On Wednesday, August 6, 2014 7:30:48 PM UTC-4, Todd wrote:
On 08/06/2014 04:14 PM, trader_4 wrote:

Yes, it worked spectacualarly well in Europe and Japan. And it's also

failed miserably in other countries where we've tried the same thing

recently, eg Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems the culture and values

of the people have a lot to do with it.



Where we succeeded, our military still has a presence

some 70 years later.



Where we did not succeed is where we "cut and run".

Depends on what idiot(s) we have running the show at

the time. Iraq is paying the penalty and Afghanistan

is going to start paying it shortly. Vietnam

payed for "cut and run" real bad too.



I don't think it's anywhere near that simple. The experiences
in Europe/Japan and Iraq/Afghanistan post war were very different
from day one. In the former case, once the war was over, there
was no significant continued hostilities, no terrorism, no sectarian
militants. In Europe/Japan, the people immediately set about
peacefully rebuilding their countries.
In the case of Iraq/Afghanistan, you had exactly the
opposite, with sectarian militants, terrorists, that started as soon
as the war ended. They are vastly different cultures. And with
Vietnam, there is every reason to believe that we could still have
been there fighting for decades, losing even more than the 50,000
lives we lost. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are very similar in
important respects. The people there, for the most part, were unwilling to
fight for their own country and the USA had to shoulder the major portion
of the burden. You can see that right now in both Iraq and Afghanistan,
where their armies are ineffective, even after more than a decade of
US training and handholding. All of those countries had corrupt,
ineffective govts that the people didn't believe in. The major mistake
was in not learning from Vietnam that we can't fix everything, everywhere.
And assuming that all people, freed from an oppressive dictator, will
choose a path to peace and freedom.




And we will have both sects of Muslims competing

with each other on how many of us they can kill.

There are orders of magnitude more of them that want to just kill each other.
They've already proven that with the casualties so far. I'm not saying we
shouldn't do anything, but clearly the idea that we can build nations in that
environment has been proven to not work.