> on 04/25/2001 15:01, radman at resist@best.com wrote:
[..]
> So, what went wrong? Nothing. Or, at least, nothing of crucial
> importance. It was the war itself that was wrong.
>
> Dr Gerard J. DeGroot
The analysis is fabulous - as far as it went, but it of course doesn't go
after all of the core problems in the grand failures of the right wing
revisionists, and their mythico-religious belief that had we only been
allowed to unleash the grand panzer armee and marched through China into
Moskva..... or that having dug the grand canal from the south china sea
inland through the uplands of Laos, should it go north at the mekong? or
continue west through burma? We all of course know that the Maginot Line
would have worked if the french had not stopped at the belgium border...
I have listened to these ongoing discussions about what went wrong
with the war in vietnam, and the glories of the political what everness,
and pause, and wonder - ok, so given this keen insight how then do we
address the 'exportability' and 'testability' of this 'wealth of knowledge'
to the various other conflicts that exist in the world at this time.
We could wonder about sierra leone, Zaire, chechnya, afghanistan, Ireland,
Peru, Columbia, just to name a few - since of course wondering about the
imposition of these well defined solutions to the middle east would get too
messy, especially given Haziz's comments about Hezbollah driving off
investors from Lebanon tweeking the nose of the Syrians in ways that would
complicate the simplistic delineation of who were the correct revolutionary
forces under discussion.....
So lets focus this back on the simpler side of the discussion - say what
exactly should the voters in the USofA do about the current 'national level
discussions' about 'funding priorities' for 'military weapon systems and
force deployments' be in light of the brilliance and marvels that are part
and parcel of trying to figure out what we really learned from the ten year
federally funded weapons and tactics development programme, south east asia.
Or could it just be that the need to find a 'political solution' in the
analysis is merely the salve that those who have never had to lead troops in
combat offer each other so that they need not sully their hands in dealing
with whether or not we as the American Tax Payers should be funding the F-22
and Advanced Joint Jet Fighter Project, when our current 'lessons learned'
and 'global positioning' presents us with the real need to restore the
production lines for My Uncle's Pet Fave - the A-1E - arrives with rockets,
and bombs, and machineguns, and a loiter time you would not believe.... It
was slow, it had the propellor blades the size of barn doors, and would earn
the nickname 'spad' when flying close air support on pilot rescue missions.
Could it be that it is as difficult for the 'winners' of the 'political
struggle' to resolve what they really learned from it all, and should pass
along as the 'real lessons learned' - while we are still enmeshed in Iraq,
and Bosnia - and yet no one is really too sure how to go about appropriately
getting enough people to levitate the Pentagon this time as the correct
method for speeding up the process of the inevitability of the
historical-material dialectical alignment of forces.... Why is this?
Why is it back to the vets to explain to the hippies that the clinton era
funding initiative for the war in columbia is not 'another vietnam' - since
there still is no active draft to bother the next generation of gingrich's
and rush limbaugh's, and dandy dan quayle and W to lead the group W bench,
or oblige the next generation of David Harris's to opt out of their
privileged positions, and do what honor demanded of them...
Why, amidst all of these grand academic understandings of the great lessons
that are learned, is there none of the 'scientific' analysis embedded in
these processes that would allow for any form of not merely 'predictive'
expectations based upon the established - but at least some call for the
clear moral imperative derived from the data.....
Or could it be that the problems remain far deeper, and less cleaner, and
less simpler to pontificate about, than we in our youth, full brimming with
the passion of our own brilliance, once held to be the moral certainty that
was then our guiding and unquestionable light.....
Could it be that there are unpleasant side effects we would prefer not to
delve into in all of this? Could it be that we would prefer the simpler
socially acceptable moments that we were trained to, the blithe mouthing
of pompous platitudes, as was the unfortunate moment for one of my
co-workers who attempted to be appropriately condescending, while sounding
'concerned' as I dealt with the fact that in my youth I would have been
better served NOT to have 'given a ration of shit to mort' when he would
as was his inclination, having survived Hamburger Hill, wake up in that
bent over way he did that said he had exceded the manufacture's recommended
limits for a mere calcium based internal structure..... Since each time I
find my back, or knee, or other less than 'young' component of me reminding
me that I should have made other choices in my youth; I suffer not merely
the unpleasantry that the current market favorite drug of choice should
cure with a single dosage, but the globalized rememberance of the time,
and the 'shit dished out' and that unpleasant awareness that I religiously
remind myself 'that to the best of my knowledge my team made it back....'
And I wonder? Should I be rude to this co-worker and explain why one should
use the upper cut with the knife, rather than the thurst, to avoid the
chances of breaking the blade on the opponents rib cage? Or hope that they
should never be inconvenienced to need to know the differences? Nor obliged
to worry about whether they should support the federally funded training of
those who will need to know why we did what we did?
Ah yes, the lessons learned from what went wrong......
Should we be rude to those who did not secure the empirical evidence for
themselves? Or would that take away from their learning experience? Or is
this really one of those complex 'intellectual property issues' that is best
left to the legal staff to ponder about whether or not we should 'open
source' all of this....
Ah Yes, the lessons almost learned....
ciao
drieux
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Apr 28 2001 - 22:00:45 EDT