Mission of EU on Road to Failure | 73 comments (73 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Lesson of a Tiny Pacific Atoll Named Tarawa (none / 0)

Excellent stuff and a lesson of history that applies today with ill-fated Joe Biden and his proxy Ukrainian War to teach Russia a lesson. Demagoguery!

Privatization, Human Sacrifice And The Architects Of War by BobHiggins Mon Mar 12th, 2007 |
Appeasing The Gods Of The Shareholders
There was a time when, as a matter of policy, America went to war only as a response to an attack by an aggressor. In 1962 John Kennedy had every reason to make war with Cuba and Russia when Kruschev talked Fidel into parking several dozen Soviet nuclear missiles ten minutes from Washington and 90 miles from spring break.
Most of the Joint Chiefs, especially Curtis Lemay,(General Bat Guano?) along with a sizable faction of Kennedy's closest advisers urged the President to invade. Lemay wanted to send his B52s, (presumably not to drop leaflets) while others preferred a massive land invasion, perhaps to restore the Cosa Nostra to control of Cuban Casinos, the way God intended.
There is an apocryphal story told that Marine Commandant David Shoup (under whom I served at the time) presented the assemblage of top level civilian and military advisers with an easel containing a map of Cuba, over which he had placed an acetate overlay of a tiny Pacific atoll named Tarawa. Tarawa, which the Marines had invaded early in WW2 was shown graphically as a small speck against the background of Castro's Caribbean worker's paradise.
....
It worked well, victories were had, foes were vanquished, medals were awarded to the mothers of the dead, the prosthetics business flourished and everyone was happy.
Then came Vietnam.
No one attacked us in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin was as phony as Saddam's WMDs
We became embroiled in a war with another sovereign nation in order to prevent the spread of an ideology with which we disagreed, in a region in which we saw resources and markets that we wished to exploit and to beat our major competitors to the loot that we perceived was laying in wait off the coast and beneath the earth of Indochina. Interestingly the cast of characters was similar to today's tragic frolic in Iraq, Humble Oil (now Exxon) was there, Brown and Root (before Kellogg) was there, General Dynamics, General Electric, Bell, Dow Chemical, all the big players came to the game.

Who Will Stop World War III? | by goinsouth on May 11th, 2006 |