Posted on 05/01/2006 10:02:43 PM PDT by RWR8189
What is that picture from??!
"Ah, trying to make it a race issue. Just like the communists/socialists are trying to do."
Read the article closely, it is about Liberal guilt tying the hands of our military, which is MOST CERTAINLY happening. Happened in Viet Nam and its happening here.
All of the press reports are pretty clear on that: they seem to cheer when the terrorists win a round and boo when our guys win a round.
"we lost in Vietnam, "
"We didn't lose, we gave up."
That is the whole point of the article. If we are going to go to war, then we should prosecute it with all and any means to win - regardless of what the NY Times, Washington Post, and Illiteratti say.
I think you misunderstand the author. He is a hard core anti-leftist from what I understand. The author is pointing out how the West no longer seems to possess the moral authority to solve problems (like wars) as we should. I think his take is fascinating.
This is the guy that I had hoped would be able to challenge Schwartzenegger in 2006 in the Republican Primary election, but noooooooo ho ho ho... The CAGOP had to endorse Arnold a year ago last February and preclude ANYONE from challenging the Grinninator!!!
This guy would be every bit as good for CA as the guy that just won the GOP Primary for Governor in Ohio!!!
Incidentally, the Spanish are "white," too, and have also been guilted out by the left, although in the case of Spain and Spanish-originated cultures, the offended parties are not black but indigenous Indian peoples or Muslims.
One of the problems with Mexico is that it if it wishes to keep its dysfunctional socialist state tottering along, it has to give lots of lip-service to the indigenous population. This is true even though it has failed in educating them and does not include them economically because they are even more dysfunctional than Mexico as a whole. However, all over Latin America, the Spanish or white-guilt scenario is being played out. The nutty dictator of Venezuela, Chavez, came to power boasting that he is a mestizo, and the even nuttier flake Evo Morales of Bolivia got into power entirely on the "indigenous" (but leftist manipulated) vote.
You raise an interesting point. In some article that I read in the last day or so regarding some of the threats of an illegal immigrant invasion from South America, one of the most serious threats is that they bring their politics with them. The last thing we need to meld into the vast meling pot of America is South American politics.
bttt
Rush read this yesterday on the air and raved about the piece; bulls eye!
Analysis: A mini-Tet offensive in Iraq?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- Any seasoned reporter covering the Tet offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and presumably retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200 colleges and universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and invidious historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about what led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely.
Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed to overwhelm some 70 cities and towns, and 30 other strategic objectives simultaneously. By breaking a previously agreed truce for Tet festivities, master strategist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi calculated that South Vietnamese troops would be caught with defenses down.
After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese troops reacted fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some 6,000 casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of their objectives -- except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S. Marines -- but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many wounded. Giap had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble that was also designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals and trigger a popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the world. It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around.
As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup documented in "Big Story" -- a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was covered by American reporters -- the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and defectors, the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been set in concrete. Public opinion perceptions in the United States changed accordingly.
RAND made copies of these POW interrogations available. But few reporters seemed interested. In fact, the room where they were on display was almost always empty. Many Vietnamese civilians who were fence sitters or leaning toward the Vietcong, especially in the region around Hue City, joined government ranks after they witnessed Vietcong atrocities. Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed civil servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by clubs. The number of communist defectors, known as "chieu hoi," increased fourfold. And the "popular uprising" anticipated by Giap, failed to materialize. The Tet offensive also neutralized much of the clandestine communist infrastructure.
As South Vietnamese troops fought Vietcong remnants in Cholon, the predominantly Chinese twin city of Saigon, reporters, sipping drinks in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop. Donning helmet, Cronkite declared the war lost. It was this now famous television news piece that persuaded President Johnson six weeks later, on March 31, not to run. His ratings had plummeted from 80 percent when he assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death to 30 percent after Tet. His handling of the war dropped to 20 percent, his credibility shot to pieces.
Until Tet, a majority of Americans agreed with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that failure was not an option. It was Kennedy who changed the status of U.S. military personnel from advisers to South Vietnamese troops to full-fledged fighting men. By the time of Kennedy's assassination in Nov. 22, 1963, 16,500 U.S. troops had been committed to the war. Johnson escalated all the way to 542,000. But defeat became an option when Johnson decided the war was unwinnable and that he would lose his bid for the presidency in November 1968. Hanoi thus turned military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory.
With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp.
Hanoi's Easter offensive in March 1972 was another disaster for the communists. Some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops were wiped out -- by the South Vietnamese who did all the fighting. The last American soldier left Vietnam in March 1973. And the chances of the South Vietnamese army being able to hack it on its own were reasonably good. With one proviso: Continued U.S. military assistance with weapons and hardware, including helicopters. But Congress balked, first by cutting off military assistance to Cambodia, which enabled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists to take over, which, in turn, was followed by a similar Congressional rug pulling from under the South Vietnamese, that led to rapid collapse of morale in Saigon.
The unraveling, with Congress pulling the string, was so rapid that even Giap was caught by surprise. As he recounts in his memoirs, Hanoi had to improvise a general offensive -- and then rolled into Saigon two years before they had reckoned it might become possible.
That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an option for Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who called Iraq the president's Vietnam. It is, of course, no such animal. But it could become so if Congressional resolve dissolves.
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made clear the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential to our strategy."
Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers "gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."
America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin, "because of its democracy. Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win." Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East.
(Arnaud de Borchgrave covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under the French and 1972.)
AMEN. I've been saying this for years. Our leaders have long since lost the will to fight wars to win. And our wonderful military technology, ironically, is exacerbating the problem. You wanna know why Iraq is full of insurgents? Because the population DOES NOT FEAR US. They know full well that we'll bend heaven and Earth to kill only the "really bad guys." The insurgents hide with the civilians. A not insignificant portion of the population supports them, which compounds the problem. If they knew that supporting the insurgents would cost them dearly, the people of Iraq would be taking care of the insurgents themselves.
In the end, this is just one more way in which we are totally crippled by political correctness, because that's what this is at its core. We're SO determined to make everybody like us that we've become a paper tiger in far too many ways. I would've thought 9/11 would've wiped out a lot of this goofy mindset, but it didn't. One of the first things we did was change the name of our war so it wouldn't OFFEND our enemies. If that doesn't sum up the problem in a nutshell, nothing will.
MM
Yes I agree and my point is that the author with no military experience has no idea what he is talking about.
Just because he is a hard core anti-leftist does not make him right.
There is too much talk about the Second World War, and how we fought in that war.
The Second World War was a war against industrialized nations, todays war is against a rootless insurgency chalk and cheese.
Second World war tactics would do more damage than good.
If The Soviets had invaded West Europe then the tactics we used in the Second World War would of been correct.
My country fought a war against the IRA, we also fought a war with Argentina over the Falklands, we used different tactics different strategy, one was against a terrorist organisation, one against a conventional military.
We are winning in Iraq, and we are winning because we are fighting the correct war at the correct time with the correct tactics and strategy, and if freepers who support the war cant see that, then how in hells name is your President going to persuade those who are wavering or anti war.
Its not your fault, as I have said before and in fact it is recognized by your Military who have released a paper on this, your average American civilian has no idea whats happening and who is winning or losing.
Hopefully within the next year the message will be coming out clearer.
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