Posted on 12/03/2007 3:23:05 PM PST by STARWISE
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— George Santayana from "Reason in Common Sense"
Despite the hope that we can learn from past mistakes and not repeat them, history suggests it is counterintuitive to actually believe it could be so.
We won every military engagement of the Vietnam War yet Walter Cronkite and the American media conspired with the enemy to do what the North Vietnamese could not do on the battlefield.
General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who was the commander of the North Vietnamese army, has published his memoirs. He has confirmed what most Americans either knew or suspected. The war in southeast Asia was not lost in Vietnam.
It was lost here at home.
The American media, enabling and functioning as symbiots for the John Kerry anti-war gaggle accomplished in a few short years what Giap could not do in three decades of fighting.
Giap was an immensely accomplished general, highly respected (some say brilliant). Before, during and after his martial career, he was a scholar, journalist, historian, and philosopher.
The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the Vietnam War memorial in Hanoi:
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes.
If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
Giap knew we had crushed his Army in the battles of Tet. Our generals and soldiers knew we had won. But when ‘Uncle Walter’ told the American people that February in 1968, “Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I'm not sure.”, waffling public opinion changed. Cronkite may not have been sure but Gen. Giap sure knew.
Not unlike Gen. Robert E. Lee who supposedly said, "“It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers.” "General" Cronkite apparently had greater insight and omniscience than Gens. Giap and Westmoreland.
Cronkite said, “The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw.”
No it wasn’t even close to a draw . . . and Giap understood, if the nattering nabobs didn’t. However, that lesson ignored does underscore that the media is the first draft of history, and their errors, omissions and prejudices are obvious in their copy.
The French ran away from Vietnam previous to our flight. When it became plain that France was becoming involved in a long-drawn-out war, the French government tried to negotiate an agreement with the Vi?t Minh. H? Chí Minh and the other indigenous leaders did not trust the word of the French (good call) and continued the war.
Five specific reasons led to the French bailing:
1. Significant numbers of French troops were killed, wounded or captured between 1946 and 1952;
2. The cost of the war had been twice what they were getting from the United States under the Marshall Plan;
3. After seven years, the prospect of a French victory was slim to none.
4. Popular French opinion concluded France did not have any moral justification for being in Vietnam;
5. Parts of the French left supported the goals of the Vi?t Minh to form a socialist state.
Fast forward to today.
1. Although battlefield survivability is greater in Iraq than any previous war, deaths and injuries are the focus of the news.
2. Wars cost big money.
3. A quick clean victory is elusive and unlikely.
4. The drive by media continues to pick at scabs over why we are there.
5. The anti-war left is . . . the anti-war, left wing, left.
Cronkite concluded his broadcast that night in 1968 saying, “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors . . .”
Several of the ’08 presidential wannabes likewise say we should stack arms and "negotiate."
John Stuart Mill once observed, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse . . ."
Ultimately, the most committed wins, and to date commitment to victory isn't our long suit. Anything we do or don't do that encourages further aggression is unacceptable. We cannot and should not reward the enemy with political, economic and diplomatic efforts.
The most committed wins!
~~~~
RUSH: How many of you remember the name General Giap from the North Vietnamese army? General Giap, G-i-a-p is how you spell it, but pronounce it General Giap. He was a very famous, knowledgeable general in the North Vietnamese army.
He's published his memoirs and here's a pull quote:
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender.
It was the same at the battle of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it. We thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice that your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefield. We were ready to surrender. You had won."
He makes the point the Vietnam War was not lost in Vietnam; it was lost here.
That's why I keep telling everybody that the Drive-Bys were trying to do the same thing in Iraq that they did in Vietnam for a host of reasons, not the least of which among them was to reestablish their own ability to influence people into the United States losing a war that the media was opposed to.
Scary, scary stuff.
PING~~!
We were sure as hell winning when I was medevaced out!
General Giap is a more honorable man than John Kerry........
General Giap is an honorable man. John Kerry is a traitorous dog!
I had General Giap’s book. He also said that he was ready to give up when he noticed that the anti-war demonstrators were starting to have an effect. The anti-war demonstrations gave him the courage to keep fighting.
Good post and it belies the childhood words; “Sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never harm us”!!
Nowadays careless, mean and radical words are doing irreparable harm in every venue of our lives!
We were engaged with the enemy during TET and killed piles, heaps of them. Though we suffered some deaths and many wounded, there is no doubt we held our ground and eliminated the threat in our AO by the next day. We had the ammo and wherewithall to eliminate more but did not. We didn’t run out of artillary support or Air Force/Navy dropped Napham or CBUs.
Yet, upon returning stateside months later, we heard that we had “lost” the Tet offensive. What a load of horsecrap. That is the moment that confirmed what I was starting to believe, that there was a conspiracy amongst our news media and somebody was telling a huge lie, betraying our men and women in uniform for the sake of a bunch of hippies. Cronkite confirmed it.
We quit in VietNam and General Giap confirmed what Osama Bin Laden hoped - that we were weak willed and uncommitted to preserving our freedom. If not for President Bush, we all would be shopping for sheets - to wear on our heads.
Thanks for posting this. I like this quote:
“It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers.” ~Gen. Robert E. Lee
.
.
.
Why the smart money is on Duncan Hunter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926032/posts
Posted on 11/15/2007 3:43:17 AM PST by Kevmo
It was the same at the battle of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it. We thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice that your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefield. We were ready to surrender. You had won.”
Do you know which Giap book that is pulled from? I’ve read and have People’s War, People’s Army, How we won the War, and still don’t know where those quotes come from. They are pretty much Communist puff pieces, does he have other memoirs?
God bless you for your service and
the service of all our troops, past
and present.
thanks you. It was an honor to serve.
“But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!” ................... OK, I’m baffled. Where is this quote written? Someone tell me the book title and exact page on which this appears. I want to show it to my Liberal friends. In fact I’ll have it framed and given to them for Christmas presents.
Thanks for the ping. I also heard Rush talking about it on his program today.
Too bad the MSM will bury this because it exposes them for the anti-American defeatists they are.
General Giap was a worthy adversary and honorable man. J F’n K was/is nothing more than a mealymouthed charlatan and traitorous SOB not worthy to lick the sweat off....... you get the picture.
I knew this in 1968 when I was doing my job listening to NVA radio ops in the aftermath of the Spring Offensive in which the NFL completely ceased to be represented by living southerners and the NVA was shredded yet again. All they wanted was out.
I take it that you are not the lady with two kids who spit on me in SFO in '72.
btt
Better Fred than Dead...........
I think that it's germane to pass along this information.
I just finished a quick search looking for same. I found that the information in Mr. Metcalf's column is questioned by leftists (surprise). However..
I clearly remember an article years ago that included a translation of a French TV interview with General Giap. There Gen. Giap said the American press was his most important guerilla.
I cannot locate that link after a cursory search.
Others claim that the quote is also in the General's memoirs however there are leftist web sites that claim that no such memoirs exist. Others claim the book was never printed outside of VN.
A few web sites say that this book, "The Twenty-Five-Year Century" by Lieutenant-General Lam Quang Thi, has the quote. To wit,
"General Thi believes that the media played a major role in the final downfall of South Vietnam. He quotes North Vietnam General Vo Nguyen Giap as stating in a French TV broadcast that Giap’s 'most important guerrilla during the Vietnam War was the American press.'"
(It's possible that this is the web site I found years ago though I though the article I found was linked directly to the French TV show.)
I was at Ton Son Nhut(?) during the first days of the Tet Offensive, there were dead gooks everywhere, the smell and the blood flys reminded me of my Grandfathers stories of WW1.
I almost didn’t make it out of that one, Hoc Mon. After May it got so quiet, well somewhat quiet, that we got kind of shakey about coming down next.
Your instincts are correct. This is not a genuine Giap quote, at least not literally. It appears to be an amalgam of several different statements of his made at various times and places, and does pretty much accurately convey his meaning as expressed in those remarks.
I don't have the link for this readily at hand, but this was discussed in a Free Republic thread in which I participated a few months ago.
Found this, but haven’t found the exact book title
anywhere:
~~~~
How North Vietnam Won The War
By Grunt.com
Grunt.com | 4/26/2004
What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar movement? What was the purpose of the Tet Offensive? How could the U.S. have been more successful in fighting the Vietnam War?
Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist [in The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1995].
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
He later became editor of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism.
Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said,
“We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”
Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits?
A: Keenly.
Q: Why?
A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.
Q: How could the Americans have won the war?
A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland’s requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.
Q: Anything else?
A: Train South Vietnam’s generals. The junior South Vietnamese officers were good, competent and courageous, but the commanding general officers were inept.
Q: Did Hanoi expect that the National Liberation Front would win power in South Vietnam?
A: No. Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory. Regular military divisions with artillery and armor would be needed. The Chinese believed in fighting only with guerrillas, but we had a different approach. The Chinese were reluctant to help us. Soviet aid made the war possible. Le Duan [secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party] once told Mao Tse-tung that if you help us, we are sure to win; if you don’t, we will still win, but we will have to sacrifice one or two million more soldiers to do so.
Q: Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?
A: No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party, only one army in the war to liberate the South and unify the nation. At all times there was only one party commissar in command of the South.
Q: Why was the Ho Chi Minh trail so important?
A: It was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort, involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units.
Q: What of American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail?
A: Not very effective. Our operations were never compromised by attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage, but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out the bottom. Bombing by smaller planes rarely hit significant targets.
Q: What of American bombing of North Vietnam?
A: If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson and it didn’t worry us. We had plenty of times to prepare alternative routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people for months if a harvest were damaged. The Soviets bought rice from Thailand for us.
Q: What was the purpose of the 1968 Tet Offensive?
A: To relieve the pressure Gen. Westmoreland was putting on us in late 1966 and 1967 and to weaken American resolve during a presidential election year.
Q: What about Gen. Westmoreland’s strategy and tactics caused you concern?
A: Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam. He also worried that Westmoreland might receive permission to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
In January 1967, after discussions with Le Duan, Thanh proposed the Tet Offensive. Thanh was the senior member of the Politburo in South Vietnam. He supervised the entire war effort. Thanh’s struggle philosophy was that “America is wealthy but not resolute,” and “squeeze tight to the American chest and attack.” He was invited up to Hanoi for further discussions. He went on commercial flights with a false passport from Cambodia to Hong Kong and then to Hanoi. Only in July was his plan adopted by the leadership. Then Johnson had rejected Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more troops. We realized that America had made its maximum military commitment to the war. Vietnam was not sufficiently important for the United States to call up its reserves. We had stretched American power to a breaking point. When more frustration set in, all the Americans could do would be to withdraw; they had no more troops to send over.
Tet was designed to influence American public opinion. We would attack poorly defended parts of South Vietnam cities during a holiday and a truce when few South Vietnamese troops would be on duty. Before the main attack, we would entice American units to advance close to the borders, away from the cities. By attacking all South Vietnam’s major cities, we would spread out our forces and neutralize the impact of American firepower. Attacking on a broad front, we would lose some battles but win others. We used local forces nearby each target to frustrate discovery of our plans. Small teams, like the one which attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, would be sufficient. It was a guerrilla strategy of hit-and-run raids. [lloks like a re-writing of history with the benefit of hindsight]
Q: What about the results?
A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was.
Q: What of Nixon?
A: Well, when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate we knew we would win. Pham Van Dong [prime minister of North Vietnam] said of Gerald Ford, the new president, “he’s the weakest president in U.S. history; the people didn’t elect him; even if you gave him candy, he doesn’t dare to intervene in Vietnam again.” We tested Ford’s resolve by attacking Phuoc Long in January 1975. When Ford kept American B-52’s in their hangers, our leadership decided on a big offensive against South Vietnam.
Q: What else?
A: We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=%7BBCD4208E-DA5B-4B50-9848-86F50DA24BFE%7D
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1873051/posts
And:
ping
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, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
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.
It was so horribly run at the end by the politicians,
listening to the anti-war zealots and greedy for their
own political futures.
Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless your friends.
“We were ready to surrender. You had won!” ............... Sorry, I don’t buy into it. No General in his right mind would come out with a statement like that. If this isn’t a quote from his book, I can’t believe it. It is probably only hearsay, someone’s misinterpretation, or just an amplified rumor made to sound like he actually made that statement.
Excellent account of events of those days. Thank you.
Time magazine of that day was a pretty good news magazine. You'd watch Walter "NV Communists' Most Trusted Man in America" Cronkite all week then get the truth from Time or U.S. News and World Report; Newsweek was already gone.
Here for example is an excerpt from Time, it's about a Vietniks "anti-war" demonstration.
"More disturbing is the incidence of those within the end-the-war-movement who really seem to be rooting for the other side. Automatically among them are American Communists and Marxists who insist that the U.S. presence in Viet Nam is another example of capitalistic imperialism. A bunch of recent marchers in Manhattan actually carried red, blue and yellow flags that, to the shocked astonishment of spectators, turned out to be the banner of the Viet Cong -- or rather, since protesters think that term pejorative even though Cong only means Communist, the National Liberation Front."
Now millions and millions of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Publics sitting home watching the miracle of color TV would hear Walter "NV Communists' Most Trusted Man in America" Cronkite report that the protesters were carrying red, blue and yellow "protest banners." That is how the TV networks reported the "anti-war" (peacenik) movement.
You are right, little has changed vis-a-vis the MSM.
We did not have the Internet and we did have the "Fairness Doctrine. We were the silenced majority. Never again!
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
i WONDER if the puppet masters realize that their cells in hell are going to be extra uncomfortable.
What a hideous amount of blood on their hands and they are still planning for much more.
Ping!
Oh, thanks for posting this thread! :-)
Written ?...
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-132053836.html
and same review: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PBZ/is_2_85/ai_n13822002
Vietnam: General Vo Nguyen Giap.(Review Essay)
From: Military Review | Date: 3/1/2005 | Author: Reeder, William S., Jr.
General Vo Nguyen Giap: The General Headquarters in the Spring of Brilliant Victory (The Gioi Publishers, Hanoi, 2002), has been translated into English and provides a ready source of information on Giap’s view of the final phases of that conflict.
excerpt:
“The last message comes forth throughout the text. From the outset, as Giap reflects, there was never any thought other than continuing the fight until the United States tired of its involvement in Vietnam. This important lesson—that conflicts couched in the rhetoric of peoples’ wars can continue for many years and even decades—is one of the most significant from the Vietnam War and, certainly, an extremely relevant message of this book.”
;)
Giap wasn’t that brilliant. He was following a strategy formulated by Mao in China and emulated successfully by Castro in Cuba: operate in the countryside until you dominate it and isolate the urban centers; then march on the cities. Giap’s theory was that the people in the cities of South Vietnam would turn on the government and welcome the NVA as liberators. It didn’t happen.
In January-February 1968 the NVA held parts of Saigon and Hue and dozens of smaller towns for a time. Very few South Vietnamese joined them and the Viet Cong were almost wiped out in the first days. The NVA became isolated from their supply lines while pinned in fixed positions. Those not slaughtered ran back into the countryside in disarray.
Tet 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War. The backs of the communists were broken. We could have marched to Hanoi. Then Walter Kronkite and others began dispensing their gloomy wisdom and Lyndon Johnson announced a bombing halt and a peace initiative.
No wonder Giap was baffled. He screwed up a huge offensive—that rendered his army ineffective for months— and the world press was calling him “brilliant.”
I remember being home from college during the Tet offensive. Sounded to me like we thumped them. Then the sniveling press started up with their negativism during war time. I was so disappointed in Cronkite for undercutting us that way. I respected him up to then. The naivete of youth, I guess. Thanks for the post.
You have a good memory for historical things, times, places and names! I don’t know that I was paying that much attention to Cronkite and newscasts then.
“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. ..... 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, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.”
And I fear that history will repeat itself if Hillary gets in the WH and has a Democrat majority in the House and Senate.
I was wondering just the other night what things would be like if we had not given up our support to the South? Along with the obvious tragidy in Vietnam and Cambodia, I wonder how different the Soviet Union would have been? I wonder if they would have been as eager to go into Afghanistan if they had lost in Vietnam. And if they hadn’t gone into Afghanistan things would be quite a bit different there in 2001. (I’m not up on all of that - so maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference or not).
However - it WILL make a difference if we pull out of Iraq!
I LOATHE the ENEMEDIA!
and 90% of CONgre$$.
BTTT
It makes one wonder who’s got murtha hanging on their wall.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.