Posted on 08/24/2007 8:12:59 AM PDT by kellynla
Notice how all the PC Media clowns, like Jimmy here, are going into hysterics because Bush shoved their own rhetoric about Iraq = Vietnam back on them.
Absurd nonsense. Bush was factually dead on in each and every example he used. Only a brain dead political bigot who is simply ignorning all factual reality to cling to his partisan political dogma could write that statement. This Jim Hoagland is a brain dead clown.
They never get tired of the old chickenhawk argument do they.
Some history, liberals prefer to revise.
Other history, they prefer to ignore.
The above falls in the latter group.
Maybe old Jim here doesn’t realize there is a significant difference of people living under communist rule and terrorist rule... or has he forgotten like so many others that 9/11 was a misison carried out by these murderers or that they have cut off heads, burned bodies, and God knows what other kinds of torture to American servicemen...
Jim here is in a state of denial these type must have victory shoved down their throat... “For the Good of the Country”
The Surge is Working and the Rats are in the Trap
Missed this Destorters outrage of his side’s citing Nam for the past 5 years???
Pray for W and Our Troops
Iraq is not Vietnam because the enemy is not backed by the arms industrial might of a super power (i.e Soviet Union and China) that can provide unlimited amounts of weapons as long as the Iraqi insurgents and jihadist can provide the manpower. Most of the fighters are Iraqis, whose population is not as large as Vietnam. These jihadist and insurgents do not have a sanctuary country (DMZ, Cambodia) that is off limits to US operations to rest, regroup and rebuild. The free Iraqis army/police is not beset by the corruption of generals/colonels skimming soldiers’ pay (US pays the Iraqi soldier directly) and destroying the moral of the soldiers to fight. Nation building strategy chosen by GWB (not my personal approach, but that is another matter) is the long way to establish US presence in Iraq to take on the other terror sponsor nations in the future is not an unwinnable approach, though vulnerable to domestic anti war and war impatient US public. The MSM and US public keep forgetting that every year we are in Iraq, the Iraqi army and police gets larger and larger, and more combat experienced. Eventually, the Iraqis will be able to fight the war on their own and the US forces pared down to become a backup force and trip wire against Iranian invasion. The screwed up government of Iraq will face elections when their term is up. Since they cannot come up with a political solution to stablize society, they will be voted out and replaced by one who can. Also the South Vietmanese army was a conscript army where men were conscripted by impressment gangs. Many did not want to die for corrupt government and officers. During battle many of the Vietmanese troops broke and ran in combat, or their officers chose to avoid combat (casualties means a smaller payroll to skim off of). The Iraqi army and police is a volunteer force which has no shortage of volunteers. AQ brutality is our best recruiter. From my DoD contacts in Iraq, there are always long lines at the police and army recruitment offices. If the average Iraqis don’t give a damn about their government, there will be no lines or volunteers.
Hoagland probably distorted the facts of Vietnam back in the day. These clowns lied so much about Vietnam that they have to continue the lie to cover their asses.
Bush did not link Iraq to Vietnam. The Dems did. He finally clarified and set the record straight on facts that the Dems would rather keep from the uninformed populace. Liberals are masters at rewriting history (or even current events, for that matter). We really need to do a better job of calling them on it every time they try to do it.
Iraq will be Teddy’s last chance to stab a few million more people in the back.
It appears so. The Pres actually knows some history, the others make it up like amateurs or outright propagandists.
And the reason they are going so hysteric about this speech is W is rubbing their noises in the oceans of blood that is on their hands from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The insurgency in Iraq is indeed back by substantial power, the Sunni money that has supplied the insurgency since it began cranking up in late summer, 2003 and has been used to supply arms and recruits through Syria, a sanctuary state. Once it became clear that they were safe from American invasion, the Syrians became the chief funnel of supply for Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents. Beginning with the spring of 2004, a defacto alliance between Syria and Iran was begun and it has continued to this day.
All of which they blame on American intervention in 1954. They arge: If we had not intervened to keep Vietnam from being unified under the Viet Minh, We would not have been drawn into the war the way we were. They thought of Ho as an nationalist hero, who had fought to rid the country of the evil colonial rule of the French. They are motivated by an anti-anti-communism.
Despite the track record they will never admit that communism is identical with tyranny. No matter what evil deeds the communists are guilty of, the always excuse these deeds by claiming that the Communists were driven to it by the evil imperialists.
As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left is portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel’s book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the “ruling class.” All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that “while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death.” The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. The North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. The antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland’s request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. The final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I didn’t recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. In that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that “We Gotta Get Outta this Place,” to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Interesting that Hoagland criticizes the lack of a unity government in Iraq while setting forth the proposition that the disunity in our own country is justifiable.
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