Posted on 08/23/2007 7:38:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The truth behind Bush's mangling of Cold War history. The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles (“Russians with dollars,” we were called.) On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon—the where some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken—I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North’s victory over the “U.S. imperialists.” In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi’s new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars). Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall—but the opposite way.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
If by "forget" you mean "lie about", then yes, he did. :)
And...Did you forget to search? (and format??)
It hasn’t been posted before, and yes, I did search. What else did you mean? I can’t post the whole article, it has to be excerpted...
It worked for everybody except the 2-3 million murdered for not being communist. The truth is like garlic to a vampire or a Cross to a Lib.
Pray for W and Our Troops
“the dominoes did fall, but in the opposite way.”
another brilliant, insightful, intelligent, compassionate, all-knowing socialist brother re-writes history. (what’s three or four million dead, more or less.)
/sarcasm off/
INCREDIBLE!
He must be excluding all the Arab countries, and China from the "developed world" to even come close to such a self-hating statement.
Rush actually was on this yesterday...
these lefties helped kill millions of Indochinese peoples and they still deny it and paint it as a victory
however...some 60s radicals left all that after seeing how Ho’s minions really acted after ‘75
The first several pages of the most recommended comments are filled with anti-Bush, anti-war rhetoric--much from Americans.
A randomly picked comment from the first 5 pages using the 'READERS RECOMMENDED' filter:
" Added: Wednesday, 22 August, 2007, 17:57 GMT 18:57 UK How can anyone hear Bush's comparison of the real Vietnam War to his own VietRaq War and not be apoplectic with rage? Here is this ... this draft dodger! ... daring to reference a war he and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton all avoided, telling soldiers and their families that the war he started is just as pointless as the one he evaded, yet expecting those soldiers to DIE for his own deranged dreams of "a crusade" in the Middle East. Bush and Cheney MUST be impeached! Christian Shea, Hollywood, California, United States Recommended by 35 people "
it “worked” for
john kerry, jane fonda et al,
but it did not work for the rest of us.
Oh, come on. What’s a few million lives to further leftist goals...? Stalin and Mao make Pol Pot look like a piker by comparison, and the lefties loved them. They still do.
See my tagline...:)
It worked for the VC, the NVA, the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao.
The indochinese are still running away from the communists. I could take anyone who cares to know to a Florida trailer park where they have a busy underground railroad.
Chinese aid quickly grew from a trickle to a torrent. In 1965, aid included 18 aircraft, 4,439 guns or mortars, 220,000 small arms, over 10,000 sets of communications gear, seven naval vessels, and more. Shipments fell in 1966 but were still substantial: 3,362 artillery pieces, 141,000 rifles, 14 warships, and other items. More than 70 aircraft were delivered in 1967, the peak year for these weapons, along with the first Chinese-made tanks. During 1968, deliveries included more than 7,000 guns and about 220,000 small arms, along with 18 tanks. In 1969-70, a fallow period, Chinese supplies arrived at only a subsistence level.
But after the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, supply deliveries hit a new peak in 1971, with almost 8,000 guns, mortars, and rocket artillery launchers, 143,000 small arms, and 80 tanks. Armor deliveries remained substantial, peaking at 220 tanks in 1972 then falling off. The Chinese spigot became the foundation of the North Vietnamese army that became so important in 1972 and 1975. Given that Hanoi simultaneously received many aircraft and almost all its air defense missile and radar systems from the Soviet Union, the combination was potent.
July 1989, South China Sea aboard the USS Ranger. I was a midshipman on a summer training cruise standing watch with my "mentor" who was the JOOD. The weather was really bad, only the helos were up, and one reported a small vessel in distress a few miles away.
The vessel turned out to be a motorized barge operated by the Vietnamese Army. It had lost its motor and had been blown out to sea in the storm. It was taking on water and the crew of 9 were about to abandon ship. Prior to their problems starting they had captured 20+ boat people who they had chained in the hold. Those boat people would have sunk with the barge if we hadn't shown up. Of the 9 military on the barge, all but 1 wanted to defect. Instead of drowning in the hold of that barge, the boat people were pulled out of the hold one by one and put into one of Ranger's motor whale boats. The first thing they saw coming out of that hold was an American aircraft carrier flying the Stars and Stripes. They were some very happy people.
I learned a couple lessons that day.
1. Communists won't hesitate to murder the masses if it satisfies their goals.
2. Sometimes the best missions in the military are about helping people.
3. You can take the biggest toughest looking sailor in Navy, after being on deployment for 5 months, put a tiny baby (in this case a cute little Vietnamese boy) in his arms, and make that sailor cry.
4. I knew right then I joined the right team.
By the way, the author of this article is full of $H!T.
Chinese aid was paid for by the Soviets. It would be hard to find aid that wasn’t.
“...Did he forget the millions killed in Vietnam and Cambodia after the United States left?”
No, He just shined ‘em on. It wasn’t convenient for his story.
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