"Mr Oake’s widow, Lesley, sat just feet away from her husband’s killer in court."
Very sad and a very hard thing to do.
http://www.inatoday.com/peoples%20war%2051905.htm
"'PEOPLES WAR'
AND A DANGEROUS FOREIGN POLICY"
MAY 19, 2005
By Toby Westerman
Copyright 2005 International News Analysis Today
www.inatoday.com
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "A "peoples war" against U.S. troops in Iraq is being encouraged by the politicians and generals of Vietnam, a nation which still has a close "ideological relationship" with its giant neighbor to the north, Communist China, according to one U.S. immigrant activist.
Articles appear daily in Vietnam advocating the strategy of a "peoples war" in Iraq and denouncing U.S. "imperialism," declared Vietnamese-American writer and activist Duc Tran in an exclusive interview with International News Analysis Today.
The articles condemning the U.S. and supporting the Islamic militants appear in both Vietnamese and English language newspapers, according to Tran.
The concept of "peoples war," was successfully used against the French and Americans in Southeast Asia. In a "peoples war," small bands of fighters intentionally provoke an overwhelming military response, with the result that a small number of guerrillas may be lost, but the enemy is worn down emotionally and financially. Should women and children be killed during an enemy counter attack, the result for the communist guerrillas is even more positive, because images of dead civilians give the enemy a "bad press."
Leftist media outlets are essential to a successful "peoples war," and are used to emphasize the horror of the attack on the guerrillas - a situation which the U.S. encountered in Vietnam and is again experiencing in Iraq.
Born in 1972, Tran came to the U.S. in 1990 with his family. Tran's father was a member of the South Vietnamese Assembly, and was imprisoned in a labor camp for six years after the fall of the South Vietnam.
From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, the United States supported the anti-communist South Vietnamese government against communist-controlled North Vietnam. Although North Vietnamese military under the direction of General Giap never won a single major victory against U.S. forces, mass street demonstrations in the U.S. and American media hostile to U.S. intentions in Vietnam forced an American withdrawal in 1973. The Democratically controlled Congress cut off all military assistance to South Vietnam, and, in 1975, Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, fell to North Vietnamese forces.
Tran continues to follow events in Vietnam, and warns that U.S. policy toward Vietnam is dangerously uninformed."