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Posted on 04/30/2025 3:55:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
If you are old enough to remember the Vietnam War or to have studied it in school, this will sound familiar.
The Fake Narrative
The political leadership of the United States, President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, wanted to prosecute the Vietnam War with as limited a force as possible. The “military,” knowing that a large force would be necessary, attempted to build the force through incremental, ever increasing troop requests. Ultimately, the never-ending requests and the growing quagmire disillusioned McNamara.
The origin of this narrative can be traced to a book titled The Pentagon Papers. The Secret History of the Vietnam War as Published by the New York Times. This book was not the complete study stolen by Daniel Ellsberg. It included some of the Papers, but four reporters (Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E.W. Kenworth, and Fox Butterfield) took turns explaining to the rest of us what various portions of the Papers meant. The beginning of McNamara’s so-called disillusionment came at the end of 1965. The Times story was that at the end of 1965 U.S. commander General William Westmoreland “suddenly found it necessary to request a vast increase in troops for Phase II of his plan. The General said he would need 154,000 more men.”
The Actual Plan
Here is the actual account from the complete 12-volume Government Printing Office Pentagon Papers that the above story purports to summarize. By early 1965 the Johnson administration concluded that direct involvement of U.S. ground forces would be necessary to win the war. During the first half of the year the administration worked out a three-phase plan that should result in victory in early 1968. Phase I would raise troop strength to 175,000 by the end of the year. The goal was to “stop losing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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The NYT has not changed.
Difficult to fight dishonest media which operates in bad faith.
What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones' lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?
Guess what? We followed Vietnam with more of the same, but getting worse at each turn. We're still at it today on steroids after running up $37 trillion in unsustainable debt and doing so while ignoring the rot inside our own home.
We're paying the price now. And, unfortunately, it's likely to get worse in the short to immediate future.
That ole' light on a shining hill is not quite as bright as it used to be.
There you go. Smart. Real smart.
I once had a two hour discussion about that Vietnam situation with McNamara and misses McNamara. They broke down and we talked while I repaired their car at my shop.
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“What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones’ lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?”
War is extremely profitable for the right corporations...
Today is the anniversary of the fight for Hill 881 South. Over forty Marines and Corpsmen died for that worthless piece of real estate that a single B-52 could have leveled in an hour. I hope to meet McNamara someday and discuss things with him. I’ve been waiting a long, long time.
Well said.
I think maybe part of the reason ‘why’ is because Johnson wanted to push a bunch of left wing domestic policies (which he did) but didn’t want to get tagged as a Commie.
America was in the middle of the Cold War and he didn’t want to tangle with the USSR or China, and Viet Nam seemed to be just the right war for him to campaign as an ‘anti communist’.
We all know now that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964?) was a lie, but the Swamp got away with this and used it as a pretext for aggression in South East Asia.
Johnson did get both the Civil Rights Act and Medicare passed in congress in 1965.
Not that these were bad things but they were politically controversial at the time.
I was young back then but I remember that Johnson was pushing some left wing stuff pretty hard and I think he wanted a distraction for the public to focus on, not his domestic policies.
I could be wrong about this but it seems to me we got lied into a war for political reasons, which seems to be standard procedure for the US.
And never put an economist in charge of war.
And don’t give the French back their colonies, next time.
What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones’ lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?
The British managed to stop the Communist insurgency in Malaysia with aggressive anti-insurgency tactics.
We stopped the onslaught in Korea, just barely.
The French tried to stop the Vietnamese communists, but failed. America, the only Western country with the means to do so, stepped in to prevent the Communist takeover of the entire Indochinese peninsula. We had quite a few allies. There were Australians, Canadians, Brits, South Koreans, and quite a few others fighting with us.
The concern was the Communists would win in Vietnam and there would be a domino effect. If we did not stop them in Vietnam, where would we stop them?
Communists had taken over Cuba and were busy pushing Communism in Central and South America.
There was (and still is) a massive fifth column of Communists in the USA. McCarthy has been proven to have been correct. There was a massive infiltration of communists into the U.S. government.
Eventually, the fifth column of leftist media in the USA were able to lie sufficiently to break the will of the American people to triumph in Vietnam. We retreated ignominiously.
But the effort was long enough, and sufficient enough, for world communism to fracture and its failures to become well known. The “domino effect” was real, but Cambodia became enough of a horrible example of the failure of Communism to help stop it elsewhere.
Eventually, we elected Reagan, and he pursued a policy of winning the Cold War, of which Korea and Vietnam were hot spots. Then we won.
Didn’t McNamara express regret, before he died, for his whole approach to the VietNam conflict? I think he wrote a book about it iirc.
Yes. To understand the Vietnam era, whether for or against, one must take into account the context of the Cold War struggle with what really was an international communist threat. The operative concept was “containment,” and few doubted it was necessary.
In the end, comparing S Vietnam with S Korea, hard to see much difference. Although not democratic, VN is thriving and a large trading partner with the US, the war appearing to be largely relegated to history.
I disagree. The lesson was on how to fight a continuous war.
Recent history dictates that they learned it well.
Been watching A&E’s Ike, Countdown to D-Day. Degaulle was portrayed as the jerk he really was. He was about as ungrateful as they came. France could have been more helpful after WW2.
That is both a gross oversimplification of the Korean conflict and a misrepresentation of what was 'attempted' in Vietnam.
I'm just a bit curious about those rose-colored glasses, but not enough to care this morning. Much bigger fish to fry.
The one thing DeGaulle though was that he saved France from falling to the Communists.
A lot of people don’t know this, but right after Paris was liberated, there was a Communist reign of terror in the city, basically anyone in their way was accused of being a collaborator and executed.
What was Russia and China doing fighting in Vietnam, and that followed them fighting in Korea.
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