Doomed to repeat it
In the runup to Vietnam, anyone with more than a passing knowledge of communism and communist states was considered too Red to be trusted. Part of McCarthy's wondrous legacy, it was.
When it came time to make the important decisions, no one who knew much about Ho Chi Min was around to talk about it. And this led to any number of blunders, beginning with a thick-headed notion that communism was a monolith, a single Red wall soon to be crowding our borders -- unless we went in and did something about it. (In reality, Ho Chi Min was as much a nationalist as a communist, an opportunistic man using the tools at hand to form a country. And his bloody border wars with China -- and the heavily fortified border between Russia and China -- prove beyond a doubt that communism was no monolith)
Now, dig this quote from
Newseek's latest on Iraq:
The day before he was supposed to leave for the region, Garner got a call from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered him to cut 16 of the 20 State officials from his roster. It seems that the State Department people were deemed to be Arabist apologists, or squishy about the United Nations, or in some way politically incorrect to the right-wing ideologues at the White House or the neocons in the office of the Secretary of Defense. The vetting process “got so bad that even doctors sent to restore medical services had to be anti-abortion,” recalled one of Garner’s team.
Gives "Courage of your convictions" a whole new slant, don't it?
