Word: vietnamization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ABLE TO LEAP logical abysses with a single bound, American leaders have looked at the crisis in Iran and cheerfully decided that it marks a watershed in American foreign policy, an end to the "post-Vietnam era." America's existential agony after Vietnam is over, congressmen and State Department experts contend, and henceforth the American public will be more willing to accept military intervention in Third World nations without questioning the need. The arrogance of a mob of Iranian students in Tehran, in other words, has unwittingly written out a carte blanche for the arrogance of American power abroad...
...theory circulating in Washington goes like this: after the disaster in Vietnam, the U.S. grew so timid about flexing its muscles in the Third World that it lost the will and ability to defend "legitimate interests" there. As a result, when the Tehran mob broke traditional standards of international law and took the embassy occupants hostage, America felt powerless to respond. To avoid such embarassing nuisances in the future, the Pentagon's friends in Congress argue, the U.S. must develop a "quick-strike force" able to dump a motorized division anywhere in the Third World within 60 days. Congress approved...
Young said Carter could help the Cambodians by organizing an international peacekeeping force or by imposing economic sanctions against the Soviet Union to pressure Vietnam indirectly...
Nguyen Ngoc Huy, research associate on Southeast Asian affairs at the Law School, also suggested that Carter pressure Vietnam not to use starvation as a weapon in its war against Cambodian rebels...
When one looks into the eyes of those who have lived through Dachau and Auschwitz, the Gulag and the Cambodian holocaust, Vietnam in the 1960's and Vietnam in the late 1970's, the terror in Kampala and the tanks in Prague, they bear witness to the same human reality. The barbed wire in South Africa, Brazil Russia and Chile, Berlin and China is the shadow of the barbed wire that is stretched through our minds. The seed of that darkness is everywhere, and our hope lies in the fragile unfolding of our knowledge of the common roots of human...