Posted on 07/06/2009 9:51:12 AM PDT by SLB
Nor Maxwell Taylor, nor the Bundy brothers, nor Walt Rostow nor Eugene Rostow nor Ambassador Lodge nor Ellsworth Bunker nor Allen Dulles nor any of the other New Mandarin Ivy League smartasses that got us into it -- and then walked away: "the best and the brightest". They all had feet of clay, but walked around like chryselephantine gods.
And that includes, you, Henry the K. I'm talking about you over here.
Why was the North off limits?
Thank you.
As a Vietnam Veteran (1970 - 1971), I am keeping a close eye on prostrate problems that might be cropping up now. I have a close friend who was there from 1965 - 1966 and is battling prostrate cancer. At least the VA is providing decent treatment.
You've got to have that wrong. Everything has to be Bush's fault. /s
He was a mandarin. A Darwinian superman. A walking bag of super-duper DNA, radiating brainpower like a nuclear reactor.
Didn't you get the memo?
They'd be well qualified to play football for the University of Florida!(j/k) :)
Didn’t want to draw the Russians in if we went to hard against NV.
I never really understood - apparently only someone as smart as McNamara could.
So far as I got it the reason was if we really went to war against the North (as they had gone to war against us in the South) we might make them really mad at us, or might bring in the Chicoms or might bring criticism from the "international community." Plus, McNamara seemed to think if he only applied a little pressure and then gradually increased pressure against the North they'd come to their senses and negotiate a peace deal.
Then there were various suspensions of bombing what targets McNamara would allow us to bomb to give the North an opportunity to sue for peace, none of which went anywhere.
If Obama could ever bring himself to go to war, his ilk would probably fight it in a similar fashion, with one hand tied behind his back.
Look at a map of Vietnam. See what Country is on it’s Northern border? That’s why.
“I’ll never understand how this man’s ego let him believe that he knew more about military tactics than graduates of West Point and Annapolis.”
Tying the hands of the military while escalating the war will be LBJ and McNamara’s legacy! My husband a Nam vet will never forgive those two for what they did! May they both rot in he!!.
Yeah, my dad, a Nam vet, pretty much still hates them ever after they are dead. He tells me Westmoreland was “handcuffed” the whole time by those morons.
“So far as I got it the reason was if we really went to war against the North (as they had gone to war against us in the South) we might make them really mad at us, or might bring in the Chicoms or might bring criticism from the “international community.” Plus, McNamara seemed to think if he only applied a little pressure and then gradually increased pressure against the North they’d come to their senses and negotiate a peace deal.”
I think your second point is more important. McNamara personally chose targets, ordnance, and even approach and departure routes as a way of sending various “signals” to the NVN. For instance, when the first SAM sites went up in NVN in the spring of 1965, McNamara in his folly placed them off-limits as a way of “signaling” the enemy not to use the missiles. The NVN, of course, were actually under attack and such an idea probably never occurred to them, except to shake their heads in wonderment at the stupidity of the American leadership. Only after several US aircraft were shot down did McNamara respond and order the sites attacked, giving plenty of opportunity for them to be moved or reinforced into “flak traps” in the meantime. Losses were heavy in the resulting strikes.
The magnitude of the attacks was more than adequate to do the job, it was the nature of the attacks that made them ineffective.
Myra is showing her own ignorance in comparing Southern Hill country people to Ghetto residents. Some of them are probably not particularly well educated but their IQ scores would be right up there with the best.
A good example of Southern Hill country soldier would be Sgt. York.
My Father was the crew chief in RVN for several F-111's. They had an Edsel grille hung over the maintenance area.
Agent Orange was destroyed by the US Government and Dupont in August 1974 on an incinerator ship off the coast of Mississippi. The Orange was offloaded to the ship at Gulfport. There were over 20 freight cars on the railroad full of the drums that went onto the ship for incineration.
Plenty of Americans were doing the same thing.
When you go to war your objective is to destroy the enemy forces, not "send signals."
But the tiny percent contamination of Agent Orange with dioxin is not as great an impact. Lawyer fodder, not food for thought.
For most of the war the North was not off-limits. Certain targets were; airfields, the storage depots in the middle of Hanoi, the Haiphong docks, etc.
Completely useless targets, like road intersections that could be bypassed or repaired overnight, were added in an apparent attempt to just keep the bombs falling.
If the very fact of the bombing did not provoke the Chinese to intervene, then hitting a few important targets, and making it effective for a change, would not have either. This was proven at the end of the war when Nixon lifted all the restrictions for Operation Linebacker II.
McNamara held back as part of his freakish and utterly immoral “communication by bombing” strategy, a mistaken effort to intimidate the North Vietnamese with the threat that these targets would be hit if the NVN didn’t start negotiating in earnest. This was a propaganda trap, since he could not then hit them without provoking cries of “escalation” from the pro-NVN media.
Pretty cool plane, just not carrier size.
Didn’t know there was any such thing as an incinerator ship.
I was talking to a retired Marine Corps Gunny last week and I guess the Crotch has as many problems as we did.
Oh, brother....
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