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If I have dinner with Kari I'll suggest it. If I remember . . . |
Posted on 12/19/2007 6:59:14 AM PST by april15Bendovr
I heard recently on the Rush Limbaugh show this quote.
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
After I used this quote I have been informed that this memoir is listed as a Urban Legend.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_general_giap.htm
Can anyone help me prove that this "False status" in itself is an urban legend?
Rush states he is right 90% of the time so I figured I had a 10% chance of being wrong.
I think it would be quite difficult to prove or disprove the claim that Giap never conceded what has been suggested because just about everything he ever said or wrote 1)was uttered either in Vietnamese or French and 2)was uttered to friendly individuals/groups.The Vietnam war was,in part,a proxy war.A proxy war in that our true adversaries,the Russians and Chinese,had allowed (compelled?) their revolutionary brothers and sisters in Vietnam to do the fighting and dying.
You can check McCain's biographies, for example. McCain and Jeremiah Denton later noted that they could tell when the bombing was having an effect, even from inside their prisons.
Supposedly the quote is posted and documented at the Vietnam War Memorial in Hanoi. Someone who has been there just needs to speak up.
I would add that this didn’t seem to be something Giap would say-—he was more involved in the tactical situation in the South, not the STRATEGIC situation in the North. It is entirely possible the quotation is accurate, but it needs to be attributed to someone else.
One more source. You shold look at a book called “The Transformation of American Air Power,” by Benjamin Lambeth. It sounds like something he would have found.
“America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.”
So all we really needed to do to win was squelch democracy, protest and dissent?
“We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.”
Master of the obvious.
...former Colonel Bui Tin who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese Army and received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30,1975, confirmed the American Tet 1968 military victory: "Our loses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for reelection. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to reestablish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was." On strategy: "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war. It was the only way we could bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units, etc. Our operations were never compromised by attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage, but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out the bottom. If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson and it didn't worry us. We had plenty of time to prepare alternative routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people for months if a harvest was damaged. The Soviets bought rice from Thailand for us. And the left: "Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9AM to follow the growth of the antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and would struggle along with us ... those people represented the conscience of America ....part of it's war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor."
Until recently according to Snopes Hillary wasn’t a liar when she said that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary.
Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap (The Warriors) (Paperback)
by Cecil B. Currey (Author)
I think that this is one source of the quote.
The protest movement was NOT about Democracy.
It was about advancing Communism. Jane Fonda was not a peace protester. She was a North Vietnamese SUPPORTER. A traitor.
“If you knew what communism truly was, you would get on your hands and knees and pray that one day we [U.S.] would be communist.” - Jane Fonda (exact phrasing may by slightly different) at University of Michigan (November 21, 1970)
John Kerry’s busy looking for a pen to sign his 180 form.
Just think how truly wrong America was, via its liberal democrat nuts, to deny our allies support so they could defend themselves against a communist ofensive. The liberals are not happy unless friends of America are killed, imprisoned, and their countries turned into enemies. That is how insane the left is.
According to ‘snopes’ the entire Clinton body count is false. Of course their analysis itself contains many ommissions and errors.
We paid a high price [during the Ted[sic] offensive] but so did you [Americans]... not only in lives and materiel[sic].... Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. ... The most important result of the Ted[sic] offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory....The sense of that quotation is very much along the lines of the internet legend quotation, IMHO.The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.
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If I have dinner with Kari I'll suggest it. If I remember . . . |
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