Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Military History Visualized"
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It was a failure of doctrine, as you say. And political decisions. The doctrine flowed from the strategy, which flowed from the political decisions, which flowed from the political goals, which were based on faulty assumptions and, really, a lack of historical knowledge of the Vietnamese people.
Our first error was early in the Cold War, when we supported the French effort to re-impose colonial rule. (Yes, I’m aware of the major SNAFU at the end of WW2.) This was done under the guise of anti-communism, but it was just a cover for re-colonizing a fiercely independent people.
There was a sincere policy of opposing communism that the French used for its own national interest. The thinking behind anti-communist policies solidified around “the Domino Theory”, meaning that if Vietnam fell to communism, so would its neighbors, etc., until all of Asia was dominated by the Soviet Union and China. This was a faulty assumption, as was the idea that Vietnam’s nationalist movement was wholly communist in nature and obedient to Moscow and Beijing.
U.S. policy makers and politicians were ignorant of Vietnam’s thousand year history of fighting the Chinese and other invaders. They were unaware that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a communist second. They did not know that the original armed nationalists, the Viet Minh, was a coalition of political groups fighting for independence. (VM later became the NVA in the north and the VC in the south).
All of this ignorance led to U.S. politicians seeking a simple military solution to a complicated geo political problem that they didn’t fully understand. And that is the basic error. The war was unwinnable because the faulty goals were based on faulty assumptions. That is the cause of U.S. failure in SVN, not a socialist 5th column in the U.S.
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@baronknownot780 I love the work of Tolkien, disliked them Bakshi adaptation, I loved the Jackson LOTR movies, but was very meh on the Hobbit movies, which were sort of entertaining taken on their own but quite lame within the context of the entire mythos that Tolkien had created.
Rings of Power bored me nearly to death halfway through episode 3. That’s why I hate it. It took material I loved and made it boring. A lot of people will complain about the Galadriel character being unsympathetically singleminded, a murder hobo, or whatever. But Galadriel is just a symptom.
The real problem is the writing is crap, and the reason that the writing is crap is that the show runners don’t really know how to tell a story. They think they have a formula, but all they’ve managed to create (in me, at least) is boredom.
I could go on in great detail about their storytelling failures, but I won’t. My bottom line is I don’t want to waste my valuable time being bored if I can help it. Two and a half episodes is enough time to capture my imagination or involve me emotionally with the characters. The hobbit-ish people’s subplot almost got me to entertainment town, but couldn’t overcome the wearying crap of the rest of the show.
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Have you ever read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Not an easy read for most people, but if you can plow through military manuals, I don’t think it will give you any problems.
The title refers to the trajectory of the V2. “But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.”
The novel is a twisting narrative, absurd and at times surreal. Have a look!
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D MO Interesting point, but that wasn’t the strategic object. It was all about the canal, and not letting it fall into the hands of drug trafficker/drug addict. The Panama Canal has a huge strategic importance.
Now, I fully believe that Noriega was paid by the CIA for various things, but he became unreliable. A threat, really, to CIA shenanigans in Central and South America, if Noriega was threatening to expose what he knew. So when an ex-CIA director became president, it was time to clean up some messes that would have been very embarrassing to the U.S. government in general and the CIA specifically. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for this (including the fact that Noriega was making the threats publicly), so I’d count it as the second objective of the campaign. Still, #1 was protecting the canal.
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