[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

Bookmark (no pun intended)

[griswold3]

mark

[Santiago de la Vega]

This is not a limited war and until the US government acknowledges that fact - and attacks Iran and Syria - this war will play out like Viet Nam.

When the fight began, the US President was clear: if you are on the side of crazed mullahs of Islam, you are the enemy and you will be attacked.

After Iran and Syria are disposed of, it's time to send the illegitimate b_st_rds of the Saud line back to the sand they came from.

There can be no sanctuaries for these tyrants.

[Cicero]

This is only "revisionist" history because in the case of Vietnam the revisionist historians got in there first.

When The New York Times published the stolen Pentagon Papers, as a very large supplement to the paper, they were a cause celebre but evidently hardly anyone actually read them. All they knew was that the proved that Nixon and the Pentagon were guilty of all sorts of crimes, and that was good enough for them. If they bought the paperback version, it was to set out as a coffee table book to prove they were with it.

I read the whole thing. The only big surprise was the fact that John F. Kennedy ordered the assassination of Ngo Dhin Diem, which did indeed, unsurprisingly, cause the war effort to collapse and never really recover. From that point on the South Vietnamese were not much help, and we had to send in our own troops to fight in their place. Really, really dumb, as well as plain plum evil, assassinating your ally because he was a Catholic and unpopular in the leftist press.

There's one new detail here that I hadn't seen before. Joseph Mendenhall of the State Department, and Roger Hilsman. I remember Hilsman. A real loser. So, these were the Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame of that era. And Kennedy, who was an incompetent president, fresh off the Bay of Pigs, was dumb enough to listen to them.

Then, of course, Nixon was finally left to pick up the pieces, which he did very well until the liars in the press nailed him and left our allies in Southeast Asia to the tender mercies of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh.

Never forget that in the last days of Vietnam hillary clinton was right in there, helping with the nailing, while her husband-to-be was over in London dodging the draft, organizing peace marches, and betraying his country. And John F'n Kerry was in Paris, helping to advice the North Vietnamese how to win the struggle.

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

"the dismaying conclusion to suggest itself from the 1972 Christmas bombing was that had this kind of air assault been launched in February 1965, the Vietnam war as we know it might have been over within a matter of months, even weeks."

Heartbreaking.

[Yardstick]

*Bumpmark* -- sounds like an important book.

[larryjohnson]

thanks

[ThanhPhero]

Not only was Viet Nam winnable, we won it. Twice, at least. HaNoi was preparing to sue for peace after losing so badly in Tet '68 and again after the Christmas Bombing in '72, but Washington had other ideas.

[Fedora]

Ping.

[jeltz25]

bump

[Bender2]

Bump for later read

[piasa]

bttt

[SuziQ]

I remember reading "A Bright Shining Lie" and seeing Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam", and thinking, "there is more to it than what these men have said". I'll have to read "Triumph Forsaken" to get the other side of the story.

I seem to remember reading in "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young", about the men riding in to the I Drang valley in the helicopters during the battle. They saw what they believed were Chinese soldiers on the ground with the North Vietnamese, helping direct the fighting. They thought they were Chinese, because they were noticeablely larger than the North Vietnamese, and they later found out that radio operators on the ground reported hearing chatter in Mandarin Chinese from the Vietnamese side.

Am I remembering that correctly from the book, Aloha Ronnie?