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 ...
Ping
Nailed it. I was aware of the 60's election theft, but, you're right.
Maybe, like, FDR, the "rest of the story" will someday surface.
history repeating itself bookmark
*ping*
We don't know how JFK lived, and it still is not certain how he died.
No conspiracy there.
The Cuban missile crisis was a direct result of Kennedy's massive failure at the Bay of Pigs.
Had he supported the invasion there would never have been a communist government to accept any armament of any type that would threaten us.
Kennedy was no hero in October.
He caused it.
BFLR = Bump for later reading
Quid Pro Quo.
Ain't life grand?
bttt
There is no big antiwar movement because there is no draft. When Nixon ended the draft, the antiwar movement went away. Charlie Rangel knows this and this is why he keeps agitating to re-institute the draft. He wants to gallop backward to the old chaos of the "New Left."
In 1984, when Reagan was running for re-election, he could and did boast that "not one inch of territory" had been lost to the Communists on his watch. It was not just a straw man. It was a real turnaround from the prevailing trend.
Really? I recall that up to his death he was sending over more and more groups of "advisors", about 40,000 by 11/63, without ever rallying the nation to send troops in the open. Eg, his first SOTU speech only mentioned VN in passing, as one of several places freedom was at risk. I agree though that Kennedy had little commitment to VN despite his brave inaugural proclamations.
here's a nice part of the works exposing the MSM warping of the Vietnam era...
Three Big Lies About the Vietnam War
by Michael Medved
https://www.treefarmtapes.com/catalog/product.asp?productid=14142
Hardly. If we had fought VietNam like we fought WW II we would have nuked Hanoi, or at least carpet bombed it for the duration and sent the Navy and Marines in to occupy the port of Haiphong. We fought VN like the anti-WWII.
Ping
Good point.
Hellacious ping. There's even a bonus Sheehan in here for you.
-excerpt-
Undermining South Vietnam's leader
During 1963, in contrast to later years, the American press corps largely favored American involvement in Vietnam. Many also believed, however, that the South Vietnamese president had to be replaced before the war could be won. Perhaps not fully aware of cultural differences, they faulted Mr. Diem for refusing to afford dissidents – and US reporters – the same freedoms they enjoyed in peacetime America.
Diem mishandled the Buddhist protests of mid-1963, they contended, by using a heavy hand instead of offering concessions. In truth, Diem did make concessions initially, but the Buddhists responded by accelerating their protests, enumerating more fictitious grievances, and demanding Diem's removal. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow largely dismissed Diem's contention that the Buddhists were infiltrated with Communist agents, yet newly available Communist sources reveal that Diem was correct.
The Buddhists' unopposed insolence in the summer of 1963 undermined the Diem government's prestige, something no Vietnamese government could afford for long. Eventually, Diem's generals recommended that the government arrest the Buddhist movement's leaders and disperse the other protesters in order to restore its prestige. Diem consented and worked together with generals in executing the mission.
But then Halberstam and Sheehan published tendentious stories accusing Diem of acting without the knowledge of the military, citing "highly reliable" – but anonymous – sources. They also published stories stating that the officer corps was upset with Diem for his treatment of the Buddhists, based heavily on information from a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who, unbeknownst to them, was actually a Communist agent. The stories were not true.
Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow would play crucial roles in events that fomented the coup that removed Diem on Nov. 1, 1963. Their anti-Diem information, much of it from ill-informed or agenda-driven sources, gave Diem's opponents in the US government the reasons they needed to remove what they considered to be an ineffective allied government. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge accepted their reports, spurring him to incite the coup.
Because the war went very poorly for the South Vietnamese after Diem's overthrow and assassination, the three journalists soon faced accusations that they had helped wreck the South Vietnamese government. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow skillfully produced a defense, one they have maintained to this day.
By taking a few pieces of evidence out of context, they asserted that the South Vietnamese war effort had been wrecked before Diem's death rather than after it, something that they had not claimed at the time. They were thus able to convince the American people that Diem had ruined the country and that the press had been right in denouncing him.
A multitude of previously untapped American and Vietnamese Communist sources show that the South Vietnamese war effort actually was thriving until the very end of Diem's life.
Diem's armed forces hurt the Communists far more seriously than Americans have been led to believe. So, too, did his poorly understood "strategic hamlets," fortified South Vietnamese communities stocked with government cadres and militiamen.
When the war became unpopular in America during the late 1960s, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow stopped expressing support for the US defense of South Vietnam. They ridiculed the principal American rationale for war – the so-called domino theory, which predicted that the fall of South Vietnam would lead to the fall of the other countries in the region. When many of the dominoes did not fall after South Vietnam fell in 1975, they held it up as proof that they were right.
bttt
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