quote: besides, Nixon ended the Vietnam war. He didn't start it, but he did end it. Now wasn't that admirable?
As a matter of fact, no. Nixon (and Congress) abandoned millions of people we'd said we would protect, leaving them to be slaughtered, and in the process showed that Americans would run away from a fight if enough grisly pictures showed up on the evening news. What exactly is admirable about that?
The US has a very poor record of follow-through and Vietnam is probably one of our more shameful ones, another being the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, once the US achieves its goals or leaves the area, we tend to wash our hands of it all. In Vietnam, we essentially withdrew all support to the North Vietnamese and didn't even try to support those in Laos and Cambodia. In part, it was the weakness of President Ford and in part it was the fecklessness of the Congress, which defunded the entire region, leaving our allies to their fate. What happened next was the bloody rise of Pol Pot and the massacre of millions. It also led to the large numbers of Vietnamese who risked death to reach our shores.
In the aftermath of our success in Afghanistan, we also turned tail and left the region, feeling that our money was better spent elsewhere. The result of the failures of President Bush (the elder) and the Congress was the rise of the Taliban, who stepped into the vacuum we created. We all know what happened around a decade later with the Taliban in place in Afghanistan.
A third one was our removal of support for the Shah of Iran. Granted he was a despised dictator, but the result of President Carter's withdrawal of support was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. We all know how little trouble fundamentalist Iran has been in the subsequent 28 years.
I predict that a poor follow-through in Iraq will lead to similar or worse problems than the three above if we were to pull out prematurely.
-- Roger
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." -- Benjamin Franklin
