Posted on 05/01/2006 10:02:43 PM PDT by RWR8189
bump
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. 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."
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 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. 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.
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.
It is amazing, isn't it, how pathetically little is known today by the general public about exactly why Vietnam fell in April '75. And not just with the younger generations born afterwards, but with the older generations who lived during that era and believed what the MSM of 30 years ago fed us.
To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions
During those years, I strongly believed that the entire crew of antiwar celebs were lying when they claimed they were only doing this out of genuine concern for those poor, victimized, oppressed (by US imperialism) Vietnamese people. I was certain they were doing it for ulterior motives such as their lionization by the press, for the lucrative lectures (excuse me, "Teach-Ins"), and perhaps just for the pure satisfaction of thumbing their noses at powerful politicians.
But I was wrong. Well ......... I was one percent wrong anyway! And 99% right.
Late in 1975, the North Vietnamese were at the height of their bloodbath - murdering untold numbers of people who had ever crossed them in any way, subjecting hundreds of thousands more (who didn't make the cut onto the "instant death" lists) to "re-education camps" where many died in the horrendous conditions, and forcing a mass exodus of "boat people" who were so desperate to flee that they took huge risks of being drowned in overcrowded boats that overturned far out at sea, or of being sunk in the South China Sea storms, or of being killed by pirates, or of being "rescued" by some navy or other that delivered them straight back to Vietnam.
During this time, stories of the bloodbath were trickling out in spite of the Communists' news blackout. And one of the major antiwar celebs - Joan Baez (she was also the very first antiwar celeb too, as I recall) really did turn out to be concerned about what she was hearing re the fate of the S Vietnamese. And she got the idea she could do something for them by gathering together the famous antiwar celebs - all of whom she knew well, after hanging out with them for so many years - and pooling their money and their names into a full page ad in the NY Times.
This was to be addressed to the Vietnamese government. It would say something along the lines of, "Hey, remember us? The people who were instrumental in your winning total victory? We're really deeply concerned about what you're doing to your own people. This isn't what you promised us would happen. We beg you, we beseech you, etc. etc......"
Great idea, Joan! And just how did it work out? Well, let's see .... She went to her good friends, the Berrigan brothers, Daniel Ellsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, and dozens more. These were people who she was dead certain were - just like her - doing what they did all those years out of concern for the Vietnamese people. And she got a rude shock. They laughed and turned her down. Every single last one of them. No one would join her for this NY Times ad. They couldn't care less about government death squads running loose in Vietnam.
And so the ad never happened. It was ironic she got stuck with the moniker "Joanie Phony," because she turned out to be in the end the only single one of the whole rotten bunch who was not a phony.
You see you are so wrapped up in this political left right that you cannot see the wood for the trees.
If we had wiped out the city of Fallujah, it would of set back our gains in Iraq for years.
Do you think local Iraqis would be coming forward with information enabling us to kill or capture leading terrorists.
Read this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1624804/posts
And this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1623011/posts
And definitely this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600263/posts.
In fact read the last article first it will give you a good understanding of COIN, then the other two articles to see the results.
Then I will be happy to discuss them with you.
And why they are totally different wars.
The main point being in the Second World war we were fighting major industrialized powers and therefore our tactics and strategy had to mirror that.
To day we are fighting what is termed a rootless insurgency/terrorist and our tactics and strategy have to mirror that.
But instead of me explaining it, I will let a American Military man explain it some one with years of service in your special forces fighting terrorist.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600263/posts
And then read the results which prove we are winning.
Read this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1624804/posts
And this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1623011/posts
No there is only one real major difference between Vietnam and Iraq, and that is in Iraq its the right war, right strategy and right tactics.
Read the following FR articles.
Also can you explain to me that why in FR posts on articles that show positive news are almost ignored, while article such as this with a more negative slant on the war are a lot more popular.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600263/posts
And then read the results which prove we are winning.
Read this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1624804/posts
And this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1623011/posts
agreed...tet was a win...its just the media who called it a loss..and as for the fall of vietnam...go ask ted kennedy why he stopped the cash flow to the south vietnamese in 75...while you are at it and have his attention
ask him about the million or so the commies killed in vietnam after the war, how about the boat people who left that 'communist paradise'
ask him about the emptying the cities and the deaths of 33% of the population by the khymer rouge...and throw in loas while u are at it..lets see fat ted answer those questions
I would presume that this site is a lot like the MSM in that if it bleeds, it leads. YMMV, of course.
But you've stated the truth here.
PC warfare is a byproduct of PC thinking. Perfectly understandable. Generous, smart PC thinkers don't wage war anymore, not even to defend the US since any enemy is really a victim of evil US (republican), policies. All we need is communism and a workers' paradise like Zimbabwe. Or Mexico.
Liberals don't ever mention boat people and millions dead thanks to Pol Pot. You'd think that happened in another universe.
Well if we take the Second World war we find that is not the case.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they took over two million soviet prisoners, including many officers some quite senior who were anti Stalin.
The local population in the Ukraine, White Russia the caucuses the Baltic states welcomed them as liberators.
If the Germans not been brought up on a hatred and fear of the Slav and had initiated less repressive measures, they could of organized a Russian Army to fight the Soviets.
It was not until late 1943 when it was too late that the Germans started to recruit Russians for the National Russian Liberation Army.
They could of harnessed the occupied areas to feed there War Machine more efficiently.
And they would not of had to tie down too may troops in anti partisan operations.
The Harsher the repression the more efficient the resistance.
Poland suffered the harshest measures and they had the most efficient resistance.
In France it was not until they started drafting french workers to work in Germany that the French started to resist.
When you confront modern Leftists with that set of facts, they attack you immediately and call you a liar. They can't deal with the reality of what really went down in that place, at that time. They don't like having the follow-on killings and reeducation camps in Vietnam, and rise of the Khymer Rouge and the Cambodian democide/genocide next door as a "Domino Effect", rubbed in their noses, either.
"Holiday in Cambodia, holiday in Cambodia ..... Pollllll Pot. Polllll Pot. Pollllll Pot ....." - The B52s
That's the Dead Kennedys, not the B-52s, just for the record.
Great song.
#34---I've never seen anyone mix Politics and Music with that much aplomb!
Ping and bump for later read
What an incredible article. No white person, and I mean NO white person, could write something like this and live to tell the tale. Academically, that is.
That's Steele's point.
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