History buffs help me out!
I have not completed my readings on the topic, so please do not jump all over me if I have some facts incorrect, but as I was reading something really stood out to me that kind of bothered me.
First of all, most of us are familiar with the reasons/"reasons" that Bush went to Iraq. I want to compare this war with the Vietnam war that lasted from 1959 - 1975.
From wikipedia:
Quote:
John F. Kennedy's Escalation of the War, 1960–1963
Main article: Strategic Hamlet Program
When John F. Kennedy won the 1960 U.S. presidential election, one major issue Kennedy raised was whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. As Kennedy took over, despite warnings from Eisenhower about Laos and Vietnam, Europe and Latin America "loomed larger than Asia on his sights."[44] In his inaugural address, Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."[45]
In June 1961, John F. Kennedy bitterly disagreed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when they met in Vienna over key U.S.-Soviet issues. Cold war strategists concluded Southeast Asia would be one of the testing grounds where Soviet forces would test the USA's containment policy—begun during the Truman Administration and solidified by the stalemate resulting from the Korean War.[citation needed]
Although Kennedy stressed long-range missile parity with the Soviets, he was also interested in using special forces for counterinsurgency warfare in Third World countries threatened by communist insurgencies. Although they were originally intended for use behind front lines after a conventional invasion of Europe, Kennedy believed that the guerrilla tactics employed by special forces such as the Green Berets would be effective in a "brush fire" war in Vietnam. He saw British success in using such forces in Malaya as a strategic template.[citation needed]
The Kennedy administration remained essentially committed to the Cold War foreign policy inherited from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1961, Kennedy faced a three-part crisis—the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and a negotiated settlement between the pro-Western government of Laos and the Pathet Lao communist movement[46] These made Kennedy believe that another failure on the part of the United States to gain control and stop communist expansion would fatally damage U.S. credibility with its allies and his own reputation. Kennedy determined to "draw a line in the sand" and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam, saying, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place," to James Reston of the New York Times immediately after meeting Khrushchev in Vienna.[47][48] Kennedy increased the number of U.S. military in Vietnam from 800 to 16,300.[citation needed]
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Now the key part of that piece for me is what I made bold.....I am still a bit raw on the whole war and the history of it, but one obvious question that came to my mind was the fact that there was no real pretense for the Americans to go into Vietnam other than to flex their muscles and continue their quest to be an imperialistic empire. Of course there were many American casualties and casualties on the other side as a result of this war.
So the question begs, how was the invasion really different than what the US is trying to do now. And my real question is how does Bush get raked over the coals, when Kennedy gets a free pass for his actions?
Was there a deeper reason for this war? What am I missing? Am I even reading into this thing right?
Just from the few readings I have completed, it seems that using the military for the purposes of imperialism and economic colonization is not just a Republican thing, its an American thing.