Posted on 05/02/2005 5:51:21 PM PDT by wagglebee
Instead, it was Congress – more specifically, the nearly 2-to-1 Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 – that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam.Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "re-education" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army.
This was, IMHO, among the most invidious betrayals in America's otherwise proud history. It should also serve as a reminder never to trust the left, even it's more moderate elements. Although it was tacit rather than explicit, and excluded the most radical leftists who openly wanted the communists to triumph, there was effectively a "bargain" struck between hawks and doves with and after the election of Nixon. It's terms were that the hawks, and the Nixon administration, would extricate American forces from Vietnam, that is they would "bring the troops home," and in exchange the doves would agree to continued support for America's allies in Indochina and necessary enforcement of peace treaties.
Nixon and the hawks kept their side of the bargain, and the left, including the "moderate" left, reneged, slashing aid again and again and again -- viciously, vindictively, gratuitously -- far beyond anything explainable by mere political expediency. The South Vietnamese army, for instance, was forced to heavily ration artillery shells during the last year of their struggle, and at the end their forces literally ran out of bullets. For Cambodia the situation was even worse. Aid had been cut off entirely, and even reconnaissance flights over the country were prohibited by Congress.
Nixon almost managed to salvage a 'Rat debacle in South Vietnam (and even President Ford courageously continued to demand reasonable and necessary levels of aid for South Vietnam, even when there was no chance of Congressional acquiescence). Nixon fought far more effectively than LBJ even with a small fraction of the forces that the 'Rats had committed (in large part simply by doing the bleeding obvious -- bombing the hell out of the North and attacking North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia and Laos) and consequently achieved a peace agreement that the liberals, doves and radicals had all declared impossible.
It's almost as though the 'Rats were determined that the war be lost, and actively and energetically sabotaged both aid and treaty enforcement to acheive the end. We know that the radical left and much of the "peace" movement's leadership desired this, but what is truly shocking, and should be a caution to Americans even today, is the extent to which the behavior of moderate leftists and liberals coincided with the goal of America being shamed and defeated (no matter what the cost in lives to the Indochinese people).
I became a Republican while still in high school during the Kennedy vs Nixon campaign. I oppose almost everything the liberal Democrats have stood for since then. However, I think my dislike for everything Democrat is deeply rooted in their betrayal of the United States military in Vietnam. It was because of Democrat duplicity in conducting that war that I lost many friends. The government's attempt to micromanage the war hamstrung the military and eventually cost us many lives and eventually the war. Had the military leaders been allowed to conduct the war with victory as the goal it would not have lasted half as long as it did.
We, and our allies in Indochina and, through discrediting our trustworthiness, America's allies everywhere on the globe. In the case of many I think both this program and its effects were entirely intentional. They managed to seriously undermine American effectiveness and credibility. Thank God Reagan came along when he did to repair much of the damage.
I have no doubts that the lies about Vietnam were intentional and probably funded by those who hated America at that time. Most of those lunatic lefty leaders are now dead.
Those my age, the 60 somethings are still living this big lie. Their entire adult lives have been wrapped around the Hate America because of Nam lie. Fortunately many have left the earth and many in large numbers are leaving the power positions they have obtained in the media, governments, universities and in politics. Unfortunately, many like the Clintons and Carters are still around spreading their hate America bs as healthy political interchange.
Maybe the most dangerous of this group are the mid 40 to 50 something lunatic lefties who have positions of power in the MSM, local media, Follywood, national and local politics, and in our universities. They have honed the Hate America from Nam to everything our side stands for and tries to do. Think of Perky Katie, vile Follywooders, the Ward Churchills and the congressits like most from California. These lefties are often intelligent, well educated and use their power positions to weaken America 24/7/365. They have added the religions of the left abortion and political correctness to the Nam lie.
Their weakest demographic group is the 30 something to early 40 something. They are often poorly educated and can only mouth the mantras of the older hate America loonies. 9/11 woke up many who were in this group. The left is losing ground in this critical group daily.
I inlude Cronkite with Kerry and Hanoi Jane.
BTTT
bttt!
That was the only poll that really mattered and the MSM spun it so that even then the dems won.
Regards,
TS
YES ! I thought I would never see this in print:
"contrary to the assertions of Cronkite and others in the mainstream press, the American military had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon, much less losing the war. The last American combat unit left Vietnam in August 1972, nearly three years before the 1975 Communist invasion. The U.S. military remained undefeated in battle throughout the Vietnam War.
Instead, it was Congress – more specifically, the nearly 2-to-1 Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 – that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam.
Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "re-education" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army. "
I'm told that this article will also be on FrontPagemag.com tomorrow.
"It wasn't much of a war. But it was the only one we had.
For those of us who were there, it was more than "not much of a war."
Have you ever had troops on the ground shooting rifle fire at you as you were taking off or firing mortars or rockets at you while you were trying to get a few hours of sleep?
Not much of a war? There has never been such a war.
I was there, too. And I first heard that line from a company commander.
Let's put it this way: America sure as heck didn't think it was much of a war.
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.
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