Word: vietnamize
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...Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has written extensively on the corrosive effect on Israeli society of maintaining its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Citing the debilitating effect of Afghanistan on the Soviet Union and of Vietnam on the U.S., he argues that an occupation pits a sophisticated high-tech army not against an equivalent foe, but against lightly-armed insurgents hard to distinguish from the civilian population. "As Israel's own history clearly shows, fighting a stronger opponent will cause a society to unite," he writes, "but combating a weaker one will cause it to split...
...simply have been a symptom, however, of a war in which American forces were ranged not only against communist insurgents, but against a substantial proportion of the civilian population who supported them. My Lai was hardly the only instance of non-combatants dying by American hands in Vietnam. But back home, the U.S. public had - and still has - difficulty digesting what took place in the steamy jungles of South East Asia four decades ago. Interestingly, it is once again Hersh who has been way out in front of the media pack in breaking the Abu Ghraib torture revelations...
...Dien Bien Phu, in which Vietnamese guerrillas routed the French colonial army and took its surrender. Although Cold War considerations prompted the U.S. to get involved, in the end they proved no more adept than the French - or the Chinese hundreds of years earlier - had been in bending Vietnam to foreign will...
...that the war can't be won. That's not a conclusion that goes down well at home. Forget the lessons of history; this is America, exceptional, somehow immune. In the end, though every nation that has ever claimed stewardship over another's destiny (including the United States in Vietnam) has claimed the mantle of virtue, usually divinely ordained. The other side seldom saw it that...
...photographs of U.S. troops in Iraq made me weep, and for someone who lived through the Vietnam War era, that is saying a lot. These soldiers are the salt of this earth, but it is criminal for U.S. troops to try to "liberate" a society that obviously functions better under a murderous dictator. The Iraqis are merely waiting to see who comes out on top. They do not deserve to have U.S. soldiers fighting for them. The Iraqi men who were trained to protect and defend their people tuck tail and run. Not one American life is worth...