Posted on 12/08/2006 7:41:55 AM PST by Baynative
In at least one critically important way Iraq is not Vietnam. No Viet Cong or North Vietnamese leader declared war on the United States. No one asserted that that war was one step in a global effort to destroy the United States and drive it from the face of the Earth. Our defeat did not inspire and strengthen a worldwide movement to attack the U.S. And, Vietnam did not provide a base of operation and a stream of income to fanatics seeking weapons for our destruction.
And make no mistake, if we fail in Iraq, if we leave there defeated, this struggle will not end. Don’t take my word for it. Simply take the statements of the terrorist leaders at face value:
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
The Democrats will soon assume the reins of power on both sides of the United States Capitol. Consequently, they will be held accountable for this decision along with the President. This monumental decision will be made on their watch and so will the consequences. It would be a serious mistake to interpret the election of 2006 as an expression by the voters that they want out of Iraq -- regardless of the consequences. Voters were expressing their disapproval of the current deteriorating and demoralizing mishandling of the war.~snip~
If congressional Democrats misread the election, all Americans will pay a serious price in terms of national security."
"Simply take the statements of the terrorist leaders at face value"
There is a whole huge segment of society and the world that is in total denial of the raw evil that exists in this enemy. Perhaps it is simply too awful for them to comprehend that something like that exists.
Our war objectives were mainly won. We got rid of any weapons of mass destruction program they might of had. We did a regime change. The only thing we haven't won is putting a stable democracy in place. That is more their loss than ours.
..."If congressional Democrats misread the election, all Americans will pay a serious price in terms of national security."
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We have long been familiar with the fact that the Dems read things the way they want them to read --- they tout, and shift their "reality" to make the election results a statement AGAINST BUSH....frankly they could care less about the nation's security, the threats against our borders and our soverignty, and least of all, recognizing the immediate, ongoing threat of Islamofascism.
"This monumental decision will be made on their watch and so will the consequences."
Wishful thinking. If anything bad happens the taint will never touch the Democrat party the MSM will make sure of that. Those old enough to remember will remember how President Johnson's ill-thought out incursion into southeast Asia became a terrible war after Nixon took office and is still often referred to as Nixon's War.
Most prominent among them is Nancy Pelosi.
We lost 3000 people on 9/11. Military casualties in the WOT continue to climb. Yet, it seems America has simply decided if we ignore this incovenience, it will eventually go away.
I'm absolutely stunned at the monumental stupidity displayed by American voters on Nov. 7th. The electorate thought they'd "send a message" to Republicans, eh? Well, our terrorist enemies will, doubtless, "send a message" to us after Jan. 1. They have boldly declared their intentions any number of times. How many will die this time?
I don't even recognize this country anymore. I know there are millions of Americans who like me, still support the fight and want victory. But we seem to be in the minority now. Has America, like the ancient Romans, become so utterly feckless that we don't see the barbarians at the gates? Our elected representatives haven't any courage to fight a war that clearly can, and may, destroy this nation. By their words, and soon by their actions, they will signal that we've lost stomach for the fight. Weakness will only encourage Al-qaeda, and our many other enemies, to press the fight ever harder. Predators don't attack the strong- they seek the weak and defenseless.
The blithering idiots in Congress will appear very much like prey to those who are sharpening their knives for jihad. They will act accordingly. And we will pay the price in blood. Will there even be a response?
Do not be surprised when the American people, unable to trust their elected officials, take you into their hands and administer an old fashioned version of vigilante justice. When that happens, some innocent mooselimbs will also be killed, too bad, but now is the time for you to clean up your own mess. If you don't, you will reap the whirlwind.
This analogy to Rome seems overused. However, I think that the parallels are astonishing. Their senators pontificated. They engaged in denial and attempted to buy off the trouble makers in order to get back to their orgies, wine and the gladiatorial games. We are doing the same.
The Democrats may see the enemy at the gates, but naively believe that the Islamic fascists can be negotiated with or appeased. Many liberals believe that if the US doesn't act like a bully and just lets these people sort things out for themselves there will be peace. Unfortunately the Islamic fascists see their goal as world domination not some negotiated peace.
Yes, yes...give the people more BREAD AND CIRCUSES.
Today, we call it football or TV game shows or...
Overused analogy aside, it is accurate. When Rome became more concerned with its hedonistic pleasures than its survival, it fell. Granted, it took a long time. Time is not a luxury we have.
The Democrats have basically promised America a "painless" way out of what has become a protracted struggle. Even though President Bush stated clearly in the beginning that this battle would be long and difficult, voters seem to have forgotten that. Our enemies have not forgotten. They are quite comfortable with it. It suits their purposes to draw the conflict out. They can bleed us in Iraq and prepare for further attacks with impunity in Iran and Syria and Gaza. They dream of the day they can bring the chaos an destruction they sow in Baghdad to Main Street USA.
The current crop of Democrats assuming leadership in Washington are secure in their arrogance and assured of their infallibilty. Just like the Roman senators of old, they are certain the ugliness of war can never touch them, personally. Who would dare assault them in their own country? Preposterous!
And when, not if, jihad comes to American soil, they will profess astonishment. I only hope they suffer first-hand the result of their willful stupidity.
Time will tell.
If a cut and runner is elected President next time.
We are on the certain path to a nuclear or biological nightmare on our doorsteps.
America seems to suffer "Popeye" syndrome.
Popeye is generally distracted by Olive Oyl and he is not the brightest sailor in the Navy. Bluto constantly makes a chump of Popeye, but once he has had enough he eats his spinach and you know the rest. Problem is, Bluto goes off after, heals up and lifts weights, and the whole cyle starts again.
More of the American people might have united in going all the way after Osama.
The WWII generation wouldn't have stopped at the Pakistan border.
Not if you view Iraq as our second front in the war with radical Islam...
As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it's historical course and outcome. That is painting the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left is portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. The South Vietnamese government's struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist's worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. The North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. The antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi's party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for "throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate" and for being "mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise." The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. The final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet's MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation's refusal to live up to it's treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. In that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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