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I am going to comment on David Horowitz's post because it seems to me to embody a philosophy that now dominates American foreign olicy but which I continue to find most dubious. Underlying his argument, I think, is the idea that the United States is responsible for everything that happens in the world--that since, as he puts it, Communist victory and a bloodbath-- bad things--would follow our withdrawal, those who favored withdrawal must not have cared about those consequences, or welcomed them, while any one who recognized those consequences as bad things likely to happen should have opposed withdrawal. In the same way, we now hear again and that because Saddam Hussein was evil the United States right to overthrow him, end of story. That is hardly the only way to look at the matter, however. Faced with a possible bad alternative, we have to ask whether actions that the United States can take will make things better or worse. The American attempt to save South Vietnam killed 59,000 Americans, an estimated one million Vietnamese civilian casualties, and some hundreds of thousands of enemy troops (I am still very doubtful about the figures bandied about for enemy casualties, but they were undoubtedly in that range if not higher.) That is actually far more Vietnamese--_far_ more--than died as a direct result of the Communist takeover--which the United States didn't prevent anyway. Even if one throws in the Khmer Rouge, who I don't think would have ever come close to power in Cambodia had the US not fought the war in Vietanm, the majority of deaths in Indochina during this period resulted from the US's useless decision to intervene. And good intentions, in my opinion, do not excuse the US. David Kaiser
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