IRAQ, VIETNAM AND THE 60S

I have said next to nothing on the Iraq issue so far because the many conservative US bloggers do it so well but I notice that the Rottweiler has had a go at a Leftist critic who claims that President Bush should know from Vietnam that Iraq will just be a disaster for the US if it goes in.

As an oldie who actually volunteered for service in Vietnam in the 60s (but missed out on getting a slot owing to the many others in the Australian Army who wanted to go), I get a bit peeved about the nonsense that is spoken about Vietnam. The event that broke the will of President Johnson to win in Vietnam was the �Tet� offensive by combined North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. But that event was in fact a huge military victory for the US. Even when caught by surprise, the US and Australian forces massacred their attackers with only light casualties of their own by comparison. What lost the war was the peacenik element in the US who made virtually ANY US casualties unacceptable. So the US threw in the towel after that and moved out. The US military effort was defeated not by Left-wing Vietnamese but by Left-wing Americans -- and so the South Vietnamese were left to the tender mercies of the Communists. So Vietnam is NO reason to think that an attack on Iraq will be unsuccessful in its aims.

And why was there such a big antiwar movement on the home front in the Vietnam era? Because of conscription. Both the USA and Australia had military conscription in those days. And all those 60s college and university students did not want to get shot at so joined up with the extreme Left to protect their own skin. As soon as both Australia and the USA abolished conscription, attendance at radical rallies and demonstrations dropped to a fraction of what it had been. The only demonstrators that remained were the usual �rent-a-crowd� exhibitionists who demonstrate about anything and everything in the hope that it might get their picture in the paper. And putting up with those loons is just one of the everyday prices of democracy.

Interestingly, what US armed intervention did not achieve, US culture did. The Vietnamese Communists may have resisted US bombs etc but they could not resist Coca Cola. And the �Doi moi� reforms long ago put the whole of Vietnam onto the capitalist path. So America did win in the end. It will win in Iraq too.

**************

FOX-HUNTING

Because so many of his policies are conservative, British Prime Minister Tony Blair occasionally has to throw a sop to the Leftists of his Labour party to keep them happy. Once such sop was to cut the voting rights of the herediary peers in the House of Lords and now he has banned hunting to hounds. The ostensible reason for the ban is that hunting is cruel but the real reason is of course that fox-hunting is usually seen in Britain (rather erroneously) as an upper-class sport -- and hating the �Toffs� is a great British Labour Party tradition.

Australian anthropologist, Ron Brunton wrote an excellent summary of the issue recently and endorsed the words of the Prince of Wales to the effect that if fox-hunting had been beloved of blacks and gays it would have been warmly approved of instead of being banned.

What neither the Prince nor Brunton have noted is that this is no theory. It is literally true in Australia. In Australia, blacks are even allowed to hunt animals from PROTECTED species if that is part of their �traditional� customs! The hypocrisy that Leftist hatreds engender really is breathtaking sometimes: Black cruelty is good; White cruelty is bad. Shades of Orwell!

************

Comments? Email me:
Email: jonjayray@hotmail.com.