Impudence, Imprudence & Ignorance of Hubris
Ted Folkert
April 13, 2015
The amazement never diminishes. The decisions are never justified. The sense of it all is never explained. The justification, the foresight of the aftermath, the reasoning, the truth – have never been provided in any way that makes any sense to many of us.
Yes, we are talking about Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And we are talking about the entire Middle East now, as well.
Oh sure, Vietnam was about halting the march of communism, that dirty, scary word back in the 1960s. Fingers were pointing in every direction – you are communist – he is communist – of my goodness, communism is everywhere, the sky is falling, the world is ending. What was the big scare? Communism in those days was supposedly a governmental system whereby the government owned all industry, all resources, and all property and provided a subsistence living to all of the citizens on an equal basis. This definition is a generality, not an in depth understanding, and has no implication that communism was or is a viable or sustainable system. And the situation varied with different countries that attempted such a system. But why the scare? Did we think the communists were going to gain control of our country? Did we think they were out to control the entire world?
Death, destruction, devastation, destitution, disgust – the aftermath of the senseless war in Vietnam. More than 3 million members of the US military served during the war, more than 1 million of them faced combat there. There were fifty-eight thousand US fatalities. More than 2 million Vietnamese deaths have been estimated. There have been an estimated 60,000 injured and 40,000 Vietnamese killed by unexploded ordinances since the war ended, many of them children, many of them farmers trying to provide a living out of the land we destroyed. This, as we all know, is still going on today.
Twenty million gallons of herbicides were dropped on South Vietnam, exposing 4.8 million people to toxic chemicals. Life-sustaining farmland rendered arid and unproductive, contaminated with toxins. Yes, the pain and suffering, the loss of a way of life, a loss of a livelihood, and a loss of family is still being suffered today. All this was done in the name of stopping the march of communism around the globe.
I don’t recall any such effort on our part to prevent a communist government in Russia or China. I wonder why? Could it have been that interfering with the governmental preferences of those two countries would have been a dangerous mission and one that we might lose? And then we boycotted Cuba for 50 years, although they were no threat to us whatsoever. Did the Vietnam decision seem like a piece of cake, an easy mark, one we could destroy with a few bombs? You know, like our ridiculous decisions about Afghanistan and Iraq, where we were to be in and out in a couple of months after dropping a few bombs and unfortunately those two military adventures have both lasted almost 15 years and may continue indefinitely. The above examples were decisions made by our fearless leaders in spite of the facts that the French failed in Vietnam before us and the Russians failed miserably in Afghanistan before us. Valuable lessons ignored, of course.
And now our happy warriors in the Department of Defense and our fearless leaders in Congress and the executive branch of government are wrestling with the Middle East again and again and again. We are either supporting Israel too much or not enough; we should control the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Iran and other countries or should not; we are either trying to help the opposition in Syria or we are siding with Assad; we are allies of the Saudis or we are not; we should either help the Palestinians or we should not; we should either support the existing government in Yemen or we should not; we are either supporting the call of the Armenians to declare that Turkey murdered 1,500,000 of their people unnecessarily in the WWI era or we are not; we trust Pakistan or we don’t; we are either supporting Ukraine or we are letting Russia have their way in returning it to their Soviet republic. My mom would have called this damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
And now the situation has become so complex in this entire region that we are involved on both sides of some conflicts – enemies and allies with some countries at the same time.
What to do – what to do? That is the $64 trillion question. Unfortunately, it is a question that has no answer. We cannot resolve conflicting religious beliefs with bombs. We cannot send our youngsters to battle to resolve all of the conflicts that arise in a hundred different countries around the world. Nor should it be our responsibility. All international conflicts should be controlled by a united stand by an international peacekeeping force, with all countries so engaged providing equal funding and efforts. We simply cannot continue to be the police force for the entire world.
Think about it!