which isn't saying much because that kid wanted to give them the most advanced technology they could get for operating it while the Iraqis were telling him no we don't need that we just need some blackboards and chalk and could open in a day instead of the several months it was closed. The whole goddamn thing was an absurd poo poo show of incompetence. Hell we tried to give Iraq it's own capitalist Cultural Revolution
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Jan 29, 2015 06:38
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| # ? May 7, 2024 14:24 |
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So I finished The Invisible Bridge, where can I read about what happens next?
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Jan 30, 2015 19:52
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