BOOKMARKED.
BUMP
Posted on 05/01/2005 10:34:32 AM PDT by aculeus
Morning bump.
I was married to a prominent Leftie (what's wrong with THAT picture ...yes, the selfsame Miss Kennebunk Dump) and was never able to get her or any of her friends (more than one of whom called me "baby-killer") to tell me why refugees were streaming southward to escape the Worker's Paradise they were all so sure NV must be.
I blame first the sex-mad, poxed, insane, doped-up invalid JFK (easily the worst president in our history ... if the crazed SOB had 15 rational minutes a day, I never saw any evidence of it) for starting it. Then, LBJ and his left-over JFK crew, particularly McNamara, for micro-managing and limiting the war from DC. To do it, they depended upon insecure Navy Communications. The Commies read our military mail for years while a masterfully organized KGB PR Campaign frightened our politicians out of their wits.
That war could have been won, as could have been Korea, if Democrats had not been in charge. It could even have been won late. Nixon and Kissinger let the commies off the hook when Hanoi should have been flattened and flooded, Haiphong closed down, and the Chicom road and rail supply line closed down. It was a replay of Ike accepting stalemate in Korea instead of wiping out Chinese sanctuary cities.
We showed the world that once you pull off the cheap trick of buying our media, we have no national guts. We are paying a terrible price for our failure to win in Korea and Vietnam because of what now turns out to have been an exaggerated fear of the Soviet reaction, which would never have happened.
Something Kerry urged during his testimony before Congress. Kerry also predicted only a few thousand would be affected by a Communist takeover.
Make that at least twice.
Bump.
At a minimun, we could have achieved a Korea-like solution with the South remaining free. Jophnson and MacNamara micromanged the war and prevented us fully applying our overwhelming military superiority.
The Vietnam War turned into a political football under Johnson and McNamarra. They had no intention of 'winning' it; rather, they used it for political positioning. And when that backfired and resulted in an even worsening quagmire, Johnson chose not to run for reelection.
Johnson helped created a worsening problem and, partly at his choice and partly due to the shifting mood of the general public, chose to leave office and leave the problem to the next administration.
"ARVN only faced three large scale assaults during the war. The first one was a disaster for the communists because of massive American support. The second was a disaster for the communists even though American support was limited to air support and a little arty support. ARVN infantry and ARVN armor recaptured all but one town that had been overrun and the communists suffered massive casualties."
Yes, and ARVN (actually the US and ARVN) won those battles because the US military was there to help out--basically by softening up NVA attacks enough with massive air strikes (which conveniently provided the NVA with a good crop of captured US pilots)--so that even the feckless ARVN could defeat them, for the time being at least. The one time ARVN stood alone against an NVA attack it was crushed. South Vietam was rather like a timid child who could never win a fight against a bully unless his dad or big brother was there to back him up. You never saw Israel having to rely on US air strikes to win its battles have you? For that matter, I know of no cases of Russian pilots flying CAS in support of NVA offensives either. The North may have had a Soviet sugar daddy supplying the weapons, but they did ALL the fighting and dying on their own.
Tough to win a war when the home-front is collectively stoned.
"After Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975, the summary executions of tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese began... Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China sea... The anti-war movement in America also facilitated the communist takeovers of Laos and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia led to a killing field in which some three million Cambodians were exterminated. Paul Johnson has given a succinct, detailed, gut-wrenching account of this tragedy in his classic work Modern Times." - Jamie Glazov on May 14, 2002
"When Nixon went down in Watergate, the Democrats cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell... In 1975 the Democrats cut military and economic aid to the two regimes we had been defending against the Communists... Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered 2.5 million people." - David Horowitz on October 14, 2004 at Geogetown University
Makes me physically sick to think about this. I watched the movie "The Killing Fields" ~ regardless of some of the slant to the movie, you cannot come away from watching that believing that Communism is a good thing, or that the US did the right thing pulling out or pulling aid. God bless those poor people.
David Horowitz is here combining the totals from Cambodia and South Vietnam...does he say elsewhere what figure he accepts for the number of victims of the Khmer Rouge?
We had good reason to fear the USSR and China. 60 million died under Stalin and Mao. More than WWII.
Of course, you would never hear Jane Fonda or the lefties admit that. Communism is good, you know.
I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. 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 was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint 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 was 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. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.
I challenged Professor Stone on the following. 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.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that 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. I pointed out how 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. I pointed out 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. 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.
When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that 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. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that German Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how 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.
There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.
Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.
He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that 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.
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.
