Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "Pearl Harbour - Context, History, and an account from someone who was there" video.

It's been 40 years but I believe my reference for this is John Toland's The Rising Sun . IIRC .... one of the things that happened in Japan was that it had largely avoided colonization because it didn't have anything that anyone wanted. But - with such as the attentions of Commodore Perry - Japan realized that it's policy of isolation - that they had employed for the last 200 years - wasn't going to work any more. So - they had decided that - "If you can't beat'em - join'em" and they had decided to become a colonial power too. Their problem - was that they were coming to it late in the game. Here - they had come to believe - that if they ever backed down to a colonial power - they were on a "slippery slope" to being colonized. But they had been successful in creating a modern military and in defeating the Russians in 1905. They colonized Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria - and then - began working on China as a whole. So - here the Americans are - supplying Japan with the oil it is using to conquer China. After such as the Rape of Nanking ... those watching the news reels who knew - knew that the oil the Japanese were using when they raped Nanking - came from the United States. Thus the US came to try and do something for the Chinese. When the Japanese got the Germans to prevail upon the Vichy French to let them into Indochina - that was to much for the US and they demanded that the Japanese not only pull out of Indochina but out of China as well. Here - the Japanese Government is faced with a problem. They KNEW that if they went to war with the US they would be destroyed. But ... if they backed down to a colonial power they were on a slippery slope to becoming a colony. Their decision was - become a colony or be destroyed. Caught between a rock and a hard place - they didn't know what to do. They were being pushed by more radical elements to attack the US - so they finally threw their hands up and said in effect "OK. YOU do it." Then - when the more radical elements came into power they were faced with the decision - become a colony or be destroyed - and they found that they didn't know what to do either. They in turn were being pushed by even more radical elements to attack the Americans so eventually they threw up their hands and said "OK. YOU do it." This went on until they reached Tojo - and he did it. Then - one of the things you see after they had knowingly opted for destruction over colonization - was they started to bull shit themselves that there was a way for them to avoid it. The basic idea - which is what the North Vietnamese and Taliban did to defeat the United States - was to just bleed them and outlast them. Eventually they figured these soft, weak Americans would just quit. They were fighting the wrong generation though. They were fighting a generation that didn't piss around - but ended up fire bombing their cities and then dropping Atomic Bombs on their heads. If we had fought the Vietnamese Communists and the Taliban anything like we had fought the Japanese - we would have won. (IIRC) ... .
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@Warspite1 You are right about everything you said - just wrong in your conclusion. Fighting an insurgency is a low key war. All you have to do to win - is to not quit. All we had to do to win in Vietnam and Afghanistan - was to not quit. We were winning those wars right up until we quit. So winning can simply mean that you stay there until you have accomplished your objectives - such as a stable, safe national government for the side you are on. We had promised the South Vietnamese and the Afghan National Government - that we would protect them. Then - we were not militarily driven from those conflicts - we simply quit and went home. What we did was despicable. I am ashamed to be an American. As a child I was proud of my country but in my life time we have abandoned two groups of people we had promised to protect. I'm proud of my personal military service, though my contribution to the Vietnam war consisted of nothing more than being a sentry in California and I am proud of our Armed Forces because they did what their Civilian Commanders ordered them to do. But my contention - that if we had been a stronger nation whose children had understood what life was really like from growing up in poverty - like my parents did - to being the spoiled brats that my generation was - that then we would have stayed and we would have won. So - yes - everything you said was correct - except the conclusion you drew from it. We have been in Germany since WWII and we have been in Korea since the Korean War. Our presence in Germany kept the Warsaw Pact from invading it. Our presence in South Korea had kept the North from invading it. We should still be in Vietnam and we should still be in Afghanistan. Millions of people died in Southeast Asia when we abandoned them. Now - we have left the little girls in Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the type of people who would put a bullet in a little girls head because she wanted to go to school. These were not wars we couldn't sustain. These were wars we quit. Oh ... and whatever Biden might or might not have been able to do about it - it was Donald Trump who signed a separate peace with the Taliban. Oh ... and to the consequences of quitting ... We paid for quitting in Vietnam in Africa, Asia and Latin America right up until the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait because he figured we wouldn't do anything about it - just as Hitler had figured after the Rhineland, Anschluss of Austria and Czechoslovakia - the British and French wouldn't do anything if he went into Poland. This is what happens when you let Dictators think you won't do anything. Same thing with Britain and the Falklands. Vladimir Putin is a dictator now. He has troops massed on the border - right now - with the Ukraine. China is run by the Communists. Right now - they are harassing Taiwan with continual intrusions into their air space. What's going to happen if Putin and the Chinese get the idea that "we won't do anything" if they invade the Ukraine and Taiwan? Why shouldn't they think we won't do anything after we just quit in Afghanistan? The next time someone mentions 9/11 to you - remember - that the Terrorists Won - because we quit. .
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@Warspite1 Yeah ... now here - you have responded exactly the way I thought you would - because - the arguments are not new. And - the very fact that someone such as yourself would repeat them - is just one more indicator of why we lost. We lost - because of people like you. I'll correct a few of your mistakes. I said: "Fighting an insurgency is a low key war" The insurgency part of the Vietnam was was low key compared to the rest of it. Insurgents - don't have artillery. The part that wasn't low key was the part played by the PAVN (North Vietnamese Army). The South Vietnamese Army was not defeated by Insurgents. They were defeated because the Soviet Union continued to supply them when our Congress cut the funding for the south. What do you say to the mothers of the Vietnamese boys who died because we quit? What do you say to the children of parents that were sent to re-education camps? What do you say to the 2/3rds of Cambodia's population that were NOT killed by Pol Pot? What do you say to the little girls in Afghanistan who only want to go to school? Tell me. What do you say to those people? Do you tell them that they were not worth our fair haired boys dying for? That is your argument after all. That these people were not worth us spending our money or our lives to protect them. It's OK for us to have 50,000 people killed on our highways every single year of the Vietnam War - but it wasn't worth 58,000 of us dying in the whole war to protect them. How many mass demonstrations have their been to denounce the carnage on our Highways? Cutting the speed limit to 55 saved 5,000 lives a year - but - what happened to that? Fortunately, cars are safer now - so that we only have 45-50 thousand people die on our Highways EVERY SINGLE YEAR. What do you say to the relatives of those people? You don't have to say anything because they just accept it as a normal part of life. It's OK for us to spend a fortune on drugs - and enrich the most terrible people in the world - but it wasn't OK for us to spend the money to protect the Vietnamese from those that would enslave them to an 19th Century Utopian bunch of horse shit - used by the Communists to take power - and stay in power. The money we are spending on illegal drugs sure seems to be sustainable. Did my parents generation do things like that? No but their parents in the Roaring Twenties did - with Alcohol. Ha! Ha! For the current events stuff you're just completely full of shit. We hardly had anyone in Afghanistan by the time we quit so the idea that having those troops available else where really made me laugh. As did the idea that we might use them for other insurgencies. No. That's not how that works. You don't quit one war just so you can go join another one. Come on. You can't be that stupid. The US has never been ambiguous about Taiwan - and in the past - every time there was any question about it - we sent a carrier task force to steam though the Straits of Taiwan to make the message clear. And - we have sent ships sailing right through the National Waters China Claimed to have around those islands they built in the South China Sea. Those are things we DID do in the past ... what will we do in the future ... seeing as how we abandoned Afghanistan? As to Biden's other things he might just do - what a laugh. Sanctions have NEVER stopped ANYONE from doing ANYTHING. You meet force with force - that is the ONLY thing that works. As to explaining staying in Afghanistan to "Joe Public" - how stupid can you be? Were there college kids demonstrating in the streets over Afghanistan when we quit? No. Was Afghanistan even a nightly news story? No. Afghanistan had long since retreated to the back burner of the US attention span. No one would have notice that we stayed - because they were used to us being there. There was no call for us to leave. Lastly ... it's people like you - and Obama - that just didn't get this in the first place. There was nothing going on there that hadn't been going on for a very long time, long before we got involved. We had been attacked by terrorists time and time again before 9/11 - it's just the that galvanized us to do something - because it pissed us off. This was NEVER just a one war thing. Go in - fight it - win it - go home. No. That's not what it was before 9/11 and it wasn't afterwards. And - the things we did were great. We precipitated the Arab Spring. All those millions of people who had just been used to being run by dictators stood up and did something about it. If they could have some semblance of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan - those people thought they could have it too. Of course - just as with our history - democracy - the acceptance that it's better to deal with rather than kill each other - doesn't come over night. Thus all Libya's problems were not solved once THEY got rid of Ghdafi. But - WE freed Iraq from Saddam Hussein ourselves - and - freed Afghanistan from a government run by the Taliban. The things we accomplished were great - and then Obama, Trump and Biden threw it all away. You know ... in the Year of the Rat Offensive (1972) by the North Vietnamese - it was the South Vietnamese Army that stood up to them with the aid of American Air Power. The Afghan National Army was able to stand up to the Taliban as long as they had us there in support - and - the Iraqi Army was able to deal with ISIS until Obama pulled our advisors out. We were winning. We were winning - and - we quit. Oh - and every war is different - the point about Korea and Germany - is that we went in and stayed there doing what needed to be done in each place. And - we still are. Here's the deal. You don't know anything like what you think you know. The basic facts of the matter are that we just don't give a shit if a bunch of people somewhere else in the world are enslaved or all die horrible deaths. We don't give a shit because - we are not good people - you know - just like everyone else? .
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@Warspite1 And ... one more thing ... would not your name sake be ashamed of you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warspite_(03) .
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@Warspite1 You forget the original context of these comments. This was talking about in comparison to WORLD WAR II to which EVERYTHING since then was a relatively low key conflict. Thus - the Entire Korean and Vietnam Wars were Low Key Conflicts compared to World War II. But - Insurgencies are even lower key conflicts. Why do I have to repeat myself? The insurgency part of the Vietnam was WAS a Low Key Conflict in any sense. Now - here - we are simply arguing about YOUR version of a Low Key Conflict and mine. I do not see all the requirements of defeating an Insurgency as being as extensive as you do. It depends on the level of the insurgency. If you compare the troop levels we had in Vietnam prior to 1965 they were much lower than they were later. Even our initial commitments were not that great. Initially, we had only advisors in Vietnam. I knew some of them. What happened was as we committed more troops to combat the Insurgency - the North Committed more troops. Once we were fighting PAVN units - this was NOT an Insurgency - this was an INVASION. The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley which took place in 1965 - was against PAVN troops. Not Vietcong. The Insurgency continued alongside the Invasion by PAVN troops until the Tet Offensive in 1968 - at which time - the Vietcong were destroyed. After Tet - the Vietcong no longer played a serious role in the War. The fighting at Khe Sanh and in Hue (I knew people at both) was against PAVN troops. All our subsequent serious fighting was against PAVN troops. Also - I referred to the North Vietnamese Year of the Rat Offensive in 1972 - NOT the Tet Offensive 4 years earlier. There was a vast difference between the number of US troops involved in these two Campaigns. By '72, the year I got out of the Marines - there were almost no US ground troops involved. There were a few advisors still who did participate but the US contribution was mostly in the Air. Operation Linebacker took place over the North and during the Christmas Bombing resulted in a "Peace Treaty" - which was Nixon's way to cut and run. If you read Kissinger's book The White House Years you will see that Nixon never even tried. So - having demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of the Vietnam War - it would be better if you chose to not comment on something you obviously know NOTHING about. Yes - I know - you THINK you know something - but you don't. THAT is the theme of this discussion. You THINK you know something here - but you don't. Don't worry - you still know more that most people ...that just isn't saying much. As to "peer conflicts" as opposed to "Insurgencies" - you are correct about what you said. But - I am still correct in the point I was making - in that we aren't going to be getting involved in ANY other conflicts after cutting and running in Afghanistan. That is NOT what happens when you cut and run. THAT is NOT what happened after we cut and ran from Vietnam. Having had to give you a lesson on the Vietnam War ... this is getting overly long so I'll simplify my response to the rest of what you said. You don't win a war by killing all the enemy - you win by making them quit. So ... You stay until you win. No matter how long it takes. No matter what the cost. You stay until you win. Why? Because if the enemy knows that at some point you will quit ... then that's all they have to do - is just hang in there until that happens. If they KNOW that you will never quit - then they will. If they think that you have some stupid idea that a war should only last so long or cost so much in blood and treasure - you've already lost. THAT was the Japanese Plan for WWII - they said so. THAT was also the Plan for the North Vietnamese - they said so. THAT was also the Plan for the Taliban - they said so. The Japanese were fighting my parents generation - MY ORIGINAL POINT - while the Vietnamese were fighting my generation and the Taliban my parents great grand children. THAT is why we defeated the Japanese - and lost to the North Vietnamese and the Taliban. Because we stupidly thought that a war should only go on for so long or cost so much - and then it was time to quit. THEY FUCKING KNEW WE THOUGHT THAT. THAT IS WHY WE FUCKING LOST YOU STUPID SHIT YOU are just as stupid as Obama, Trump and Biden because you idiots think there are limits to how much you should do. THAT type of thinking is why we lost. A Historical example would be Rome and Carthage where they fought three wars. The Carthaginians were businessmen who thought that only so much blood and treasure should be invested in a war - and one of the reasons they primarily used mercenaries - was so they could all be laid off when the war was over. They were unprepared for the Romans. Time and time and time again Hannibal defeated the Romans but - the Romans never quit. "Carthago delenda est" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" That was the Roman way of thinking. Think like the Romans - and you (can) win. Think like the Carthaginians - and you lose. People like YOU - ARE the reason we lost. You think you're wise and intelligent and reasonable ... which is a recipe for defeat. Wars are not about being reasonable. Wars are about winning. If you don't see that - you're a fool (just like Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Trump and Biden).. .
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