"Bush’s refusal to invade Vietnam is not much different from how U.S. presidents treated Eastern Europe during the Cold War. As miserable as the citizens of Eastern Europe were after U.S. officials delivered them into the clutches of the Soviet communists at the end of World War II, the issue of violent regime change properly lay with the Eastern Europeans, not with the U.S. government. They chose peaceful means, even though it took almost half a century to throw off the shackles of Soviet tyranny. Who is to say that Eastern Europeans would have been better off with a U.S. invasion that would have killed hundreds of thousands of them and left Eastern Europe a wasteland?
"Why did Bush invade Iraq rather than travel to Baghdad and shake hands with Saddam, as U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld did during the 1980s on behalf of the U.S. government, and as Bush himself recently did with the Vietnamese communist dictators?
"The answer lies in a very simple fact: U.S. presidents use their standing army, which loyally and obediently follows presidential orders, to attack weak and relatively defenseless Third World countries, such as Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and only when U.S. casualties are expected to be low. With Iraq as with Vietnam, it’s obvious that they simply miscalculated a bit.
"As the Iraq debacle continues to spiral downward, sucking ever-growing numbers of people into its death throes, all too many Americans continue to judge the invasion and occupation of Iraq by how many U.S. troops have been killed. But from a moral standpoint, Americans should also be asking themselves two important questions: (1) Under what moral or legal authority did the U.S. government invade Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process? and (2) If the U.S. government invaded Iraq to spread freedom and democracy, as U.S. officials maintain, why is it cozying up to such totalitarian regimes as the communist dictatorship in Vietnam?
Found on Antiwar.com
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