Originally Posted by
uxb99
As for the war in Vietnam (and the French didn't exactly have a blameless occupation either what with heads on spikes and the like) wasn't the Gulf of Tonkin incident just an excuse for the Americans to put boots on the ground?
There were already thousands of Americans in Viet Nam, had been a slowly growing presence since around 1960. JFK's "bear any burden" was a change in policy from Ike's "not worth major military ops, don't go there, stick to advise and assist" policy. I've got an old friend who flew Marine H-34's (helicopters)(<== look, aviation content!) in Viet Nam before 1964. Before Ap Bac. Before Diem went bye bye. To give you an idea of scope and scale: there were over 16,000 US troops in South Viet Nam in 1963. What Gulf of Tonkin did was give LBJ the political leverage to increase that amount by an order of magnitude. The rest, as they say, is history.
Originally Posted by
WideScreen
I think, this is a very good analysis. Use all the Western located old-style Russian military equipment in Ukraine to exhaust and deplete the Russian army.
You should have stopped there, I think.
Then come in with a coalition of Western forces (not Nato) and roll-up the Russians in Ukraine. Potentially even take-over Moscow itself.
There is not the political will to do that in any of the Western capitals, not to mention you create your own problems, a la Iraq 2003 - 2010, if you try that. Dietary Suggestion: stop spiking your tea with gin.
Roll up Belarus and bring a democracy there, the people want it (in contrast to all the other Western invasions in ME/NA).
Once again, invading Belarus? No political will in Europe nor in NATO to do that. Further dietary advice: also stop spiking your tea with vodka, I saw what you did there after you put the gin bottle away!
Somewhere during that process, Putin will likely die of his cancer. Which might be expedited, when the narcotics and Oxygen tubes are swapped, just before his upcoming surgery.
His health may fail, but any assassination attempt need not be sponsored in the West. He has his own problems within, leave it to them.
Putin did pull that much power to himself, there will be nobody "in-charge", when Putin dies (see the plans to have the FSB head temporary replace Putin during his surgery, instead of the legal required prime minister). As such, after Putin, nobody will be prepared to push the Nukes button (apart from the manual background process involved to extend the button push into a missile launch also refusing to act).
On this aspect, how much power he has centralized in his own person (the modern day Tsar Vladimir, you might say) seems to be true, which will make for chaos once he's ousted or offed, and we saw how that played out as USSR fell apart. (heck, when Saddam was removed, the civil war in Iraq started and it went on for some years despite coalition efforts to arrest it).
That chaos, when Vlad goes away, might happen again or a leader who can prevent that may arise. Sometimes, 'cometh the hour cometh the man' takes some surprising forms. No idea who that might be, but I do not doubt that there are some candidates lurking.
For admikar: dietary advice is to consider not spiking the borscht with vodka.
For mahogany bob: even though iced tea and some whiskies are similar in color, the taste should be an indicator of which is which. Dietary tip here is that drinking a tall glass (a pint or so) of iced tea is fine, drinking that same pint of whiskey not as fine.