Just to start a fight, I would point out that communism stopped spreading after the Vietnam War.
Not quite - it was spread into Cambodia, at least partly by the Vietnam War (the US bombed the shit out of Cambodia, which destroyed the opposition to its spread, and abetted takeover by the crazed and desperate in several ways- including some direct aid in the form of weapons and money and drug trade).
And its replacement by fascism, also partly a result of the Vietnam War (what the US did to Vietnam was a lesson to strongman wannabes everywhere), was often a trade down.
we apparently didn't learn to let the Generals fight the war rather than the politicians, however.
We did. The faction that launched the Iraq War did not.
spoken like a true fanatic. thanks for the demonstration.
I'm neither party and I hate them all equally, but I'm not so stupid as to think that one party has better thieves and liars than the other.
Our two major US parties are just different sides of the same BS coin.
So we see where you get your projections of "hatred" from. And we see that you identify historical and informational accuracy with stupidity, and pride yourself in your independence from any such concerns.
Meanwhile, anyone who points to the obvious and even dramatic differences between a resurgence of fascism and ordinary bad government is a "fanatic".
Your case would be a bit stronger if you could identify my cause, of course. Fanatics are supposed to have a cause, right? Or are you just typing juvenile pejoratives again, without bothering about the trivialities of "meaning" and the like?
Why is Korea being lumped in there with Vietnam?
They were both failed attempts at nation building, military defeats (stalemate with North Korea in China's pocket was a Chinese win), and launched from a common ideological ground on the basis of lies (Korea's less flagrant, but that was before the rollback of the New Deal in the US got its feet under it).
Meanwhile China had to lie about the nature of their invasion because they had no rational justification for it, and they took 1 million casualties in vain just to end up with a stalemate in which the Soviet side lost a small amount of the territory they controlled at the beginning.
Among other concerns, the Chinese feared the establishment of an American client State on their border, and they succeeded in preventing that. They won, essentially - it cost a lot, but the US had military and industrial superiority and was not easy to stop. One could argue that their fear was irrational, but not easily.
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/art...chinas-intervention-in-the-korean-war-in-1950
There's nothing wrong with nation building as long as the bulk of it is done willingly by the people inhabiting said nation,
And not by the US at gunpoint, which was the thread reference.
That seems a non-issue - people building their own nations has not been a thread topic.
and the job of the US etc. is to keep incompetent thieving assholes like Schmelzer and his cousins from interfering.
The US Republican Party - an important part of the US - is among Schmelzer's "cousins". Or Schmelzer is among their's, if you prefer. He is getting almost the entirety of the content of his posts from their media feeds.
It's a bit strange to say that the job of the US is to prevent its own incompetent thieving asshole government from interfering with other people's nation building - it's true, in a sense, but a strange way to put it.
The immediate corollary is that it is the job of the US - apparently, the country itself, its people - to get the US government out of Afghanistan. I fully agree. I was among those traitors and (apparently) "fanatics" who went to the wire in opposition to the US Republican Party invading Afghanistan in the first place.
But it's a bit late to begin doing that, and the hole dug deeper by installing another Republican disaster of governance at the head of the US military is going to be decades in the escaping.
