Posted on 12/26/2005 2:35:11 AM PST by neverdem
I have been writing a little book on Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who, after a mere nine-month visit in 1831, wrote "Democracy in America," which remains the best book written about the U.S. Tocqueville is famous for his powers of prophesy: One of his best calls was predicting the future struggle for world hegemony between the U.S. and Russia. But his power for prophesy dims beside his flair for generalization. Although he could scarcely have known this, much of the pleasure provided by Tocqueville is in testing his bolder generalizations 175 years after he formulated them. His ratio of success in this line turns out to be very high.
Applying his generalizations to contemporary cases is provocative. Take our war in Iraq. Does he have anything to contribute to the discussion? In his chapters on the military and war and peace among democracies, Tocqueville, with that characteristic combination of loftiness and directness, writes: "There are two things that will always be difficult for a democratic people to do: to start a war and to finish it." Now there, as they used to say in English departments, is a sentence that resonates.
First, modern history has shown it to be true. Think how late the U.S. was in entering World War I. Think, again, what a strong sales job FDR had in selling World War II, and of the difficulty Truman had in defending the decision to go into Korea. In Vietnam, the U.S. did not so much start the war as slip into it. JFK, it will be recalled, never asked Congress to declare war against the North Vietnamese but sent what was supposed to be a limited number of military advisers to help shore up the South. The number grew and grew under LBJ and--presto switcho!--we were at...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
"JFK, it will be recalled, never asked Congress to declare war against the North Vietnamese but sent what was supposed to be a limited number of military advisers to help shore up the South."
The fantasy revisionism about JFK continues.
JFK sent 14,000 ground troops to Vietnam, thus JFK started the Vietnam war.
Not Eisenhower, not LBJ, not Nixon, but JFK started the Vietnam War.
A statement consistent with his sending our troops to Vietnam.
Assuming JFK the President would have lived up to his words had he lived, and given the opposite actions during their terms by interim Presidents, it looks like Bush I & II, clearly Bush II, are really the heirs to the JFK legacy embodied in this statement.
Correct. But the State Department and the US Army had identified SE Asia as the next opportunity to fence in Communism. Bases in Japan, the PI and SK were the jumping off points.
Tockqueville summed it up when he remarked, "America is great because America is good -- if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great". Guess it depends on your definition of "good".
Nature has become so politically correct that I'm surprised that they published the paper about the obsserved effect of aerosols, let alone make the following article free on news@nature.com.
Aerosols cool more than expected - Researchers measure smog's effect on global warming. I wonder if the story will gain some political traction.
Well, I'd say the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong *Started* the war, but JFK got the US involved in it, which is not the same thing at all.
Thanks for the ping!
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