So it's still ramping up. There are threats flying around everywhere. Luckily our government and mass media have been too busy with gay marriage and political conventions to trouble us with any of this truly frightening and some would say 'important' stuff.
Eh, things get a little crazier all the time. Whether our intentions of peace and democracy be true or not, so far we seem to be failing... miserably. I often find that history has already taught us all we need to know. It's a shame that most of us find history so boring or we might know that there was a republican president way back when, who was born in Texas (not New Haven, Connecticut). Oh... and he was also a soldier, a fairly decorated one, you may have heard of him... Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Well, he found himself in several potentially catastrophic situations during the 'Cold War' -- Quemoy and Matsu in 1955, Formosa in 1958, Berlin in 1959. He resolved them all without losing "a soldier or a foot of ground." In other words, diplomatically. In the case of Formosa he even obtained permission to go to war with China from Congress, so he sent his ambassador, John Foster Dulles, to Europe to gain support for a war; but Churchill refused, and so did NATO. Pentagon officials assured Eisenhower that we could destroy China’s military capability within three weeks even if we went it alone. Eisenhower instead gathered his top advisors and told them to find a diplomatic solution. They did, and there was peace.
That all may seem at least a little bit strange today. "What was in Ike's mind?" you may wonder. Well here are some of his words...
“A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower in a press conference, 1954
:: Damien 7/26/2004 [+] ::
