...so says my dad, on a regular basis. He also says "You shouldn't have done that" after someone has done something that obviously didn't work, or that did work, but was a bad idea. So, they are twins; one is sympathetic, an 'oh well, #### happens' position and the other is more cautionary, that actions do have consequences.

One recent example of this is the Democratic primary. Anyone sympathetic to the plight of the DNC as watch dog and defender of the national parties primacy over trifling things that should know their place in the pecking order, like states, would say "Hindsight is always 20/20". Others, including me, would say "You shouldn't oughta done that."

That example starts with the premise that, were it to be done over, some things might have been done differently. That premise is based on a presumption on my part that people have an inherent wish to made good decisions and, if only as an acknowledgement that we prefer good decisions, we sometimes wish we had this one or that one back to do over. Alas, such is life.

One distant, and much more important, example is our Civil War. Our South, in trying to fight gradual change and frankly, the principles of human justice on which this nation was founded, tried to hold on too tightly to long held traditions and societal structures at any cost. And paid it, losing all.
The point isn't judging whether we, as a people and as a nation, would have been better off with gradual change instead of civil war. I'm interested in grand decisions, decisive moments when choices are made that will, in hindsight, be pointed to and seen as a good decisions or bad.

The pursuit of these moments is the essence of history and human thought on it's grandest stage. Many people don't like 'what if's' and prefer to just live with hindsight being 20/20. Many people are very much interested in the "That was a mistake" mindset. At base, one argument says it really doesn't matter. The other says that those who do not know, and remember, history are condemned to repeat it. Both work together to allow us to not only deal with what is and also, more importantly and much more difficult in my view, what to do next.

This leads to my larger point; Iraq and Afghanistan and what to do next.

Let's look at some more recent history than 1865. Two examples; Korea and Vietnam. The pretexts for both wars, our involvement, is of a kind with Iraq; the idea of what we may prevent by taking action now. Korea and Vietnam was all about the spread of communism. In Korea, we fought to a stalemate and chose to just stay. It seems to have benefited South Korea greatly and not so much for the North. Are US national interests well served by still being there? Well, to examine that, we can look at Vietnam where we fought to a standstill and then quit. We lost, yet Vietnam has not become this grave global evil that we fought to prevent. Communism spread, but did it hurt us, our national interest? Obviously not. Vietnam is at peace. Korea(s) lives a shaky existence where the threat of war and a DMZ is a part of daily life, a matter of fact.

In the popular mind, Vietnam has negative connotations, yet, the result is better for us than the one in Korea. We have no more enemy in Vietnam, not that we ever really did. They aren't building the bomb. In North Korea, well, we've labeled them as evil and they are building WMD that, ostensibly pose some threat to us.

So, Iraq; It seems we are heading for another Korea; an unfinished war that will see us a watchdogs for decades to come. We have Iran in the role of North Korea; a not so great place where madmen tend to do well based on the threat posed by the United States. We have Saudi in the role of South Korea, doing well by economic standards, but with the threat of unrest hovering over their heads. And Iraq staring as the DMZ.

So, what do we do and why?

"Iraq staring as the DMZ"

are you kidding. Even the French are now saying we have won, Iraq is a country again. Where do you get your info?

"Iraq staring as the DMZ"

are you kidding. Even the French are now saying we have won, Iraq is a country again. Where do you get your info?

...good then! So, combat is over now, we can bring the majority of combat troops home and we can, finally, focus on rebuilding.

Thank you. That was easy.

I should have said "Thoughtful responses only." Sorry to waste your time.

...so says my dad, on a regular basis. He also says "You shouldn't have done that" after someone has done something that obviously didn't work, or that did work, but was a bad idea. So, they are twins; one is sympathetic, an 'oh well, #### happens' position and the other is more cautionary, that actions do have consequences.

One recent example of this is the Democratic primary. Anyone sympathetic to the plight of the DNC as watch dog and defender of the national parties primacy over trifling things that should know their place in the pecking order, like states, would say "Hindsight is always 20/20". Others, including me, would say "You shouldn't oughta done that."

That example starts with the premise that, were it to be done over, some things might have been done differently. That premise is based on a presumption on my part that people have an inherent wish to made good decisions and, if only as an acknowledgement that we prefer good decisions, we sometimes wish we had this one or that one back to do over. Alas, such is life.

One distant, and much more important, example is our Civil War. Our South, in trying to fight gradual change and frankly, the principles of human justice on which this nation was founded, tried to hold on too tightly to long held traditions and societal structures at any cost. And paid it, losing all.
The point isn't judging whether we, as a people and as a nation, would have been better off with gradual change instead of civil war. I'm interested in grand decisions, decisive moments when choices are made that will, in hindsight, be pointed to and seen as a good decisions or bad.

The pursuit of these moments is the essence of history and human thought on it's grandest stage. Many people don't like 'what if's' and prefer to just live with hindsight being 20/20. Many people are very much interested in the "That was a mistake" mindset. At base, one argument says it really doesn't matter. The other says that those who do not know, and remember, history are condemned to repeat it. Both work together to allow us to not only deal with what is and also, more importantly and much more difficult in my view, what to do next.

This leads to my larger point; Iraq and Afghanistan and what to do next.

Let's look at some more recent history than 1865. Two examples; Korea and Vietnam. The pretexts for both wars, our involvement, is of a kind with Iraq; the idea of what we may prevent by taking action now. Korea and Vietnam was all about the spread of communism. In Korea, we fought to a stalemate and chose to just stay. It seems to have benefited South Korea greatly and not so much for the North. Are US national interests well served by still being there? Well, to examine that, we can look at Vietnam where we fought to a standstill and then quit. We lost, yet Vietnam has not become this grave global evil that we fought to prevent. Communism spread, but did it hurt us, our national interest? Obviously not. Vietnam is at peace. Korea(s) lives a shaky existence where the threat of war and a DMZ is a part of daily life, a matter of fact.

In the popular mind, Vietnam has negative connotations, yet, the result is better for us than the one in Korea. We have no more enemy in Vietnam, not that we ever really did. They aren't building the bomb. In North Korea, well, we've labeled them as evil and they are building WMD that, ostensibly pose some threat to us.

So, Iraq; It seems we are heading for another Korea; an unfinished war that will see us a watchdogs for decades to come. We have Iran in the role of North Korea; a not so great place where madmen tend to do well based on the threat posed by the United States. We have Saudi in the role of South Korea, doing well by economic standards, but with the threat of unrest hovering over their heads. And Iraq staring as the DMZ.

So, what do we do and why?

We're already doing it.

"In North Korea, well, we've labeled them as evil and they are building WMD that, ostensibly pose some threat to us. "

Look all we ask is you get your FACTS correct. We labeled them evil, AFTER they spent years making a bomb under the noses of the Clintons, who...gasp...talked to them unilateraly to disarm, and they did not.

Now how did that turn out?

Well there are probably thousands of South Koreans who are alive today who would have been killed by the Communists in North Korea like the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge who were killed when we left Viet nam.

Are you saying we should have left those people for the Commies to kill, and we should leave Iraq to the mercies of Islamic screwballs who get pleasure in torture and pain.
That we should abandon the Middle east?

Yeah it may be good business and then again it might not. What if Iran decides to take control of the rest of the Middle east, What if Iran wishes to take Kuwait and in turn the Saudi's? What if we hadnt gone in to Iraq and Saddam had gotten strong and attacked his neighbors again. When you speak of what ifs its an open book. What if we had elected John Kerry and he went to the leaders of Islam and apologised to the Islamics for putting those WTC buildings in the way of his amateur pilots.

I think that one must first realize that hindsight is 20/20, but offers a very limited line-of-sight. You get to see what happened as a result of the actions taken, but you can't compare that to what would have happened if the action had not been taken. It's easy to use hindsight to compare what was intended by the action to what actually resulted, but there's never a placebo storyline to show what would have happened if no action were taken.

I disagree about Vietnam. The Soviets were deadset on expanding their power, and first tried to do so in Europe. They tried to take Greece and lost. This is one of the most telling, and overlooked, conflicts of the Cold War. Once the Soviets learned that taking any country in Europe was never going to be easy, they shifted their focus to Southeast Asia. They tried a proxy war through the Chinese to take Korea, and got fought to a standstill. So they moved to Vietnam. They eventually won in Vietnam, but at what cost? The Soviets expended billions of rubles in vital hard currency to take Vietnam, and what did they get? A lot of jungle. Few natural resources, no industrial base, and a lot of poor, uneducated, people. All that money for no little or no benefit and little in the way of strategic gain. That war was a loss for the United States, but like with Greece, it forced the Soviets to rethink their strategy. In this case they shifted focus to Central America, and Reagan fought them to a standstill there.

The results of this was the Soviets had lost trillions of rubles getting North Korea, Vietnam, and trying to take Central America. Unlike capotalist countries that can easily raise capital through foreign investment, the Soviet Union was a closed country and could not. They were going broke, and had only one desperation hail Mary left, sieze the Middle Eastern oil fields. There was no way they could hold onto the Middle East from the Soviet Union. They needed a "base" country closer to the region, and Afghanistan fit the bill. When their hail Mary didn't work, they were done.

So, one can use hindsight to look at the Vietnam war and say "we lost, so we should have never gone there!" But what would have happened if we had allowed the Soviets and Chinese to just take the country without a fight? We know for certain they wouldn't have stopped there. Would Australia be under Soviet control now? How about Japan, India, or all of the Middle East? If the Soviets had taken India, they don't have to ever go into Afghanistan. If one is to use hindsight correctly, it can't be to only look at a narrow outcome like "we lost in Vietnam". It should be used to see that we lost in Vietnam, but we forced the Soviets to rethink their strategy and change their actions, which ultimately led to their defeat.

As for Iraq and Afghanistan, I think they need to be looked at in the same context. We may not have won a clean victory in either country, but we do know that our invasions forced al Qaeda to change their priorities and shift their resources to these areas to fight us. We have 5,000 or so dead troops now, but how many thousands of civilians would be dead now if al Qaeda had spent the last five years focused on doing 9/11 one better instead of trying to defeat us in their own backyard? I keep hearing some folks saying there were no WMDs, but Syria didn't just pull that nuclear program out of thin air. That nuc facility had to be pretty far along for the Israelis to make the move to take it out, and there's no way to get that far along without someone noticing it... unless ther received a pretty intact and advanced system from Iraq, which was exactly what some key members of the Iraqi military said happend to their program. So, what would have happened if Hussein had gotten his nuclear weapons program completed? What would have happened if al Qaeda and the Talliban in Afghanistan had been free to plot and plan for the last five years, instead of having to worry about US and Allied infantry and bombs every minute?

I think that now is too soon for anyone to properly evaluate whether Iraq or Afghanistan were the right thing to do. Most people still get Vietnam wrong, and that was over 30 years ago.

Well there are probably thousands of South Koreans who are alive today who would have been killed by the Communists in North Korea like the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge who were killed when we left Viet nam.

Are you saying we should have left those people for the Commies to kill, and we should leave Iraq to the mercies of Islamic screwballs who get pleasure in torture and pain.
That we should abandon the Middle east?

Yeah it may be good business and then again it might not. What if Iran decides to take control of the rest of the Middle east, What if Iran wishes to take Kuwait and in turn the Saudi's? What if we hadnt gone in to Iraq and Saddam had gotten strong and attacked his neighbors again. When you speak of what ifs its an open book. What if we had elected John Kerry and he went to the leaders of Islam and apologised to the Islamics for putting those WTC buildings in the way of his amateur pilots.

I smell Ron Paul in Larry's post.

like the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge who were killed when we left Viet nam.

...do you know who the Khmer Rouge are? Do you have the remotest clue who they are?

I smell Ron Paul in Larry's post.

...not going to comment on what I smell in yours.

BRU
you REALLY need to brush up on your history of southeast asia.

Where do you find disagreement?