October 10, 2005

Answer to a young uninformed pseudo- conservative!

You are a bit young and naive for such rash conclusions. They are quite simplistic, immature and non-factual. Liberalism has little to do with foreign intervention, and race-hatred and bigotry isn't really a hallmark of liberalism or even intervention in foreign lands. Truman, a liberal fought back against Communist aggression in Korea, and kept the US's reaction limited to prevent a nuclear war. FDR dealt with American First and Liberty Lobby isolationists that were PRO-GERMAN and NAZI leaning! In fact we fought an undeclared naval war against German U-Boats for a year before GERMANY DECLARED WAR ON US! Look it up. The US was not interested in war and every opinion poll reflected the public's opposition. In fact, the last Gallup Poll of November 1941 reflected a 90% opposition to going to war against Nazi Germany to help and save England from collapse. FDR was certainly not an anti-Semite, and that statement is ridiculous on its face. In fact he was so often accused of favoring the Jewish community that the New Deal was often referred to as the “Jew Deal.” Therefore your premise is quite false, silly and insulting. Also FDR was on record from 1933 onward as a vocal foe and critic of the Nazi regime and specifically Hitler. Unfortunately right-wing isolationist friends of your grandfather's generation, the CONSERVATIVES of those days were pro-Nazi and anti-interventionist. There are millions of pages of support of this clearly understood history. With regards to JFK, he didn't hate Cubans because of the failure of the Bay of Pigs; he was unprepared, as a new President, for its consequences and failure. The planning started in the last days of the Eisenhower Administration and it was Eisenhower that let Castro overthrown Batista, a military dictator with strong ties to the US, gambling interests, the sugar business and organized crime. It was the failure of Eisenhower and his CIA to understand the detrimental aspects of Fulgencio Batista, the revolution by Marxist leaning Fidel Castro, and the Mafia that vast interests in Cuba. Kennedy's problem was that he underestimated the failure of the CIA to plan properly. Meanwhile Castro has existed for decades under mostly Republican conservative Presidents, while these same people catered to Soviet and Chinese communists for trade purposes. Jimmy Carter had little to do with Iran. The Shah and his family were brigands from way back. The US had put him back in power in 1953 when there was a revolution. When finally the corruption and heavy-handedness of the Shah and his secret police finally backfired on him, the Ayatollah Koumeni, who was exiled for decades, came back into Iran. Carter had made a terrible mistake of allowing the Shah into the US, for so-called medical reasons, he was dying of cancer, and that precipitated the holding of our Embassy and its people for 444 days. Nobody here wanted physical intervention in Iran to either rid the country of the Mullahs or even free the hostages. Iran is a big country with 50+million people. So Carter's attitude towards the Iranian people is basically irrelevant. The Iranians are dominated by a conservative Moslem-Shiite branch and are virulently anti-western. The issue of liberal or conservative is meaningless. Nixon was a friend and supporter of the Shah and his administration totally misread the Shah's weakness and the strong opposition to his rule, which was rotten with corruption and human right's abuses.

Johnson was not anti-Asian or anti-Vietnamese. He tried to continue and sustain the containment policies started by Truman, and continued by Eisenhower and Kennedy. The Vietnamese nationalists started the Vietnam War almost immediately after the French conquered Indo-China in the 19th Century. FDR promised Ho Chi Minh freedom if they helped US against the Japanese during WWII. After the war, when Indo-China reverted to the French, the war for independence continued with the eventual defeat by the French at Dienbienphu, despite financial and not military support by the Eisenhower Administration. Eventually after the partition of Vietnam in 1956, the Vietminh, the North Vietnamese and the new Viet Cong wanted one country, reunification, and the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government, supported by earlier administrations. Johnson was caught in a political quagmire. He did not want to fight there, but was faced with the charge by the Republicans that the Democrats “lost China!” Therefore he started to escalate our involvement to protect our interests in the South. His eventual bombing pause had little to do with liking or hating Vietnamese, as you claim. His military efforts failed, and when Nixon was elected in 1968 he kept up the war, bombed much, much more, incurred many casualties and eventually worked out a phony truce, pulled out and watched the South Vietnamese government collapse to the consternation of the families that gave 58,000 casualties. So it was Nixon, who bombed and killed many more Vietnamese and wound up losing the country anyway.

Clinton is well liked by Black America, and enjoys almost 95% support by them. Rwanda and most of Africa has been dominated by fratricidal tribal conflicts, and the UN has dominated most of the problem solving with strong support by Europeans. The French, British and Belgians had always-strong roles regarding African problems. Clinton's hands were tied by a Republican dominated Congress, and he no power to intervene effectively in Rwanda. Unfortunately the killing went on, quickly almost unchecked and in a relatively short period of time. Meanwhile where is George Bush when it comes to the killing in Darfur, of Sudanese Black Africans? That killing has gone on for years and he has done virtually nothing.

Therefore your conclusions are hasty, immature; reflect a lack of research and reading. Please spend a little more time with the books, read some “real” history and get away from the liberal=conservative blame game. Neither philosophical faction has a monopoly on righteousness and goodness. But your broad brush slanders to defend Bush's bankrupt problems at home and abroad have no traction. Bush's popularity has been sinking not because of liberal criticism. It has been sinking because of 2000+ deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, 15,000 wounded, huge deficits in the Federal budget, cronyism in critical governmental departments, religious-pandering to fundamentalism, corruption in fund-raising, no-bid contracts at home and abroad, tax cuts for billionaires, poor immigration and energy policy, high gas and heating oil prices, bad management, poor court appointments, and the like.