Correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, but I thought there had been a split developing between the Sunnis and al Qaeda. At least as of a month ago, that's what the LA Times was reporting

Insurgents report a split with Al Qaeda

The premise of this thread seems a little odd considering that, as has been widely repeated (on NPR at least), the "surge" won't be at full strength until June. It's an incremental build up over time, no? (In the end, the whole idea of a "surge" is silly because al Qaeda and whomever else we might be fighting know that a surge is, by its nature, temporary.)

__________________
"Everything that guy just said is bull$h!t! Thank you."

-- Vincent LaGuardia Gambini

The premise of a "surge" seems a little odd, since I believe the presence of US forces is only emboldening the insurgents.

__________________
"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

Be that as it may, it still seems a bit premature to judge the efficacy of the surge before it has even been implemented.

__________________
"Everything that guy just said is bull$h!t! Thank you."

-- Vincent LaGuardia Gambini

__________________
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

I won't pretend to be an expert on Iraq. When one group allies with another, there are often "issues" that they try to submerge while fighting a common enemy. Sometimes, they are more successful than at other times. My guess is that the split described in the LA Times is more than the Sunnis/al Qaeda would like it to be, and less than the Bush administration hopes that it is.

More important, I think, is that the Maliki government has done none of the things necessary to create an accord between Sunnis and Shiites. There is, for instance, still no agreement on sharing oil revenues. There seems to be no political will to make the concessions necessary to avoid/end civil war. And, so, a civil war is what they will have.

Tannhauser, you speak of defeat as if it were a bad thing. Defeat can be a very good thing if you learn from it.

Germany, for instance, learned from its experience with Naziism that it must make a determined and continuing repudiation of anti-Semitism. It's since become a poster child on the subject. (Would a U.S. court, for instance, have awarded damages to the descendants of slaves -- as a German court recently awarded damages to the descendants of Holocaust victims whose property was confiscated?) Japan seems to still be in denial on some levels but, at least, still maintains its constitutional prohibition on the use of force outside of its own territory.

I had once hoped that, after Vietnam, the United States understood that determining other countries' fates was beyond its proper sphere. Then, Reagan made interventionism glamorous again. And so, we have Iraq. Maybe this time.

Obviously, I'm going to have a lot of problems with your parallels between Hitler's Germany/Hirohito's Japan and the United States.

However, I'm intrigued by what you say about the Vietnam War.
When we have a defense agreement with an ally, what do we teach the rest of the world about our word on a treaty (just as we had a treaty with Saddam Hussein to end the Gulf War in '91)?

Perhaps it’s a difference of perspectives, but don't you think we learned a terrible lesson when we turned our backs on South Vietnam and allowed the communists in Indo-China to massacre literally millions of innocents?

Although your profile lists you in Wayne, I'll assume you lived in S. Phi for some period of time and almost surely became friendly with some of your Vietnamese neighbors. This short story may jog a memory of your own:
Several years ago, when I was running for a political office, I had just finished making a campaign speech in front of a large Vietnamese social group. A woman who was about 60 came over to speak to me and relayed the story of how she came to America.
Her family had been in South Vietnam when Congress defunded our efforts there. Her husband, a major in the S.V.A.F. was taken to a "re-education center" (forced labor camp), their home was burned to the ground, and she and her six children, ages 8 years - 3mo. ended up taking a rickety old fishing boat to Malaysia. When they arrived, one of her children was washed overboard to his death in a storm and one had died of dehydration. They spent seven years in that refugee camp and her husband nine years in the "re-education camp" before the family was reunited in the U.S.
Even 20 years later, tears still rolled down her cheeks relating this story to me.

I don't want to create another 25 million, 2.5 million or even 250 thousand people to live through that misery. If we turn our back on those who have stood by our side bearing the brunt of the deaths and casualties, and leave them to the tender mercies of al Queda, it will show that we indeed, are incapable of learning from history, and not worthy of moral leadership in this world.

__________________
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

Wars produce refugees. It's too bad, but there it is. As a percentage of their respective populations, the number of Vietnamese who fled their country after 1975 is probably comparable to the number of Americans who fled the new United States at the end of the Revolution.*

*According to the United Empire Loyalists, about 70,000 Americans -- 3 percent of a population of which 20-30 percent supported the Crown -- left the United States. Apply that percentage to the 1976 population of Vietnam (about 50 million) and a comparable number of refugees would be 1.5 million.

If you don't want refugees, don't have wars.

In another thread, JoeDoex also made the claim of millions murdered in Vietnam after 1975, but couldn't produce any documentation other than the assertion of some obscure veterans group. I'll reserve judgement on that. But it's worth noting that many of the Loyalists who remained after our Revolution were legally disadvantaged for years. In Pennsylvania, Quakers (who had opposed the Revolution) couldn't vote for 10 years after the Declaration of Independence. There were also a few executions.

Your point about treaties doesn't impress me much. In my opinion, it's the job of those who make foreign policy to discriminate properly when making alliances. So, when the "best and brightest" of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations chose to ally the country with the neo-colonial Diem regime...well, they chose badly. And their successors continued to choose badly for 15+ years. Deciding (finally, belatedly) to stop wasn't the error. The error was the original alliance, compounded by years and years of repetition.

(I'm a Midwesterner. Never lived in any part of Philadelphia.)

Interesting arguments. I would think that the relevant population figure would that of the then South Vietnam, though, which was only 20 million.

Mark, these are some terrible comparisons you're drawing. We didn't have forced labor camps here for loyalists. We didn't as part of government policy burn people's houses to the ground. We didn't have a "Killing Fields" here. Nothing even close to that.
The people in Iraq lived for 30 years under one of the most brutal dictators in the second half of the 20th Century. After being beaten back in his 1991 invasion of Kuwait, he failed to hold to the terms of the cease fire and after 18 U.N. Resolutions, he still refused to hold to the terms. We went in and removed him.
The people of Iraq have an elected, representative government now. They have a Constitution which lists and protects their rights. They have a way to redress the government if their rights are infringed.
What we've done there is a good thing.
Hitler's Germany, Hirohito's Japan, and the various kleptocrats in South East Asia never extended anything positive to the people of their countries.
You can see that much, can't you?

__________________
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1