[robowombat]

Your extended commentary is very much to the point. There is another aspect of the depressing domestic history of the Viet Nam conflict that gets little examination. That is why the national leadership class fell apart over the conflict. When faced near simultaneously with the Tet Offense and in Korea the Blue House raid and the seizure of the USS Pueblo the top echelon of the civilian leadership collapsed into confusion that bordered on panic. The appropriate responses would have invoked the wrath of the left but so what. Why did the 'leaders of the Free World' show such spinelessness in face of an at best medium level threat situation? Watching this meltdown from the sidelines as I completed college and prepared to enter the military gave me a deep seated queasy feeling.

Beyond this issue is the bigger issue of how and why the academic and intellectual establishment became subverted by what were for all intents crypto-communists. I first noticed this with the near religious adulation Fidel Castro and his thugs were given by many liberal academics and intellectuals. Sidney Hook or some other veteran of the twilight struggle against the commies noted that a movement and a leader that makes the gun its symbol after taking power is wed to the cult of revolutionary violence and will only become more tyrannical as time passes. This thought was completely dismissed by Castro's large US cheering section. His appeal amazed me and (back then I was pretty much a New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier liberal) it was bothersome that so many major academic and intellectual figures didn't take one look at the man and see that he was a sort of red Hitler figure.

The emergence of the progressively more radical faction of the liberal left and its effective mau-mauing of academia, the intellectual establishment and eventually the Democratic Party is the elephant in the living room of liberal America that they don't and won't recognize. The incredible rage and hatred displayed by left liberals during the latest presidential campaign are all to familiar and disturbing to those who lived through the awful period from 1963 to 1975 and then watched the buzzards come home to roost during the Carter administration.

[traviskicks]

thnx! It is just distressing to me to have been taught in school that the Vietnam war was a failure and that the domino therory was propogated by paranoid Mcarthyite skitzoids. We were taught nothing of the evils of communism.

I still think many people in my generation (mid 20s) have had these REAL MYTHS brainwashed into their heads by history books and the media.

Vietnam was lost by the criminal incompetence of the Johnson administration, including him and McNamera lying on multiple occasions to the American people, and the Nixon Administration (which was by this time so handicapped by public opinion and foolish campaign promises that he couldn't do anything anyway).

As my previous point illustrated, the domino theory was exactly what happened. Millions were killed and subjagated because of the American withdawl. It is lucky that Communism didn't advance farther then it did.

Throughout the whole Cold war period we had no proper national security strategy to deal with the military and propoganda threat of communism as they exported revolution all over the world.

I remember watching a documentary about Bush and one of his friends in texas. His friend said:

"yea we were all big Goldwater Republicans. We thought that if Goldwater had been elected in 1964 - the Vietnam war would have ended in 1964"

I think he's exactly right!

The brave soldiers and veterans of the US armed forces were betrayed by the leaders of this country, the journalists of this country, and (to some extent) some of the people of this country. It is appaling that the only people who were actually doing the RIGHT thing and fighting to save lives and advance freedom, the US soldiers and veterans, were the ones disparaged the most.

It is, like almost all of liberalism, 180 degrees from where the blame should lie. Instead, Kerry claims he was a big hero when he advocated exactly what he accused the Conservatives of doing (bringing death and despair to south east asia). Yet somehow people don't see this...

If we had just followed the "Powell Doctorine" of applying overwhelming force we could have won that war in a year - had the national leadership been willing to do so.
To this day, people don't realize what a threat communism is and was. Here is another excerpt from what I posted earlier:

Communism is the greatest evil that man has ever known. It is responsible for more than 100 millions deaths (more than all the wars in history combined), millions and millions of refugees and the subjugation and slavery of over 2 billion people since WWII. Communist regimes always follow a similar pattern. A Communist regime has never been elected, so first Communists must orchestrate a revolution, often with the support of funding from preexisting Communist regime. Next, Communists dissolve private property, nationalize media and begin a brutal purge of political prisoners and the upper classes. To conduct it's class warfare and maintain control of the revolting people, the state will militarize, establish a large secret police presence, and create horrific labor/reeducation camps. The economy collapses, failed farm policies result in starvation, refugees flee, and the government begins to export Communist revolution abroad. How far the government is willing to push the Communist philosophy will directly equate with the severity of these events and the suffering of their people. This exact pattern has come to pass in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Angola, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba. A few countries on this list have not experienced the true hell of Communism because the governments either didn't last long enough to take full root, or total Communist policies were not pursued in earnest.


btw the 'black book of communism' is a great read. And your right, this mistaken view of Vietnam has been applied to South America, Cuba, and any other Communist/Socialist country you can think of (and of course dictators everywhere too).

I think Bush with his 'freedom strategy' has finally taken our foreign policy back where it needs to be. And we can thank Reagan for doing the same thing.