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I don’t know how to classify this, or title it, so I punted.
I’ve been reading the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series at Neo-neocon, and my mind has started assembling chunks of things that have floated through it in the recent past.
A commenter somewhere, Vox Populi I think, had mentioned that the United States has historically been isolationist, only lashing out when attacked, and returning to the posture of indifferent isolation afterward. His statement was something along the lines of “we don’t stay anywhere, we just go out and make it so that we can be left alone again.”
I had also heard someone mention the number of people that died in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and the rest of South-east Asia and how it related to our abandonment of the South Vietnamese.
I remember President Bush making a speech on the 60th anniversary of V-E day about how the Yalta conference had condemned Eastern Europe to suffer the tender mercies of Stalin’s USSR.
After reading neo’s journey (as much as has been written thus far), I think i realized something about WWII that was sorely lacking in Korea, Viet Nam, and now Iraq.
The deep personal sense that we are in mortal danger in the US, and the need - as in World War II, to “make the world safe for us to ignore again.” The fall of the Reichstag was the period on the statement “Leave me alone.” in Europe. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the exclamation point for Japan (who had actually invaded us).
But Korea and Viet Nam were different. The threat from the USSR was too abstract. Nobody here could conceptualize a nuclear attack on New York, for instance. So why fight the Soviets in Korea? Why fight them in Viet Nam? At that point in history, there was no reason to believe in dominoes. But after we left Viet Nam, they all fell.
And then in 1989, with no warning, The Wall fell down.
What all this means I cannot say. But if there is a lesson to be learned from Viet Nam, it is this: when confronted with a regime that has told you explicitly “we will bury you”, you cannot abandon the fight and leave countries that are in the middle of the battlefield to the tender mercies of the enemy.