Posted on 01/22/2007 6:51:58 AM PST by kellynla
With ever-increasing frequency, Americans are told that Iraq is another Vietnam, usually by those accusing the Bush administration of miring the United States in a hopeless war. For most who make this comparison, the Vietnam War was an act of hubris, fought for no good reason and in alliance with cowards. But new historical research shows this conventional interpretation of Vietnam to be deeply flawed. The analogy, therefore, must be rethought.
Three journalists handed down the standard version of the Vietnam War in three bestselling tomes. The first two, David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" (1972) and Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," (1983) each sold more than 1 million copies, while the third, Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" (1988), received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
These books have profoundly influenced almost everything else that has been written about the Vietnam War. Because of the iconic status of these journalists and the political inclinations of the intelligentsia, the three books received few serious challenges – prior to the publication last summer of my "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965."
Historians such as Guenter Lewy, Lewis Sorley, and Michael Lind have also effectively contested some of the journalists' basic interpretations, and antiwar historians have produced more modest modifications, but the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow rendition of the war has remained dominant.
One reason for the durability of their version is that the endless repetition by other commentators produced the impression that it had to be right. Earlier, when writing a book on counterinsurgency in the latter years of the war entitled "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey," I, too, presumed that the first half of the war had been covered exhaustively.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Moyar was on C-SPAN's BookTV this weekend and had a number of interesting comments about Diem...considered him a true nationalist (comparing him favorably to al-Maliki in that regard).
We are already seeing the results of the MSM relying on spurious or agenda-driven 'interpreters' or stringers or sources like the mysterious Capt. Hussein.
In November of 1963, JFK was executed.
A lot of people thought that Jack and Bobby had a hand in the Patrice Lamumba (sp?) hit too.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Hmmm... Where have I heard that before?
The media is also ignoring the bigger picture...again.
It would be like focusing on only the battle for Iwo Jima and saying we cannot win because of the daily casualty count for our side only and not that we gain a base in the enemy's homeland. Thereby saving tens to hundreds of thousands of lives later.
I find it absolutely disgusting.
Tokyo Rose broadcasting from our own country.
THanks for the post. Folks ask why no big anti-war movement today?
One answer may be that the KGB is no longer around to fund such things....
No KGB ... also, no draft. You still get the odd, occasional nutburger pretentiously refusing to deploy, but everybody knows that nobody is wearing an American uniform, who did not volunteer. The all-volunteer military has denied the leftist domestic enemy one of its favourite points of protest. One cannot dodge the draft when there is no draft.
Only in that the Left and the Presstitutes are prevaricating again as they did then.
The two Kennedy boys were strong anti communists in their early years. The RATs ignore the fact that Bobby was council to Joe McCarthy; that Joe was Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's Godfather and that John contributed money to Nixon to defeat Helen Gahagan Douglas's run for Senator from California in 1950.
There is not much doubt that if JFK was alive today and adhering to most of his positions, he would be considered a rabid hawk, maybe, by today's standards, a conservative even.
JFK was a chickenhawk, in that he loved the Grand Gesture, but the minute things got dicey, he was willing to cut and run. Eisenhower begged JFK NOT to escalate our efforts in VietNam, but to support the war financially and with massive technical assistance.
He started of our real involvement militarily in ViietNam with a big bang, but began whimpering very very fast. Of coursre, it was LBJ who really escalated our involvement, while at the same time, hogtieing the military.
He started of our real involvement militarily in ViietNam with a big bang, but began whimpering very very fast.
Same thing he did to the men at The Bay of Pigs...
His book is excellent.
His book is excellent. We were winning when I left, too.
I wonder to this day if, had the Russians decided to run the Cuban blockade, JFK really would have attacked the violator(s).
Thank God Kruschev blinked first...
This, unfortunately, is the version the Camelot Spin Machine successfully sold the country. Kruschev was so emboldened by what he considered his success against JFK that we wound up with the Berlin Wall, our military position in Turkey compromised and Soviet troops AND missiles left in Cuba.
The Cuban Missile Crisis as a JFK coup de main was cut from whole cloth and entered the history texts exactly as JFK might have wished. The stolen election of 1960 was a watershed event in our history ... the triumph of pure bullshiite over whatever semblance of reason was left to us.
In fact, I dare say there isn't any real history of the SOB out yet ... just hagiography.
Another myth is that Khruschev was removed because he "backed down" in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He was removed because he tried to grow wheat in the tundra, with disastrous results.
No, the Vietnam war was lost in the way we tried to fight it. We tried to pretend it was like WWII.
Certainly worth posting and reminding people that the 'received' version is not the accurate one. Iraq and Vietnam share only the still-valid American vision of the Just Cause which brings the vanquished to 'the prosperity of peace', promotes human dignity and human rights for all, and upholds the value that civilization must prevail over barbarism. This has certainly proven true for Vietnam, which today is a thriving country, enjoying the prosperity of peace after 1000 years of war. Halberstam et al offered a micro-vision of the causes, stresses, and intrigues, while overlooking entirely the macro-view, the larger picture, of the place of the American involvement in Vietnam in the history of civilizing forces.
Hey, it ain't the commies' fault that they were hit with 85 years of bad weather as soon as they took over. But, you know, with Global Warming and all, maybe today's new Russkis will finally succeed in matching the wheat production achieved under the Czar.
Khruschev was removed because he "backed down"...
This is now of course, common knowledge, thanks to the incredibly efficient Kennedy Camelot Spin Machine. But IMHO, the worst thing the incurably venereally diseased JFK did was serve as a role model for BJ Clinton ... convincing the Arkansas clymer he could run the country in 2 hours a day and devote the rest of his free time to manic sexual adventures.
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