Posted on 07/29/2007 6:37:13 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Public opinion, of course, can change. In 1973, 1974 and 1975, Congress undoubtedly felt it was reflecting the country's disillusionment with the Vietnam War, and it forced a disengagement over the Nixon administration's strong objection. Yet military historians are coming to a consensus that by the end of 1972, there was a much-improved balance of forces in Vietnam, reflected in the 1973 Paris agreement, and that Congress subsequently pulled the props out from under that balance of forces -- dooming Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.
Today, Congress, too, faces a pivotal choice on Iraq. The moment that Congress enacts a law constricting the president's freedom of action in Iraq, it buys a considerable share of responsibility for the war's outcome. Will tomorrow's narrative be that the strategic military situation in Iraq was starting to improve in 2007 but Congress pulled the plug anyway -- emboldening Islamist extremists throughout the region and demoralizing all our friends? If so, perhaps it's not President Bush who needs political cover from his opponents but they who want political cover from
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
In 1973, 1974 and 1975, Congress undoubtedly felt it was reflecting the country's disillusionment with the Vietnam War, and it forced a disengagement over the Nixon administration's strong objection. Yet military historians are coming to a consensus that by the end of 1972, there was a much-improved balance of forces in Vietnam, reflected in the 1973 Paris agreement, and that Congress subsequently pulled the props out from under that balance of forces -- dooming Indochina to a bloodbath.
For a bunch of hidebound, brass-hatted liberals to admit that their party threw the Vietnam War and that the verdict of history is coming down against them, is an absolutely stunning departure from their usual selfrighteous, obfuscatory party line.
Now they might also admit that the conservatives got there first, even before the historians, and that we were right all along.
I fear a segislative defeat as well.
;)
Ping.
Rodman is a guest editorialist and doesn’t reflect the views of the editorial board at the WaPo. He’s also not a raging liberal.
Peter W. Rodman (born November 24, 1943 in Boston). Educated in at Harvard College (A.B. summa cum laude), Oxford University (B.A., M.A.), and Harvard Law School (J.D.). In March 2007 he left his position as United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs to become a Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution [1]. He is the author of More Precious Than Peace, a book on the Cold War in the Third World in which he praises the Reagan administration for warding off communism in places like Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia. He is one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, Project for the New American Century letter sent to the U.S. President Bill Clinton. He has worked extensively with Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, amongst other things helping him write his memoirs. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, Vice President and member of the Board of Directors of the World Affairs Council of Washington, DC 1, and a Fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of SAIS 1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rodman
Mind you, he is invoking the muse of history against the liberal Democrats.
The bottom line is that you have to read the article so that you can assess from the source’s words first hand what the bottom line is. This goes for all media reporting, be it TV news, talk radio, newspapers, blogs and blog commentary. Too many people rely on the filtered words of others to form their opinions. Worse yet, too many form their opinions by merely adopting the opinions of others without doing their due diligence.
Sorry for the rant.
It has also been pointed out that the reason Nixon was defeated by Watergate was because of a lack of political acumen.
The democrat party was terrified beyond belief that Nixon would begin an investigation as to why Vietnam had been so poorly managed from the start, how this had unnecessarily cost many American lives and turned many of our victories into defeats. The Kennedy but mostly LBJ administrations, Congressional meddling, MSM propaganda and vicious attacks against our military, and the radicalism in many universities indoctrinating students against the war effort.
So they *began* the Watergate investigations over a trivial matter, NOT to bring down Nixon, but so as to have a bargaining chip which could be dropped in exchange for Nixon not utterly destroying the democratic party.
But Nixon, inexplicably, *didn’t* start that investigation.
So they decided to run with Watergate, a petty affair indeed, hoping to capitalize on their enemies weakness. And they did, and it did, to the point of bringing down Nixon.
And Nixon couldn’t see the forest for the trees. That and his bizarre and ineffectual WH subordinates, should have been purged by Nixon early on, but he gave them far too much undeserved loyalty.
The history of the United States would have been clearly different had Nixon attacked, instead of just defended. A point that should not be lost on George W. Bush, who has been assailed for far too long without punishing the democrats for their treachery and disloyalty to the nation, their scheming and undermining of our war effort, their obstruction and offensiveness in our halls of power, and their general need of a good, royal butt kicking.
As well as their allies in the MSM and academia.
That's all.
Where have you seen that thesis propounded? I was following the news at the time and had no such impression.
I've never heard these ideas from any conservative, either.
I don’t expect anyone to refute him. They have these guest editorialists to prove how balanced they are and nothing else should be read into this editorial.
As for invoking the muse of history, he’s expressed his opinion (an informed one I think) but it’s just his opinion. You won’t find any liberals who agree with that and just because this is in the WaPo you shouldn’t assume this marks a change of heart by liberals regarding Vietnam.
Quoting him,
Yet military historians are coming to a consensus.....
That would appear to be a statement of fact concerning a new consensus and therefore stronger than just his opinion.
But your point about the function of the article editorially and the weight of liberal opinion probably remaining elsewhere is well taken. My first impression was that Rodman is a Post writer or contributor. The latter he is, but as the Wiki points out, not necessarily a participant in their culture. Although he is spending time at Brookings.
I would seperate military historians from the general population of historians. In any case, he doesn’t cite sources. It’s pretty much a throw away line unless he backs it up with specifics.
I’m surprised to find anyone from Brookings that isn’t waving a white flag... however, he looks at Iraq as a partisan, political issue. And therein lies majorl reason why we are not acheiving our objectives... and giving jihadists worldwide a cause for glee.
You can see something of a parallel in the current democrat investigations going on right now. What were later called the Watergate investigations began *before* the Watergate hotel break-in, as multiple fishing expeditions. Or, as the Wiki calls it, “a group of scandals.”
The equivalent today would be if the democrats combined some of the 300 or more investigations currently under way, including the Valerie Plame investigation, the legal firings of the federal prosecutors, the repeated efforts to attack Karl Rove, the executive privilege contempt citations, etc., all under some catchy label.
And unfortunately, like Nixon, Bush has not counterattacked but played defense.
The major difference is that the democrats are not doing it out of fear, as they were during the time of Nixon, but political greed, hoping for a repeat, at least enough to boost themselves before the next election. Hillary Clinton, I might add, worked as part of the Watergate investigations.
At the time, the democrats were very aware of the possibility that Nixon could have destroyed them. Nixon, after all, had been very prominent in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations that had destroyed much of the communist infiltration into government. They were still very scared of him.
He could have nailed a LOT of prominent leftists for breaking all sorts of laws by dealing with the North Vietnamese, committing various acts of treason, war profiteering (like LBJ, who made a fortune with his shipping company), general mismanagement of the war, etc.
Importantly, with John Mitchell as attorney general, a man who would have gleefully done this, I can see why they were shaking in their boots.
But he didn’t. And you won’t find a war not waged in the newspapers. Any more than at the time you would have seen anyone in the media criticize Walter Cronkite for lying about the Tet Offensive. That didn’t happen until decades later.
To get Hillary elected we will slowly see a shift toward support of the Iraq war
What were later called the Watergate investigations began *before* the Watergate hotel break-in, as multiple fishing expeditions. Or, as the Wiki calls it, “a group of scandals.”
Do you have a link to that Wikipedia article? Given the liberal bent of the Wiki publishers and the fierce determination of liberal and "progressive" (Stalinist) activists to "define" the issues discussed in Wikipedia, it's a little surprising that Wiki's publishers and referees would allow a statement impugning the Watergate investigators to stand. Especially since they included, as you point out and as we were all aware, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The major difference is that the democrats are not doing it out of fear, as they were during the time of Nixon, but political greed.....
I agree that political "greed", partisanship, and vindictiveness are the Rats' drivers right now, but you still haven't sold me the idea that the Watergate investigations were anything but what Bob Woodward told us at the time: an investigation of the Watergate break-in, espionage, and political grabass, by a couple of Washington Post reporters.
The idea that Nixon was going to/could have gone after people like John Kerry, Jane Fonda, the Berrigan brothers, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Ramsey Clark, Morton Halperin, Daniel Ellsberg, leftwing agitprop specialists like Angela Davis, Nicholas von Hoffman and David Horowitz at Ramparts, and the Mobe organizers for dancing with KGB Active Measures, or supertermite Clark Clifford and others for "throwing" the war, is appealing to old conservatives, but I never saw any inclination at the time on Nixon's part to do such a thing, old investigator though he was, or on the part of anyone in his administration. Perhaps becoming part of an administration turns everyone into harem eunuchs and houseboys. But I never even heard of any fire in the belly outside the little circle that included Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.
For one thing, with what would Nixon have investigated the people working to pull him down? He didn't have a divided Congress, he had a solidly liberal, Democratic Congress full of people like Birch Bayh and Gaylord Nelson and Shirley Chisholm. He had the Justice Department -- period. And it was full of Johnson Administration holdovers and J. Edgar Hoover at FBI. By the time of the Watergate hearings, Hoover was gone and Nixon had his own man at last, but as long as he was there, Hoover didn't cooperate with anyone he didn't feel like cooperating with, and he had the goods on everybody -- "having the goods" was his fiefdom.
I don't see the potential for a Nixon move against the contemporary 'Rat Establishment, and I certainly didn't hear anything about it at the time. Maybe Pat Buchanan could illuminate us, or Henry Kissinger, but I don't see it.
You also have the question of effectual pursuit and prosecution. The FBI spent years pursuing Bernadine Dohrn and other SDS/Weatherman leaders and never found them: they went to ground in the population that had spawned them and became invisible. And assuming we are talking about prosecutions and not just a pogrom of the Left such as those that cleaned out the Indonesian PKI and the Chilean MNR, terminating imminent Communist takeovers of both countries, just how would Nixon bring his massive case against the sellout Left to a successful conclusion in court?
Do you have any press clips showing the Democrats displaying fear of what Nixon might investigate or turn up?
Nixon's Plumbers went after the nexus between Lawrence O'Donnell at DNC and Teddy Kennedy. That was a good place to start, if one wanted political intelligence. But if Ted Kennedy had improper relationships (as has been alleged recently) to KGB assets, how would they turn up in phone calls to O'Donnell? It should have been Kennedy's phone that was bugged. Furthermore, the Plumbers themselves gave information during the hearings that Nixon's motive in tapping the DNC phones was to get early warning of any move by Kennedy to secure the 1972 nomination to run against Nixon. That was what occupied Nixon's thoughts at that time, not multiple Rat conspiracies.
Good post. IMHO Nixon was one of the smartest men in modern times to hold the office. His problem was he didn’t inspire loyalty. Dean and others could have taken the hit and he would have survived.
Also, Nixon might have survived if we knew “deep throat” was Mark Felt. Revenge is not a pretty emotion and the public might have been more tolerant of Nixon’s mistakes. The Republican senators panicked and might have held the line if Felt’s actions had been revealed.
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