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Originally Posted by Ustwo
There was once a time when Rosanne Bar was the most watched show in America. Walter was a liberal who looked conservative and respectable with a good voice. If he were to start again today he would just be another liberal pundit. <h3>Congratulations, to him for helping fuel a retreat which cost a lot of good Vietnamese their lives and subjected them to totalitarianism.</h3> Without looking I'm sure he wants the same in Iraq. Hes predictable in his liberalism.
When any president trusts a news caster for his opinion, we got issues on many levels, and thats any president, past or future.
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Ustwo, "the record"...I am exposing you to the opinions of the US Secretary of Defense from the earliest, "post US advisors only", period of US military involvement in Vietnam, to past the time of Cronkite's Feb. 27, 1968 opinion dominated telecast, and to the US military commander, Gen. Westmoreland's opinion, and to the opinion of Daniel Ellsberg. Notice that Macnamara shared the opinion in Ellsberg's circa 1967 Pentagon Papers, as early as in 1965. You can't miss it, it's displayed in the boldest type....<h3>does not match your opinion about Cronkite, or about the Vietnam war.</h3>
I don't think you appreciate how your POV of "liberal influence" on the outcome of the Vietnam war affects your overall perception of recent American history and of today's political dynamic.
Would you mind sharing sources with us that have shaped your "liberals did it" opinion of the outcome of US military involvement in Vietnam? It would help if you have sources of similar stature and responsibility for what went on there, as Macnamara and Westmoreland offer.
Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war...iews/mcnamara/
<i>Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He was a key architect of early U.S. policy in Vietnam and supported the U.S. military involvement. But as the war escalated yet failed to bring results, and as resistance to the war mounted at home, McNamara began to push for a negotiated solution. In 1968, after opposing further bombing of North Vietnam, he lost influence in the Johnson administration and left to become president of the World Bank. He was interviewed for this episode of COLD WAR in June 1996.</i>
On the 1963 coup in Saigon:
I believe the U.S. should not have given support to a coup. I think, in hindsight, most would agree with that conclusion. It was not a universal conclusion at the time, by any means.
I think one of the things it showed was that we didn't know either our opponents (in this case the North Vietnamese) or even our allies (in this case the South Vietnamese). I don't think we knew the society; I don't think we knew the leaders; I don't think we knew who was likely to follow [deposed South Vietnamese President] Diem. This was one reason that those who opposed the coup among Kennedy's advisers, one reason they opposed it. They couldn't get any indication of who was likely to follow, or whether the regime would be stable. And of course, what ultimately happened was, the regimes that followed Diem were not stable. It was like a revolving door: prime ministers were going in and out every few months or few weeks, over a period of time. But we as leaders, we as a society, did not properly understand, fully understand, as I suggest, either our allies or our opponents. ...
.... Had Diem lived, I'm inclined to think he would neither have requested nor accepted the introduction of large numbers of U.S. combat forces. He would not have wished to put his nation in a sense under the control of a foreign power, even a friendly foreign power. I think the war would have taken a totally different course. Now that is only speculation, but I think it's an important point, because if I'm correct, it shows we didn't understand even our allies, much less our opponents. And this is one of the major lessons of the conflict. ....
On LBJ and Vietnam:
...We were deeply disturbed, deeply disturbed [by the unstable South Vietnamese government]. And the president, as a politician, was determined to do everything he possibly could to stabilize that government politically. He in effect sent me over there at one time, on one visit with Max Taylor, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs. He said, "I want to see you across that country on TV every day, supporting the President of Vietnam. We have got to stabilize that government." But there are limitations to what external military force can do. <h3>External military force cannot reconstruct a failed state, and Vietnam, during much of that period, was a failed state politically. We didn't recognise it as such.</h3> ... But he was determined to do everything within his power -- economic power, political power, military power -- to stabilize that nation politically. It proved impossible. ....
... Throughout the seven years I was in the Defense Department on Vietnam, the nation was divided. The majority of the people, the press and the Congress, throughout the seven years, up until early 1968, were in favor of preventing the fall of Vietnam, because they believed in the domino theory. And they were prepared to send U.S. troops and carry on U.S. combat operations in Vietnam to prevent that loss. But there was a growing minority, and had the issue actually been debated, it would have torn the Congress apart. And that was one of the reasons why the hawks and doves agreed it shouldn't be debated. ...
On the decision to introduce ground troops in Vietnam:
....The events between January and July [1965] were such that the North Vietnamese were putting additional pressure on South Vietnam. South Vietnam was unable to respond effectively, and it became more and more clear that President Johnson was going to have to choose between losing South Vietnam or trying to save it by introducing U.S. military force and taking over a major part of the combat mission. He chose, rather than lose it, to introduce U.S. combat forces and take over the combat mission....
...McGeorge Bundy and I sent [a memo] to the President, and we said in effect: "Mr President, we're following a course that cannot succeed. We cannot continue solely in providing training and logistical support. We've got to go beyond that, or we have to get out. And we're not certain which of these two alternatives should be pursued. Each should be debated. We're inclined to think we've got to get further in." Unfortunately, the two alternatives were not fully debated, and we slid into further intervention, which ultimately led to 500,000 troops over a period of two or three years. ...
...On U.S. strategy in Vietnam:
...Some of us questioned at the beginning whether [massive bombing] would ever achieve the objective. ... Some believed that the bombing ... would stop, in a sense, the ability of the North to resupply the South. Others believed bombing would not stop that. The record of my testimony before the Congress is clear on that; many of us believed it would be impossible, by bombing, to stop the flow of the small quantity of supplies needed in the South to support the Viet Cong. And I think the record shows the bombing didn't prevent that flow of supplies. Secondly, there were those who believed that the bombing would break the will of the North. Others believed it wouldn't. And it didn't. ...
.....On the war in general:
<h3>This was much more a civil war than a war of aggression</h3>. I'm not arguing that there wasn't an element of aggression in it; I'm not arguing that the Chinese and the Soviets might not have tried to use South Vietnam as a launching pad to knock over the dominoes of Malaysia and Thailand and Indonesia and whatever. But what I am arguing is that the conflict within South Vietnam itself had all of the characteristics of a civil war, and we didn't look upon it as largely a civil war, and we weren't measuring our progress, as one would have in what was largely a civil war. ...
It is said that the military operated with one hand tied behind their backs. To the extent that that refers to a restriction on land invasion by U.S. forces on North Vietnam, that's true. <h3>But today, General Westmoreland, who was the commander in Vietnam at the time, says that while at the time he felt he was constrained, he now understands that that was an effort by the president to prevent the U.S. coming into open military conflict with China and the Soviet Union. And Westmoreland says, "Thank God we avoided that. That was a correct policy at the time."</h3> Could more military pressure have been applied, in the sense of more bombing of the North? In one sense, no. We dropped two or three times as much bombs in North and South Vietnam as were dropped by all Allied Forces throughout World War II against all enemies. It was a tremendous air effort. But there are certain things bombing can't accomplish. They can't break the will of people under certain circumstances. They didn't break the will of the North Vietnamese. And it cannot stop the movement of the small quantities of supplies that were necessary to support the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces in the South. They didn't, and it couldn't; and no additional amount of money [or] bombing could have. ...
<h2>As early as December 1965, I reported to the President that I believed there was no more than a one-in-three chance -- at best a one-in-two chance -- that we could achieve our political objectives, i.e. avoiding the loss of South Vietnam, by military means.</h2> And I strongly urged, therefore, [that] we increased our efforts on the political track, that we tried to move to negotiations with the North, to avoid the fall of the dominoes; and that, to stimulate a move toward negotiation, we stop the bombing. This was a very controversial move at the time. And we eventually did: we stopped for a month, in December 1965. It was one of about seven different attempts to move to negotiations, to stop the war to negotiate a solution that would yield a satisfactory outcome for the West, which was simply to avoid the loss of all Southeast Asia.
Those efforts were unsuccessful. I don't know why. I have proposed to Hanoi that ... we engage in examining what I think were missed opportunities for each of us, for them and us, to have avoided the war or to have terminated it earlier, with less loss of life, without any adverse effects on the geopolitical situations of either one of us. I very much hope those discussions will take place. We have much to learn from them that can be applied to the world of today and tomorrow. How to avoid these conflicts is something the human race has to learn. This century will go down as the bloodiest century in all of human history. We'll have lost 160 million people, killed by conflict. Is that what we want in the 21st century? I don't think so. If we want to avoid it, we have to learn from our mistakes in this century. Vietnam was one of those.
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Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war.../westmoreland/
<i>As commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, Gen. William Westmoreland oversaw the introduction of ground troops in Vietnam in 1965 and the subsequent buildup of U.S. forces there. He was a key architect of the U.S. military strategy and a consistent advocate for a greater commitment from Washington. In 1968, after asking for more ground troops in response to the Tet Offensive, President Johnson recalled him to Washington to become U.S. Army chief of staff. After support for the war collapsed in Washington, he retired in 1972. He was interviewed for the COLD WAR series in June 1996.</i>
On the introduction of U.S. ground troops in Vietnam in 1965:
....The political structure of South Vietnam was rather shaky at the time, because nobody knew from day to day who was running the country. ... Our mission at that time was to try to bolster the Vietnamese government, the morale of which was in disarray. We were dealing in a geographical area where we'd had very little experience in the past. We were dealing with a political-military situation. It was really quite complex. So what I'm really saying is, as we moved in to help the Vietnamese defend their country and confront the Viet Cong (the Vietnamese communists, controlled from Hanoi), we were in the process of getting acquainted with the terrain, the Vietnamese political apparatus and the Vietnamese army. And it was quite an interesting but challenging time. ...
<h3>I would say the main problem was [with] the Vietnamese society. It didn't seem to be a cohesive operation.</h3> There were factions that were fighting within the South Vietnamese society. ... And it became very clear that Hanoi was in effect strategically running the [Viet Cong] operation. ... This was a type of war that we'd had no experience with before and we were on the learning curve. .....
On fighting a limited war:
Well, that was a major problem. At the outset, the president made the statement that he would not geographically broaden the war, <h3>and that meant that military actions were confined to the territory of South Vietnam.</h3> The enemy was not operating under such restraints, and therefore over the years the border area of Cambodia and Laos were used freely by the enemy.....
....We were winning on the battlefield, but whether we were winning strategically is another matter. But the strategy came from Hanoi and there was little that we could do about it. And the people in Washington -- the Secretary of Defense and [the people in] the White House -- understood [that] from a military standpoint, [our policies involved] a restraint that was inevitably going to prolong the war. I mean, I think this was well-understood, but nevertheless, it was [our] policy, based on the fact that we were not the aggressors. We were not going to be party to enlarging the war. ....
On the Tet Offensive:
.... At that time, I didn't want the enemy to know that I knew what was going to happen. I did know. I made a mistake in not making that known to the American public, because they were caught by surprise and that was a very much of a negative factor.
On the impact of television journalism on the war:
Well, it's the first war that we've ever fought on the television screen and it was the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign, [where] they had no restraint. We provided no restraint over the media. I mean, that was a policy by the president, and the enemy exploited it. It was something that plagued me from the very beginning. On the other hand, when I knew the Tet Offensive was coming, I should have made a public statement and maybe gone in front of the TV cameras and made known to the American people that a major offensive action was to take place. I didn't do that because I didn't want the enemy to know that I had access to his plans. ... And in retrospect -- and I've made this statement many times -- that was bad judgment on my part.
On the war in general:
We were succeeding. I mean, when you looked at specifics, this became a war of attrition, [and] we were winning the war of attrition. The price that the enemy was prone to pay greatly exceeded our expectations. ...
I think one has to understand what our objective was. The objective in Washington was to raise the cost of the war from the standpoint of the enemy, to the point that he would come to some negotiated settlement. The attitude of the enemy was not comparable to what our attitude would have been under the circumstances. He was ready, willing and able to pay a far greater price than I would say we Caucasians would.
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Quote:
http://archive.salon.com/news/featur...erg/index.html
April 28, 2000 | WASHINGTON -- Daniel Ellsberg is arguably the greatest whistle-blower in American history.
....In 1971, Ellsberg, who had worked as an analyst under Secretary Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, went public with the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page study of America's 30-year involvement in Indochina that led to the Vietnam War. The report, commissioned by the DOD,<h3> revealed government deception, miscalculation and bureaucratic arrogance. Among other things, it revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had been committing infantry to Vietnam while telling the nation that he had no long-range plans for the war. Most damning was the overall impression it gave that the U.S. government did not believe it was possible to win the war.</h3>
By giving the documents to Times correspondent Neil Sheehan, Ellsberg risked spending 115 years in the slammer. Indeed, he would later be charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy. The charges were eventually dropped by a federal judge, who wrote that a pattern of "gross government misconduct" -- including a break-in at Ellsberg's former psychiatrist's office that was linked to the White House -- was so appalling that the administration's retaliatory actions "offend the sense of justice."
The Nixon Justice Department responded quickly and furiously to the Times' publication of the classified documents on June 13, 1971, and just after the third installment was published, it secured a restraining order preventing further installments from being printed. The move surprised few, given the critical view the papers took of the war. .....
<h3>Looking back, what role do you think releasing the Pentagon Papers played in bringing an end to the Vietnam War?</h3>
It panicked Richard Nixon into criminal actions to silence me from revealing information about his secret Vietnam policy. Those criminal actions, when they were discovered in 1973, played a major role in his impeachment proceedings, which led to his resignation. I believe he intended to renew the bombing of North Vietnam in '73 or '74, so I think [the Pentagon Papers] did play a role in shortening our bombing of Vietnam and shortening the war by a few years.
Had he not reacted that way, the effect would not have been great because -- although the release of the papers did have an immediate and very large effect on public attitudes toward the war and their desire to see it end -- it did not directly cause Nixon to give up his hopes of winning or postponing a defeat indefinitely.
The actions that he took to keep me from revealing his secret threats of escalation were known to the people who were caught in the Watergate scandal. And these acts were the cancer on the presidency that led to his downfall.
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Last edited by host; 11-18-2007 at 11:18 PM..
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