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Banned
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Originally Posted by reconmike
I personally think that some embedded reporters should fall "victim" to a few friendly fire incidents, maybe they would learn what should be published or not.
And Host why do you repeatedly quote Reagan on his Vietnam noble cause?
Perhaps you might not have noticed while you were hiding from the US government in those years, but a Democrat started that noble war and Reagan was just trying to remove the defeatest stygma we recieved from all the draft dodging, card burning, Hanoi Jane loving, losers in this country who would not allow us to win that war.
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I quote Reagan because his "noble war" campaign rhetoric was symptomatic of the same politics of denial....the failure to observe, digest, learn from, and then avoid making the same mistakes that get our troops and innocent civilians in places like Vietnam, killed....for nothing....in avoidable "expeditions" that end up showing us what those of us who didn't fall under Reagan's fiction, already knew. Vietnam was a mistake, a series of mistakes, that subsequent generations of US leaders and the populace, could have learned mcuh more from....if not for the "story telling" of Reagan and of his supporters.
That crap is written all over your post, reconmike. The contradictions in your post make it incoherent. You've got a president who has given us another Vietnam, in or own generation, complete with US troops inserted in the midst of a civil war, in a country where the local boys who are of similar age of our own troops, refuse to make the commitment that our troops are ordered to make....to fight for a corrupt and ineffective national government that locals themselves are not willing to fight and die for....
....and you have it wrong, mike...what you refer to as "the defeatest stygma" is the lesson of prudence and discernment in deciding when and where to commit US troops...to place them "under fire", only when it is absolutely necessary.....thanks to the bullshit rhetoric of these two guys....commanding a gullible audience of "the faithful", much more impressionable and willing to believe than any that "Fonda" could ever attract (hell....you and powerclown still believe it.....)...the potential to learn those "lessons" was detoured:
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http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/london.html
“‘Vietnam’ in the New American Century”
....During the 1980 election campaign, Reagan coined the "Vietnam syndrome" metaphor and, in the same speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars conference, redefined the war as a "noble cause."[13]By 1982, then President Reagan was articulating a version of the history of the Vietnam War, every sentence of which was demonstrably false.[14]
By the end of the 1980s, the matrix of illusions necessary for endless imperial warfare was in place and functioning with potency.The two great myths--the spat-upon veteran and postwar POWs--were deeply embedded in the national psyche.What was needed next was erasure of memory of the reality....
......How did we get to Gumpify "Vietnam"?
Throughout the decades that the United States was waging war in Vietnam, no incoming president uttered the word "Vietnam" in his inaugural address.[15]Ronald Reagan, in his 1981 inaugural speech, did include "a place called Vietnam" in his list of battlefields where Americans had fought in the twentieth century.But it was not until 1989 that a newly-elected president actually said anything about the Vietnam War.What he said was: forget it.
It was George Bush the First who broke the silence with these words explicitly calling for erasure:"The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory."Note that by now "Vietnam" was no longer a country or even "a place called Vietnam," as his predecessor had put it. It had become a war, an American war.Or not even a war. It was an American tragedy, an event that had divided and wounded America. Bush's speech went on to blame "Vietnam" for the "divisiveness," the "hard looks" in Congress, the challenging of "each other's motives," and the fact that "our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other." "It has been this way since Vietnam," he lamented.[16]
Two years later, Bush began the war against Iraq with the promise that “this will not be another Vietnam.”[17]Inextricably intertwined with "Vietnam," "Iraq" has also become a construct of simulations, an illusionary reality continually being spun........
.....The fantasy “Vietnam” has proved crucial to launching and maintaining the war against Iraq.In 1991, the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran was invoked to discredit the burgeoning antiwar movement and to create the emotional support necessary to start the war.How this was done is explored brilliantly in the 1998 book The Spitting Image, the landmark study of the spat-upon veteran myth by sociologist Jerry Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran.
The Bush Administration had offered many different reasons for going to war: "liberating" Kuwait; defending Saudi Arabia; freeing all those foreign hostages Iraq was holding (I bet you forgot that one); Saddam as Hitler; the threat to America's oil supplies; the 312 Kuwaiti babies dumped out of incubators by Iraqi soldiers (a fiction concocted by leading PR firm Hill and Knowlton); and so on.But the only one that succeeded in generating the required passion was "Support our troops!Don't treat them like the spat-upon Vietnam vets!"From this flowed the ocean of yellow ribbons on cars and trucks and homes that deluged the American landscape.The yellow ribbon campaign, with its mantra of “Support Our Troops,”"dovetailed neatly," as Lembcke wrote, with that other Vietnam issue "about which the American people felt great emotion: the prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) issue."[19]So finally the war was not about political issues but about people.Which people?Again in Lembcke’s words, "Not Kuwaitis.Not Saudis. . . .The war was about the American soldiers who had been sent to fight it."(20)
In March 1991, gloating over what seemed America's glorious defeat of Iraq, President Bush jubilantly proclaimed to a nation festooned in its jingoist yellow ribbons, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"[20]Kicked?Syndrome?Had Vietnam become America's addiction?Its pathology?
The President's diagnosis proved more accurate than his prognosis.Sixteen months after claiming to have cured us of our Vietnam disease, George Bush was on national TV shouting "Shut up and sit down!" at MIA family members heckling him at the July 1992 annual convention of the National League of Families.....
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....death to the press....shoot the messenger.....ignore Duncan Hunter and Duke Cunningham, and blow the insignificant press reporting, up beyond all rational scale, compared to it's impact.....way to go boys....I'm a yankee doodle dandie.....born on the fourth of july.....
read it again, reconmike.....the "party" line.....report on the war the way we tell you, or lose your embedded status.....or maybe be executed by reconmike......the "liberal press"...the hippies....."Hanoi Jane"....convenient scapegoats trotted out to ignore the spectacle of the Vietnam, "groundhog day", that is Iraq !
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http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...itroom.02.html
THE SITUATION ROOM
Death Toll Climbing for American Troops in Iraq; CNN Sticks to Decision of Showing Dangers Troops Face; Is Do-Nothing Congress At Heart of Broken Government?
Aired October 23, 2006 - 17:00 ET
....BLITZER: Is -- is this appropriate, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Hunter, for the American public to see how awful, to see how brutal the war can actually be?
Because I -- I guess there has been criticism from the other side that we sort of whitewash, and we don't really convey to the American public the full extent of the brutality of the enemy. Do the American people have a right to know what war is like?
HUNTER: Well -- well, first, Wolf, the American people aren't made out of cotton candy. They understand, when you see 2,791 battlefield deaths, that people are killed, and they are killed in bad ways.
This is the first generation of Americans that could actually go online and watch an American be decapitated, have his head cut off by al-Zarqawi, as they watch. So, I would say that, contrary to what you are saying, this is a war in which more brutality is shown than probably any other.
But the point is that -- that this one killing of one American doesn't really tell any statistic. Of -- of the people killed in Iraq, 524 of our Americans have been killed in accidents, mainly automobile accidents. Now, you don't show automobile accidents, because it's not sexy. It's not violent. It doesn't draw a big audience. Showing the impact of a single bullet, a single shooting doesn't tell you anything. If you isolated one American going down on Omaha Beach at Normandy, what would that tell the American public?
BLITZER: Well, let me interrupt...
HUNTER: But how...
BLITZER: ... Mr. Chairman.
HUNTER: But -- but I guess my question to you is -- is, Wolf, how instructive would that be with respect to the conduct of the war? It tells you nothing, except an American was struck by a bullet and went down.
BLITZER: But we never actually showed the impact. And you can take a look at that five-minute report. And you will see that we never saw -- we went to black before that insurgent video, that propaganda video, which we ourselves called it a propaganda piece of footage...
(CROSSTALK)
HUNTER: Then -- then, what's the value, Wolf? What's the possible value, then?
BLITZER: The value -- some of -- some of the thinking -- and let me bring in General Grange on this.
When the Pentagon announces killed in action, they -- they don't refer to snipers specifically. They refer to small-arms fire. And there have been hundreds of American troops who have been killed in small-arms fire. And -- and one of the things that we saw in this video -- and, General Grange, let me let you elaborate -- is the nature of the enemy, how they stalk and try to kill American troops with these kinds of snipers.
But, go ahead, General, and -- and talk a little bit about that.
GRANGE: No, I mean, you can argue whether the tape should be shown or not.
I mean, I just looked back. Since 9/11, I mean, a different -- when you are asked to do a -- to make comment on a different segment, quite often, it's a decision you have to make, at least in my case, as a retired G.I., and working with the media periodically, that I always have a tough decision whether I should even comment or not.
In this case, this thing is shown overseas. And I knew it would be shown in some extent. Thank God that we show it in a -- in a better way than it is showed in its raw footage.
But point is that I guess I cheated a little bit, because we kind of -- my comments were kind of to turn it around and show the -- and capabilities of the enemy in this regard, and -- and how they use civilians for cover, and abuse civilian neighborhoods, and -- and just the way they operate, which is against the land -- rule of land warfare, to expose those things.
So, you know, in a difficult situation like this, showing it or not, I think it's also an opportunity to exploit these guys, and give the information to our people, so we can survive and take them down.
HUNTER: General, I look at it just the opposite.
I think showing Americans being killed by terrorists, with -- apparently, with impunity, because the film doesn't show the terrorists then being pursued and killed. And lots of terrorists who have shot at Americans took their last shot at the Americans, because they themselves were killed in turn.
But showing the world a film, and lots of terrorists out there watching their TV sets, a picture of an American being killed in a crowd by a terrorist who operates, apparently, with impunity, and gets away, is highly suggestive, I think, and highly instructive to them.
And I think it's dangerous to Americans, not only uniformed Americans, but also tourists, Americans who might go abroad and be in one of those crowds one day, when somebody who saw that film, how you just walk up and kill them while they are in a crowd, decides to replicate that action.
BLITZER: All right.
HUNTER: Well, sir, if I may, it's a point well taken. And -- and I recognize that.
And -- and I would say that, in the comments that were said in this, that, in my evaluation, they were not all -- they did not kill a lot of the Americans in this shot. They missed. There were some wounds. And, in fact, the -- they were not that good, and which would have been a different slant, the way it was shown internationally, compared to how it was shown by -- in the United States.
BLITZER: <b>We're almost out of time, Mr. Chairman, but let me just wrap it up.
In your -- your letter, you suggest that CNN reporters no longer be allowed to be embedded with U.S. military forces in Iraq. We have several of our reporters all the time embedded, literally risking their lives, very courageous reporters, whether Michael Ware. John Roberts is embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq right now. And -- and we have -- we have -- we have been doing that for three-and-a-half years.
Are you at least open to this notion that good people, like you and General Grange, can disagree on this, without questioning the -- the credibility, the patriotism of CNN?</b>
<h3>HUNTER: I think that -- I think the question I asked when I saw this, Wolf, is, does CNN want America to win this thing?</h3>
And, if I was a platoon leader there, as I once was, and I had a -- and I had a news organization which had shown, had -- had taken film from the enemy, showing them killing one of my soldiers, and they asked if they could be embedded in my platoon, my answer would be no.
I go back to the -- to the -- the days of guys like Joe Rosenthal, who filmed the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and Ernie Pyle, who was a soldier's reporter, the guys who were on our side -- even though they reported the rough and the tough of the war, they were on our side.
You can't be on both sides. And I would say, if I was that platoon leader, I would say, absolutely not. Take CNN out of there. You can't be on both sides.....
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When asked by Blitzer, Duncan Hunter, corrupt war profiteer and peddler of the influence of his high office, in a "time of war", was not able to,
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Are you at least open to this notion that good people, like you and General Grange, can disagree on this, without questioning the -- the credibility, the patriotism of CNN?
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....disagree.....and neither is reconmike or powerclown....instead, out comes the broad brush...to paint all of those who want the new Vietnam to stop....
as non-patriots who don't support "the troops"...... |