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Old 09-24-2006, 05:31 PM   #1 (permalink)
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Vietnam:Reagan's "Noble War", The Left forced the US to fight with one hand tied,Or?

It didn't have a "Noble" beginning...it seems that it's escalation by the US leadership, was predicated on a false presidential address to the nation:
Quote:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261
30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War

Media Beat (7/27/94)

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."

But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam — no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.

A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 — and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers — in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.

"The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964."

On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf — a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.

But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.

Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat."

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

But Johnson's deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed the New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities."

An exhaustive new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520083679/fair/102-4452221-7194515">The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam,</a> begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' — when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North."

Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" — as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on 'national security issues.'"

Daniel Hallin's classic book The <a href="http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/Since1945/~~/c2Y9YWxsJnNzPWF1dGhvci5hc2Mmc2Q9YXNjJnBmPTcwJnZpZXc9dXNhJnByPTEwJmJvb2tDb3ZlcnM9eWVzJmNpPTAxOTUwMzgxNDI=">"Uncensored War"</a> observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats."

What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time."

In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam — sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

The rest is tragic history.

Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident."

Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public."

And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Quote:
http://www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2000_07/despmeas.htm
A publication of Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. ®
An organization chartered by the U.S. Congress

June 2000/July 2000
Desperate Measures
Search And Destroy, Rolling Thunder, Agent Orange, Phoenix, And Taking The Night Away From Charlie

"Desperate Measures,'' the third panel of the extremely successful Vietnam Veterans of America and College of William & Mary conference on the Vietnam War, concentrated on how tactics changed during the course of the war. The panel was moderated by Jim Golden, a Vietnam veteran, former Brigadier General in the U.S. Army, and current William & Mary Director of Economic Development and Corporate Relations.....

......Golden: Zalin Grant served as a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam, then returned to Vietnam as a war correspondent and journalist for Time and The New Republic. He is the author of Survivors, which deals with American prisoners of war; Over the Beach, an account of the air war over North Vietnam; and Facing the Phoenix, an examination of the controversial Phoenix program.

Zalin, how did you get to Vietnam and did your training prepare you for what you found there?

Grant: I was struggling in college, and I went to do my ROTC two-year service. The Army sent me to Vietnamese language school and gave me as little training as they could.

Was I surprised? I went to Vietnam and I had never traveled out of the country. I had been to Washington on a class trip. I had been to New York. I was 23 years old when I arrived in Saigon on November 1, 1964.

What surprised me? Everything. My eyes were so wide I couldn't close them for a week. The training was almost irrelevant to what we were facing.

Golden: Ronald Spector is a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran. His books include The U.S. Army in Vietnam, The Early Years, After Tet, and the classic work on the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun.

Ron, how did you get to Vietnam? When did you arrive, and where did you serve?

Spector: Actually, I was in Vietnam as a result of a big misunderstanding. My recruiting officer told me I was going to be a social aide in the White House.

In 1968 they were sending over groups of individuals as replacement drafts, and the group that I went with to Vietnam left from the same air terminal as Chuck Robb. That was my brush with greatness. He got to wait in the VIP lounge and we got to wait on the floor, but I've always associated myself with LBJ and Chuck Robb.

We spent about two days getting ready in Okinawa, and on the second morning I woke up early. Somebody in the barracks was playing the radio, and I thought the news said that LBJ had stopped the bombing and was ready for peace talks and wasn't going to run anymore. That sounded so weird that I was convinced I had just dreamt this. So when I got up a few hours later, I was surprised to see this actually was the case. So we got to Vietnam in a very optimistic frame of mind. We thought the war would be over soon.

I came to Vietnam very soon after leaving Yale. Yale was not exactly a staunch place for support of the war, so nothing I saw disillusioned me. I was already totally turned off by the war. If anything, I was sort of surprised to see that there were people who were actually interested in fighting the war. Unfortunately there weren't very many, and they never could get their act together.

Golden: Peter Arnett was the longest serving reporter in Vietnam. Peter, how did you get over there, and were you surprised when you arrived?

Arnett: I was sent for TDY for two months in June of 1962, and I eventually ended up staying about a decade. I was working for the Associated Press, and I was sent into Saigon to help the sole correspondent at the time, Malcolm Brown.

There were just a handful of reporters then. Stanley Karnow was there and David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. They were just a group of young journalists. It was not a big story, really. We'd write our stories daily, but they weren't page one. It was a small story, but it just grew and grew and grew. The press corps, unlike the military, just stayed on and on and on.

We covered Vietnam like a regular beat in the United States. We'd go to the office in the morning, get assignments, go to Danang, go to the Delta, and the press world grew and grew and grew. Our experience was very different from that of the military people we covered. They were stuck in the boondocks for a year, and then they'd go home. We had the luxury of getting in and out of Saigon, and we looked at it as a career.

Golden: General Moore spoke about bringing his unit over. When I arrived in 1968, we were very much individual replacements. I think we had different experiences as a result of whether we went as a unit or whether we arrived individually.

General Moore, I think it is safe to say that Vietnam was a helicopter war and you were very much involved in the design of air mobile operations. Could you give us some insight into your reaction to the first air mobile operations that we had in Vietnam? How did the enemy react and how did we adjust our operations over time?

Moore: I'd been there for about a month when the North Vietnamese attacked a special forces camp at Pleiku with the intention to overrun the camp and then move to the north and overrun the city of Pleiku, then on to the South China Sea. The First Cav was sent out there to prevent this from happening. The first brigade of the Cav was out there three weeks conducting air mobile short air assault operations with experienced air assault commanders from Fort Benning. My brigade was sent out there on the tenth of November and my battalion was ordered into the Ia Drang Valley. This was the first long jump air mobile operation of the war.

Compared to what we did in the Gulf War when we went over 100 miles into the Gates of Basra with the 101st Airborne Division, 14.3 miles from Pleiku to the Ia Drang Valley seems like a short hop, but it was a long hop then. We went out there, we met the enemy, and we fought him for three days. I fought with a 450-man battalion. Not all of us were on the ground initially; it took five hours for us to assemble.

Meanwhile, we were attacked by two full battalions of enemy determined to kill us all. It was a hell of a fight, and we could not have survived without air mobile resupply and taking out our casualties. They brought in ammo and water to us. I learned that if you want to find and kill that enemy, you can't push against him. You've got to make a long jump over his head to his rear. And then you will sure as hell find him.

What did the enemy learn? The enemy learned in the battle at the Ia Drang to employ what they later called the bear hug: grab them by the belt and thereby neutralize our great fire power support advantage.

Joe Galloway and I went back to Vietnam several times, and a couple of those times we talked to the enemy commanders who engaged us in the Ia Drang. Most notably, General Nguyen Huu An, who at the time was a Lieutenant Colonel as was I. He went on to fight throughout that war and wound up a division commander driving into Saigon on the 30th of April, 1975.

General Nguyen and I have talked at great length on air mobile operations and what he learned. I can almost give you some direct quotes from our taped conversations. He told Joe and me that when we fought against him on the coastlines, he had difficulty knowing where we would land because there were so many rice paddies and so many places where we could land our helicopters.

However, he said, when we fought out in the jungles of the Highlands where there were very few clearings, he would post lookouts around the clearings when he got word--and he always did get word--that we were going out on an operation. The minute he found out where we were coming out, he would ambush these landing zones.

I thought that made a lot of sense. This man had fought against the French, and he knew the French were road-bound with their ground vehicles, and he and other commanders successfully ambushed the French on Route 19 several times.

I thought that was smart as hell to ambush the very few clearings in the jungle. He actually bragged to Joe and me about how many helicopters he had shot down in Dak To in the 173rd battle and also at another battle involving the 4th Division in the Highlands. These guys were fast learners. In fact, when the Cav was fighting in the fall of 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Hoang Phuong, a historian, was sent down there to debrief the enemy commanders on what they learned from the Cav. He later turned out to be the Chief of Military History for the People's Army of Vietnam.

He told us that initially they were very confused by the First Cav. His words were, "You jump like frogs everywhere, and we even thought there were defectors in our ranks who told you where to come. But then we learned about the clearings.'' He said they learned early on that they had to shoot down our helicopters and they concentrated on that.

Golden: One other question. When your operations went into more populated areas, what impact did that have on your air mobile operations?

Moore: It really didn't have a large effect. I was able to employ a lot more in vertical engulfments and to get on the flanks and rear of the enemy with my helicopters.

I'd like to comment that success as an air assault commander required a special ability to think fast, to trust one's instincts, and to make decisions quickly and accurately, without second-guessing. To be a successful air assault commander, you had to think at the speed of a helicopter. You had to think in terms of landing zones and pick-up zones.

Later on in the war, a lot of the ticket-punching battalion and brigade commanders were sent over there who didn't know anything about air assault or air mobility. Most of them treated helicopters like aerial trucks to transport troops from point A to point B.

It was the rare replacement commander who knew how to handle helicopters on a fast-moving battlefield against an enemy which was everywhere and nowhere. I employed a lot of diversionary landings to fake the enemy out with empty helicopter landings, trying to fake the enemy to get into a position where I could kill him. I found out that worked pretty well.

The impact of our air mobile divisions in populated areas is that we were able to finally kill the enemy, but at the same time, unfortunately, we killed a lot of noncombatants, which I regret very much. But this happens in every war and sometimes we were placed at a disadvantage.

When I went into the Bong Son Plain in January, February, and March of 1966, we were required to use helicopter loud speakers and leaflets to warn enemy villagers that we were going to land in or near their villages. Of course, the enemy was in those villages as well, so he was warned also.

Several things happened later on in that war that I particularly felt were wrong. One was the institution of fire bases We achieved security of our artillery in the first year or so of the war by moving our artillery, by keeping the artillery moving and securing it with a platoon or a company of riflemen.

Another thing that happened was what I called a "fire support base mentality.'' The enemy was smart: he knew the range of our artillery, and he stayed outside that fan. He made us come outside that fan. A dumb commander would come outside that fan and deny his troops the use of fire support in an attempt to finally kill the enemy.

Golden: That was one of my surprises in the 25th Division. From 1968-69 I was in the artillery, and we operated from fire support bases. During the eight months that I was there, I think we moved one fire support base. It had become a very static operation in contrast to the early, very mobile, air mobile operations.

Moore: They were sitting ducks.

Golden: Herb, you got a close look at the helicopter war from the front seat. How did you see our tactics evolving over time? How did the enemy adjust to it? What did we learn as we went through the war?

Fix: The helicopter's main purpose in life is to move that combat soldier combat troop around, to move him from one spot to another spot. The Marines started using that tactic in the Korean War. When we went into the I Corps area, we started using the same type of helicopter tactic.

It was wonderful as long as we had that element of surprise. It worked. Once you lost the element of surprise, when you dropped leaflets like the general said, they knew where you were going. They were not dumb. They were smart enough to stay hidden, to stay underground during the artillery bombardment and the air attack. But the minute that first helicopter came in, they came out of their holes and started killing the helicopters.

In the movie Patton, George C. Scott walked up on the stage and talked about the purpose of the military person. He said that the military person's purpose was to make the other person die for his country, not for him to die for his country. In some respects, when we dropped those leaflets and announced where we were going, it seemed like we were exercising the theory that we want to die for our country, not have the other guy die.

One tactic that changed was when we first started undergoing helicopter operations, you'd go 5 to 10 to 15 miles. Then we started going 75 to 100 to 150 miles at a time, leap-frogging around from spot to spot. That proved to be very effective because the enemy could not keep track of where we were.

But the enemy learned to keep their heads down, stay down, and avoid gunfire until we came in.

Golden: How did you coordinate air operations with all the other fire support systems that were around: artillery, air, and so forth? Was that a problem for you? Did you get pretty good at coordinating those fires?

Fix: We weren't as good as we would like to have been, but we thought we were pretty good. It was a little startling when B-52 strike bombers would come across and drop their bombs from 20,000 feet through your formation, but that did not happen often. The coordination and control was, I thought, excellent.

Golden: Ron, could you give us a little insight as to how operations were conducted before Tet and how they changed after Tet?

<b>Spector:</b> I should mention--not to disillusion people who have studied the war a good deal--that one of the things that we have discovered since the end of the Cold War is that neither General Giap nor Ho Chi Minh was really directing the war on a day-to-day basis. They were sort of like the Queen of England. They would come out and make speeches and then ratify things that had already been decided on. The real war was not being run by General Giap but by a committee. The committee was made up of people whose names you've probably never heard of.

I think the reason the war goes on so long is that both sides kept underestimating each other. In the first phase of the war, the early '60s, the Communists gambled on being able to overthrow the Saigon government before the U.S. could really intervene. That doesn't work, and as a result of that gamble, they end up with American combat troops committed to Vietnam.

<h3>In the next phase, Hanoi decides that if they can inflict enough casualties on the Americans, they will withdraw. But, in fact, the Americans keep sending more troops, which leads to another decision which is to gamble, again, with the Tet Offensive, the great series of attacks throughout South Vietnam.</h3>

This has the desired psychological effect in the United States. But it also means that the Communists have lost a lot of their best people, and not only that, but they keep insisting on more offenses. Hanoi wants another offensive in May and then another in August, and then they want another one in early 1969, and they lose a lot of people.

Now, of course, they can replace these people, but they can't replace the experience of these people and they end up having to send Northerners to do the work that the Southerners used to do. The net effect of this round of offensives in '68--which was the bloodiest year of the war--is that the military balance tips somewhat towards the Americans and towards the Saigon government, which is able to actually get some control over a lot of the countryside throughout late '69 into '70 and early '71. <h3>This is what convinces people like John Paul Vann and President Nixon that we won the war, really won the war, because now the other side is weaker and it is on the defensive. But, again, this is a temporary condition, because Nixon is withdrawing troops from Vietnam. By '72 we begin to see the balance shifting back in favor of the Communists.

The underlying factor in all this is that while there were people in South Vietnam who didn't like the Vietcong, there were very few people willing to die for the Saigon government. The Saigon government was corrupt and ineffective, and that was the bottom line.</h3>

Let me just say one more thing. There was never a mechanism implemented to impose any kind of uniform system of doctrine or tactics on division commanders and brigade commanders. That is, if you were a brigade commander and your predecessor had been very successful doing "A,'' that didn't mean that you had to do "A.'' You could do "B,'' and nobody would argue with you. Neither MACV nor your division commander ever told you that you had to do "A'' based on experience. Then, of course, you have brigade and battalion commanders coming and going all the time. Some are successful, but they had no effect on their successors' tactics. There was no way to impose any kind of unity on doctrine and tactics. It was one strange characteristic of the war: There is a lot of innovation on the part of certain commanders, but it doesn't make any difference.

Golden: General Moore, you were a brigade commander. Would you agree that we failed to pass on the lessons learned from one to the next?

Moore: Absolutely. The U.S. Army, from the Chief of Staff down, did a miserable job of passing on information, primarily to the lower unit commanders. That is where the guys get killed--platoon leaders, company commanders.

When I got back from Vietnam in 1966, I made a very strong plea to the Department of Army to assign me to Fort Benning, Georgia, to teach tactics to lieutenants and captains and lieutenant colonels who were going to Vietnam to be commanders. I knew the war and I knew this enemy. I knew how to keep some of my men alive.

But you know where they sent me? My orders were to go to the Latin American desk at the State Department. I raised hell and they sent me to ISA under McNaughton in the Pentagon and where I was never asked anything about Vietnam. I did this nonsense job for a damn year.

I think it is a crime that the U.S. Army did not take advantage of guys like me who were there that first year. I think there would be a lot fewer names on that Wall had they done so.

Golden: This is also a war about intelligence. Zalin, talk about our intelligence operations: How effective were they, and how did they evolve over the course of the war?

Grant: When I went to Vietnam, we didn't understand who the Vietcong were. Only when Douglas Pike wrote Vietcong did the picture become clearer. As time went on, technical intelligence became very good: picking up information about who the Vietcong were and where the units were. What it didn't include so much was the analysis of the intelligence the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were particularly good at putting out. They knew you were going to get something, so they gave you five versions of what they planned to do, all at different times. You constantly got tips about a Tet offensive or something like a Tet offensive.

So when it's said, for example, that we had information about the Tet Offensive, they are right. We had information about a thousand things. The problem with intelligence was analyzing it and coming up with a conclusion. As General Moore said, the idea is to make decisions very fast. We couldn't.

Golden: Can you tell us about the Phoenix program and its objective and whether it was successful or not?

Grant: Edward Lansdale, who took his team to drive out the French (which they successfully did), had a right-hand guy named Rufus Phillips, a former Yale football player. He was with the CIA. After Lansdale's team left, they sent Phillips back to Vietnam in the early '60s.

Phillips found a guy, Lieutenant Colonel Tranh Ngoc Chau, who was a great hero of mine. He was a former Vietminh. His brother was a Vietnamese intelligence officer. He was a Buddhist and a nationalist. Chau had an idea of how to combat the Vietcong. He knew them well. He knew that his organization could help in identifying the grievances of the poor rice farmers and setting them straight. He also knew that some of the Vietcong leaders were so hardcore, they would have to be eliminated one way or another. He wanted three-man counterterrorist teams to seek out these leaders and eliminate them. But Chau wasn't someone who wanted to kill people. He wanted to win them over to the side of democracy.

Phillips met Chau and referred him to the CIA. The CIA tried to put Chau's concept into effect, but they did it American-style. Instead of making one program, they split it up. What Chau envisioned as a three-man antiterrorist unit became a big cabinet. When Diem was overthrown, these provincial reconnaissance units (PRUs) became the thugs for the provincial heads. They became extortionists; they became killers; they diverged completely from the idea of Tranh Chau.

After the U.S. reached some stability in Vietnam, William Colby came back. He knew about this program. He said the program was necessary but we've got to put it on the right track, and Colby essentially did. But the program never worked.

It was immensely more complicated than that. Certainly there were excesses. Some people were killed who shouldn't have been. As Colby himself told me, it just didn't work--as many programs didn't work--as effectively as they would have liked.

But towards the end, by 1970, after the Tet Offensive had wiped out many of the chief Vietcong captains, this program started to work.

Golden: You've written a lot about the air war over North Vietnam. Could you tell us a little bit about the objectives at the beginning of Operation Rolling Thunder and how they evolved?

Grant: In the 1950s America developed a program called Massive Response. This was a program that we implicitly threatened to use by building up so many nuclear weapons that we would scare people. Massive Response gave way, in the war as developed by McGeorge Bundy, his brother, Bill Bundy, and Robert McNamara, into something they called Graduated Response. The idea was the same. It was to scare the North Vietnamese into giving up. As we soon found out, the North Vietnamese didn't scare easily. The initial targeting--most of the targeting throughout the war--was based on this premise. It is also based on the premise of not doing anything so dramatic as to bring the Chinese into the war.

This was always a big worry to President Johnson. The way they developed the targeting was absolutely ridiculous. There is no logic to it except that it gave Johnson control to parcel out the targets, one at a time, regardless of what the implications were or the pilots who were flying them. He just didn't understand.

Johnson would have what was called Tuesday lunch with McGeorge Bundy, McNamara, and several advisers, and there was Johnson going over a map of North Vietnam and plotting the targets himself. The military wanted to bomb where the North Vietnamese kept their MIGs. They could have gotten them on the ground and eliminated that threat completely. But for a reason that he didn't explain, LBJ said, "I'm not going to let them bomb there.'' He kept a close thumb on the target, which made absolutely no military sense.

Golden: Peter, you were there for a very long time. What was your view of the major concerns about these issues?

Arnett: In prior wars, the American press played a supportive, basically patriotic role when America was engaged militarily overseas. In Vietnam, the Saigon Press Corps became a Greek chorus for the growing tragedy of Vietnam.

From the beginning, we had full access to the battlefield and to the information flow. We could get briefings at the embassy. We had good contact with senior military officials, and we could go into the countryside. We covered Vietnam very extensively. I saw my role as essentially reflecting the view of the soldier in the field.

I wrote over three thousand stories in Vietnam, and millions upon millions of words were written by my colleagues--all of them essentially reflecting what was happening in the field. There are many aspects I could refer to. A comment by John Paul Vann to me in 1968 was that America had not been in Vietnam six years, it had been in Vietnam one year, six times. As a reporter, I found that I kept going into the same sort of operational areas. Each year there would be different faces, certainly on the American and advisory side. But the landscape never changed, nor did the Vietcong operational people. I would meet American officers who would ask and talk about tactics. I kept remembering the previous year or the year prior to that where similar operations had been launched.

Some of my colleagues had the temerity to offer advice, but what journalist knows how to fight a war? It was frustrating. By 1968 when I had already been in Vietnam six years and been all over the country, a decision to attack a particular hill or to move around a particular village area made me think about how often it had been done in the past.

In Vietnam, you had a press corps that was very active, very competitive, that put out an enormous amount of information that flowed out of Vietnam into the country's newspapers. The view from Washington was very different from the view from the field.

Most of our reports--well, all of our reports--were essentially ignored by government. Early in the war when David Halberstam started writing about the abuses of the Norodom Sihanouk regime, President Kennedy tried to get him withdrawn from Vietnam. That was the administration's response to reporting about a negative situation. In 1965 and '66, President Johnson did the same thing to me. The Washington view was to paper over the problem, portray the press as being incompetent and left wing, and to attempt to suggest the whole thing was hunky dory in the field.

Fix: I have a question for Peter Arnett. As we got into Vietnam, our job was to find, search, and destroy the enemy. Somewhere along the line we got into the theory, though, that one of our goals was to become more of an occupational force of pacification. We found ourselves in the I Corps area setting up people in villages and trying to convince them that our way was better than Charlie's way. I didn't see too much of this in the press. Did you talk about this at all, Peter?

Arnett: We discussed everything in the press. We did avalanches of material. It all appeared somewhere because every time I went out into the field, the GIs had clippings. Whenever we mentioned a GI, the hometown paper used it. That was often the only reason the hometown papers used it.

People like John Paul Vann and many senior military offices used the press--me and other reporters--to try and convey their frustrations about the war. There is no doubt about it. But we weren't effective in getting through to the administration. We got through to the antiwar folks. They would take our stories, our negative stories, and picket.

But the vast majority of stories were basically positive because it was a hard-fought war and there was incredibly courageous action.

A Question-and-Answer Session followed, some of which is reported here.

Question: I'm George Duggins, president of Vietnam Veterans of America, and my question is: Did we ever have a strategy to win the hearts of the people in Vietnam or did we just say the hell with the people, we are going to bomb everything in sight?

Grant: Colonel Chau, a friend of mine and John Paul Vann's best friend, had developed this program. Vann had very few ideas about political action himself, so with Chau, they tried to institute a program of winning hearts, as they called it, political action programs to improve the basic lives of the people. We made some progress because the rice farmers were looking not for political ideology so much as improving their lives. But this got lost in the military war. We made some improvements, but by the time they started the war was over as far as America was concerned.

Question: Shouldn't we have been considering ethical questions in terms of targeting civilians for assassination?

Grant: Yes, we should have been considering ethical questions. There were assassinations of people that shouldn't have gone on, and the people conducting them should have been held accountable. But from my knowledge of William Colby, this was not his intention at all. His decision wasn't based on any particular ethical premise, although I thought he was an ethical man. His idea was that this was counterproductive. You don't go around assassinating innocent civilians.

Question: After the siege of Hue, we found approximately 2,600 school children, men, and women massacred, supposedly by the North Vietnamese. Some say they were killed by American artillery and buried by the North Vietnamese. Do any of you have any more perspective on that?

Arnett: I remember vividly an accusation that the media had neglected covering it. The suggestion was made that the liberal media will highlight American atrocities but not Vietcong atrocities. It has been pretty much determined since that that was an execution by the Vietcong. They came in waving a list of names of schoolteachers and government officials, they rounded them up, they took them to the swamps, and they executed them.

One of the reasons that this didn't particularly shock Americans was that from the beginning of the war, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were portrayed as terrorists and killers. They were portrayed in the most venal terms by the U.S. government. It was part of the whole propaganda effort to mobilize support against the war.

Question: General Moore, I'd like to ask you to elucidate on your remark about not studying Dien Bien Phu and the impact that had on our situation?

Moore: I made the comment yesterday that, unknowingly, Giap rehearsed his war against American troops as he was fighting the French. Unfortunately, when Dien Bien Phu occurred, we were watching, but we were not learning, in my view. We were concentrating primarily on keeping the Vietminh from overrunning Dien Bien Phu. The big talk was about bombings and so forth.

Last October Joe Galloway and I were able to spend four or five days at Dien Bien Phu walking the storm points. We took a drive up the main supply route out of Hanoi. This is hardly even a two-lane road, just almost a one-and-a-half lane road of mud and dirt. But Giap had the ability to supply his tens of thousands of troops around Dien Bien Phu because he impressed into service tens of thousands of men, women, and children to maintain that supply route.

The discipline was superb. All of this he put into effect later on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Many historians say the key to the war in Vietnam was his ability to keep open the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply route for troops, supplies, gasoline, and eventually, tanks and rockets. He had tens of thousands of maintenance workers on this trail, and it was bombed year after year ineffectively.

But the main lesson that, I think, should have been learned by American decision-makers on Dien Bien Phu was the willingness to suffer tens and tens of thousands of men killed in order to achieve freedom and independence from the white man. They were totally adamant about driving the hated Westerners out of their country and stopping foreign intrusion into their internal affairs. My conclusion is that the whole Vietnam War was our Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. That is number two.

Number three, I go back to Brigade General Douglas Kinnard's book, The War Managers. General Kinnard says that the United States pushed the Vietnamese army out of the war and took over with a form of war that only U.S. forces could fight. He also said that our heritage, our legacy to Vietnam, was a form of war that could not be sustained by a country which had no history of political, military, or social cohesion.

Golden: Finally, I'd like to ask the panel to comment on what we learned from this experience.

Moore: The next major war was the Gulf War. In discussing it with Joe Galloway, who covered the Gulf War, he made a very cogent comment. He said: "The Vietnam War meant everything and nothing in the Gulf War.''

We learned so much in Vietnam what not to do, about controlling commanders in the field and so forth from the National Security Office in Washington, and we learned so much about what to do. If you are going to go to war, knock the hell out of the enemy fast. Go in there and kill him and get it over with. That is exactly what happened in the Gulf War.

The Gulf War, of course, had a lot of dissimilarities, too. There were no sanctuaries for the Iraqis as there were for the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. There were no bombing restrictions placed on Schwartzkoff. There was complete unity of command. He didn't have a commander in Hawaii running the air war in North Vietnam like Westmoreland and Abrams did. He didn't have the CIA and State Department and USIA sending back-channel messages back to Washington. I think the lessons we have learned in Vietnam were applied damn near 100 percent in the Gulf.

Arnett: Bernard Fall, the great French journalist and academic who wrote about Dien Bien Phu, was a favorite of the military and a favorite of Westmoreland. In fact, when Fall was killed in Vietnam in '66, Westmoreland had Fall's body flown to his family in Hong Kong. In his memoirs, Westmoreland wrote that he admired and respected Fall and had a collection of his works in his bedroom. "But,'' he wrote, "I never did have the time to read them.''
The article above describes the mistakes that resulted in the inability of the US Military to execute it's objectives in Vietnam.

I am old enough to have lived through that period in US history, and I think that the term "clusterfuck" aptly describes what happened. It is a fallacy to believe that the "left" somehow "forced" the US military to "fight the war" with one hand tied behind it's back". The truth is that the US military received all of the weapons, supplies, and troops that it asked for.....the downfall was the same as it is today, in Iraq. The "Vietnamization" of the war, failed.

The comments in bold, above, from:
Quote:
Ronald Spector is a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran. His books include The U.S. Army in Vietnam, The Early Years, After Tet, and the classic work on the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun.
....reinforce the notion that Vietnamization failed. US KIA losses from '67 to '69 were 39,000...including 16,000 in the bloodiest year, '68.

As with every other issue, the folks on the other side, have their talking points. News reporting from 1980 indicate that in his bid for the presidency, that year, Reagan made a speech to the American Legion convention, pandering for the military vote. His campaign handlers admitted then that his framing oif the Vietnam war as "Noble", was mistake. How many of our soldiers have died since, because Reagan "snuffed" out the lessons to be learned from
Vietnam, for too many of our contemporary leaders, and their supporters.

Where do you think the "Powell Doctrine" came from....it was from the actual military lessons learned, in Vietnam/

Last edited by host; 09-24-2006 at 05:34 PM..
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Old 09-24-2006, 07:55 PM   #2 (permalink)
Pissing in the cornflakes
 
Ustwo's Avatar
 
The nobel goal in Vietnam was to save people from the 'joy' of communism.

It failed with tragic results after the US pull out.

Quote:
Reagan made a speech to the American Legion convention, pandering for the military vote.
A poll conducted late last year by the Military Times found that 57 percent of those surveyed consider themselves Republican, while 13 percent identified with the Democrats. Among the officer corps the numbers were different. Nearly 66 percent of officers considered themselves Republican compared with 9 percent Democratic. Nearly 30 percent of those surveyed by the Military Times declined to answer the questions or said they were independent.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5964655/

Republicans don't need to pander to get the military vote, this isn't a draft army, these are volunteers, you won't find many Democrats. Its even worse for the democrats if you look at the national guard and the reserves.

Don't forget it was the Democrats who did their best to get military votes thrown out in 2000, they didn't do that because the military votes Democrat.
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Old 09-24-2006, 08:02 PM   #3 (permalink)
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Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA
I am the same age cohort as Host and distinctly remember Nixon's attempt to leave 'nam under a "Peace with Honor" slogan. The pictures of people desperately trying to get on the last helicoptor out of Saigon speak to that honor. The Vietnamese boat people arriving on our shores spoke to that honor. The Cambodian and Laos supporters left behind to be murdered speak to that honor. The murdered civilians of the former South Vietnam speak to that honor.

There was no hand tied behind the military's back. It was a futile effort, already abandoned by the French, and fueled on by the lies of McNamera and others. You might recogonize some of those names in Bush's current administration.
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Old 09-24-2006, 10:15 PM   #4 (permalink)
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Yup....history indicates that pandering is the right word to describe the "wooing" of conservatives, veterans, and union workers, because, what did they get in exchange for their votes, besides bloated deficits, loss of union jobs, accelerated dependence on imported oil and a shift in wealth from them to "big oil", and the obscuring of the lessons that could have been learned from Vietnam....could have kept us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Invading and occupying two distant countries, in each case, justified by the pursuit of a single individual, after you've reduced your national conventional forces to a 60 year low, doesn't confirm that many lessons have been learned...yet.
Quote:
SMITH, HEDRICK
WASHINGTON
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Sep 7, 1980. pg. A.2

Last winter, most politicians reckoned that the Republican nomination was Ronald Reagan's to lose if he didn't trip up. He had a scare at the start of the primary season, but he didn't trip. By the summer the polls made it look as though the Presidency itself was his to lose if he didn't stumble. And suddenly, as his fall campaign opened, it looked as though he might boot away a golden opportunity.

His lieutenants had drafted a series of thematic speeches to demonstrate Mr. Reagan's Presidential depth. But before he could get the public's attention, Mr. Reagan was upstaging himself with thoughtless remarks and indulging in wistful throwbacks that left his advisers wincing. Last week, he linked President Carter with the Ku Klux Klan in an uncharacteristic bit of pique over what he regarded as the Carter campaign's attempts to connect him with the Klan.

Earlier, he launched George Bush, his running mate, on a mission to China with a gratuitous quip about re-establishing official relations with Taiwan. He mused aloud about teaching the biblical story of creation along with Darwinian evolution. In Chicago, his remark that the Vietnam War had been ''a noble cause'' stole headlines from a defense policy speech.

Mr. Reagan was like a prize fighter trying out in a new ring but still shadow-boxing with old sparring partners. As he threw verbal punches left and right, his eyes strayed off the main target. Some of his jabs bounced back against his own chin.

A bit overconfident and headstrong, he was eluding and baffling his own handlers. In a political campaign, handlers are as vital to a candidate's survival as the seconds who send a boxer into each new round with a reminder to keep his guard up and save his best punches for good openings.

As an actor, Ronald Reagan spent years in Hollywood listening to stage directions. As a Presidential candidate, he is accustomed to coaching. But few handlers have mastered the art of giving him tough advice to protect him from the unvarnished enthusiasms of his conservative rhetoric.

In 1976, his campaign manager was John Sears, a tough-minded strategist, blunt with his advice, hardnosed about the need for briefings, and determined to control the candidate and the campaign. He was hired again for the 1980 drive but last February, Mr. Reagan chafed under Mr. Sears's tight rein; he fired him and two associates. No one else has gotten clear control since then. ''I think Reagan felt he was programmed too much then and he's resisted it ever since,'' said a high-level adviser. ''Once we have a number of these flaps, he'll stop resisting.''

<b>The basic difficulty is the Californian's penchant for speaking his mind and giving conservative audiences what they like to hear,</b> without anticipating how his words may grate on more moderate ears. ''When he looks at China and Taiwan, he sees the issue so clearly that he doesn't see the troubles what he says will cause with others,'' said one aide. <b>''Or in calling Vietnam 'a noble cause,' he's so convinced of that he can't see the bad impact it will have.''</b>

''Not enough people go in and tell him how things are going to sound,'' said another Reagan operative. ''He'll take contrary advice if you give it to him well. It's a failure of his staff when people don't. But to be effective you have to be firm, and most people around big politicians don't like giving them bad news.'' Last weekend, for example, at a staff review of the campaign with Mr. Reagan, participants said no one had the nerve to tell Mr. Reagan that his goofs were his campaign's main problem.

By several accounts, too, his staff failed to warn him about the potential consequences of his remarks about Taiwan. In Ohio, another embarrassment developed when three staffer members - Lyn Nofziger, Michael Deaver and Ed Meese - inserted the charge into an economic speech that the current downturn was a Carter ''depression.'' But they failed to consult Alan Greenspan, a top Reagan economic adviser who was nearby and who admitted the next day that the remark was an overstatement.

The traveling staff did not spot political trouble in the ''noble cause'' phrase that Mr. Reagan himself inserted into his Chicago speech. And it prodded him into taking a swipe at President Carter for appearing in an Alabama town with a Ku Klux Klan office. Reagan headquarters, hurt by a Democratic countercharge that this was ''an insult to the South,'' ordered a hasty retreat.

A Shortage of Peers?

Insiders acknowledge that these events point up divisions within the Reagan campaign command as well as an organizational looseness under campaign manager William Casey. No one person is clearly in control, several aides lament.

The major difficulty is that the Reagan team is an amalgam of two groups with different backgrounds and viewpoints - the old conservative California group that has long served Mr. Reagan, primarily Mr. Meese, Mr. Deaver and Mr. Nofziger; and another group with links to President Ford's Administration and 1976 campaign - Mr. Casey, William Timmons, James A. Baker 3d, Stuart Spencer and Drew Lewis.

Some reckon the Californians are too close to Mr. Reagan to caution him about the political land mines hidden in his rhetoric. But except for Mr. Casey and Mr. Spencer, the Ford group has not yet won enough of Mr. Reagan's personal confidence to take on the ticklish task of telling him how to trim his sails. ''He really needs someone with him on a peer level, someone who will level with him about those misstatements,'' said a close associate.

One prospect is Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Mr. Reagan's national campaign chairman and longtime friend. The situation has become serious enough that others have coaxed Mr. Laxalt, despite his own re-election campaign, to start traveling with Mr. Reagan. Nonetheless, Mr. Reagan's advisers contend that the damage so far has been modest, can be remedied, and still has not cost Mr. Reagan his lead over Mr. Carter in the important swing states.

''Obviously, you can't continue that pattern for another month and not be hurt badly,'' said Robert Teeter, a Republican pollster working the Reagan campaign. ''But so far, I'm not sure you'd notice a lot of fluctuation in the polls.''
Quote:
[ Reagan and two missteps ... ]; [SECOND Edition]
Fred Barnes Baltimore Sun
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Aug 25, 1980. pg. 1

Reagan and two missteps

WASHINGTON - Ronald Reagan has stumbled at the outset of his campaign

against President Jimmy Carter by allowing himself - and not Carter - to

become the chief issue.

For all the assiduous planning by Reagan's strategists aimed at keeping the Republican presidential candidate off the defensive, he has been bedeviled in the 12 days since Carter officially became his Democratic opponent by two controversies of his own making.

The flaps - one involving his view of the Vietnamese war, the other involving Taiwan - had the effect of minimizing the effect of two speeches by Reagan last week on defense policy.

And that was a distinct loss for the Reagan campaign, since the speeches effectively pressed one of its overriding themes: that Reagan's hard-line approach is not reckless sabre-rattling but is the surest means of achieving peace with the Soviet Union.

Worse still, the self-generated troubles tended to raise doubts about the ability of Reagan and his political lieutenants to cope with the enormouspressure of a presidential race, particularly against an experienced and remorseless campaign operation such as Carter's.

Political advisers of the President were understandably pleased by Reagan's performance. "The poor guy may not get out of these flaps alive," chortled one Carter strategist.

That certainly overestimates Reagan's troubles. The damage was far from fatal, and Reagan has plenty of time to recover.

But to do so, he may need to curtail the controversy over his proposed policy toward the Taiwan government. At this point, more than a week after the flap erupted, there is no end in sight.

The controversy involving Vietnam was gratuitously created by three words that Reagan inserted in his speech a week ago to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The text contained Reagan's long-standing rhetoric in defense of the American effort in Vietnam, to which he added the phrase "a noble cause."

This was seized on by many of the reporters covering Reagan - to the surprise of the former California governor and his aides, who hadn't expected the phrase to attract attention.

Lost in press reports, especially those on television, was Reagan's well- reasoned argument that his tough military policies would have a far better chance of delivering peace with the Soviets than would Carter's.

In their effort to control the flow of news in the presidential race, the Reaganites have adopted a number of practices common to campaigns. One is limiting press conferences, where the candidate might make an off-the-cuff remark that upstages his primary message or gets him in trouble.

Another tactic is to emphsize general themes while steering away from specifics such as the price tag on proposals or the exact steps to be taken to achieve an important national goal.

To stay off the defensive in the campaign, Reagan operatives have further decided against responding to querries about old quotes from Reagan that the Democrats already have begun citing.

"You ignore it and go ahead talking about the important point in the campaign, which is Jimmy Carter's record," Nofziger explained.

That is the policy at least. But after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy derisively mentioned several comments from Reagan during Kennedy's speech to the Democratic National Convention, an aide to the Republican candidate sought to explain them. This kept the quotes alive in the press for another day.
<b>Forgive me for adding the following article and the followup....14 years later. It seems like a microcosm that points to what workers were duped into doing with their former collective bargaining rights....voting them away.</b>
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...D8415B8084F1D3
IN MOVE TO THE CENTER,REAGAN PLANS TO ALTER 2 ANTIUNION POSITIONS
RAINES, HOWELL. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 9, 1980. pg. A.1

Ronald Reagan has revised his position on two issues of prime importance to labor unions as part of a broader strategy to move his Republican candidacy closer to the center of the political spectrum.

A campaign flier that will be distributed in a day or so to union members in hard-pressed mill towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania strongly modifies Mr. Reagan's harsh attack on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a hindrance to management. It also renounces the Republican nominee's suggestion in Indiana last spring that unions be made subject to antitrust laws.

Putting Out 250,000 Fliers

The Reagan campaign is preparing to distribute 250,000 of the fliers at a time when the candidate is making a series of increasingly moderate statements on such subjects as social welfare, the economy and military affairs.

The movement toward the center in the postconvention period has long been a part of Mr. Reagan's campaign plan. But that process worked only fitfully until the past few weeks when Mr. Reagan began stumping through the industrial states. Given the political balance in the West and East, these states hold the key to President Carter's hope of re-election.

The campaign flier that will be distributed to union members is intended, according to the man who wrote it, to neutralize the normally Democratic labor vote by convincing union members to stay away from the polls on Election Day.

On its surface, the flier looks like an appeal for traditionally Democratic voters in the Middle West's industrial section to switch to Mr. Reagan. But its real aim, its author says, is to minimize, rather than convert, the union vote in key states.

''I don't want those people to vote for Reagan,'' said Michael Balzano, a former Nixon Administration official who recently joined the Reagan traveling staff as a labor adviser. ''I want them to stay home. I don't want them to vote.''

Mr. Balzano drafted the campaign leaflet, with the candidate's approval, to reassure union members that a Reagan victory would not be a reversal of labor's legislative and regulatory gains.

Moves Toward the Center

''We want to make sure that Governor Reagan continues to appeal to ticket splitters and independents who are moderate,'' asserted James Baker 3d, a deputy campaign director. ''We've never made any secret of that.''

The Republican candidate's moderation has been evident on several fronts. Before his pledge to leave the union laws intact, for example, Mr. Reagan had defended his economic plan, which has been attacked as radical by Mr. Carter, by arguing that the Republican's tax-cutting proposals would not result in curtailment of essential Government services.

Last week, he reversed his opposition to Federal aid for New York City, and he has played down in stump speeches his statistic-studded proposals for an arms buildup in favor of renewed pledges to keep the peace. Recanting his past critcisms of Social Security, he pledges at every stop that no beneficiary will ever miss a monthly check. In the face Mr. Carter's accusation that he has pandered to racism, Mr. Reagan today said at Wheaton College near Chicago that he would ''vigorously support'' laws against discrimination.

The union leaflet is intended to dampen the impact of Mr. Reagan's past statements, too. In it he pledges not to seek repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act or the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires Federal construction wages to match prevailing union wages. He also promises not to seek a national ''right to work'' law, which would outlaw contracts that require workers to join a union to retain their jobs, and he promises not to try to extend the antitrust laws to unions. Stances Last Spring

But in South Bend, Ind., last spring, Mr. Reagan complained about labor union contributions to Democratic candidates. And in response to a voter's question, he agreed with the suggestion that consideration be given to extending antitrust laws to cover organized labor. Similarly, he promised at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Washington to review OSHA regulations with an eye to removing many of them through executive order or legislation.

Mr. Balzona, a former director of Action, the Federal service agency, who often acted as President Nixon's liaison to labor and ethnic groups, said that before he agreed to run what he calls the Reagan ''offensive'' on union issues, he set out to determine the campaign's present stand on labor issues. ''I tried to find out what our position was,'' he said in an interview, ''and they didn't have a position.''

Then, armed with Mr. Reagan's quotations, he said, he ad discussed the matter with the candidate. ''He said, 'Some of these speeches I've made, some of the rhetoric you used, you get carried away. In a speech you exaggerate some things for effect.' '' Mr. Balzona added that he had concluded that the criticisms of Mr. Reagan from union officials had been based on ''a series of statements he made in campaign speeches for the last 19 years.''

''But when we ran the statements by him - 'Do you intend to abolish OSHA?' - he said, 'Of course not.' '' So on four key questions - including, ''would Governor Reagan seek the repeal of OHSA?'' - the pamphlet to be distributed to union members offers a blunt, boldfaced ''NO.'' The direct language, Mr. Balzona said, was approved by Mr. Reagan despite the objections of strategists who insisted that he had to be consistent with past statements. But Mr. Balzona said a group of 40 ''labor professionals'' consulted on the matter urged the unequivocal answers. Their advice to the candidate was characterized as, ''Don't say anything else about OSHA. Just say 'no.' ''

Reading the Small Print

The smaller type in the campaign pamphlet, however, reserves Mr. Reagan's right to ''eliminate unnecessary regulations,'' to ''insist on tightening the administration'' of the Davis-Bacon Act, and continuing Taft-Hartley provisions for the continuation of state ''right to work'' laws.

The campaign literature attempts to make Mr. Reagan more acceptable to union members by stressing his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild. ''He led the Screen Actors Guild in its first strike and he won it!'' it notes. ''Elect the former union president, President.''

Most of the pro-Carter pickets expected at the largely inactive Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation mill here failed to show up today. Spotting one worker with a Carter sign, Mr. Reagan said, ''He's had his chance, and his ideas didn't work. He's had his chance. He's had three and a half years. I think it's time to send in a new quarterback.''

Workers at the mill, which Mr. Reagan called a ''ghost town,'' received the Republican candidate cordially enough that even Mr. Balzona was moved to observe that his stay-at-home strategy may be too pessimistic. ''From what I've seen today,'' he said, ''these people are going to vote for us. We're going to get some votes here.''

Yet there are signs of persistent Democratic loyalty in this region, as well. Yesterday in Steubenville, Ohio, Mr. Reagan encountered vocal hecklers intent on keeping his past statements alive with placards carrying the old Reagan line: ''Unemployment compensation is a paid holiday.''

<b>''He's antilabor all the way,'' asserted Paul Tucker, one of about 150 union members who booed Mr. Reagan. ''We've got to keep Ronald Reagan out of the White House.'' <b>
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AC0894DC494D81
MARKET WATCH; The Workers Are Starting To Win a Few
Norris, Floyd. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: May 1, 1994. pg. A.1

IT was almost 13 years ago when it became clear that labor unions had lost much of their clout. President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' strike, and left the strikers unemployed.

In retrospect, that action seems to have set the tone for an era in which the power of workers to get "more," as Samuel Gompers is said to have put it when asked what organized labor wanted, had ended.

It was a time when the fear of inflation had grown to the extent that the public wanted something done, not just in the United States but around the world. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was breaking the power of unions and in France a supposedly Socialist Government was imposing austerity.

The fear of inflation then is now only dimly remembered by many. Prices had begun climbing in the late 1960's, and inflation kept rising through price controls and through recessions. By 1981, almost everyone expected oil prices to top $100 a barrel within a few years. Interest rates were high and rising, and a few months after the controllers' strike was broken the Government sold an issue of 30-year bonds with a yield to maturity of 15.78 percent. There was disagreement about what government could do to bring inflation under control, but there was consensus that there would not be the political will to do it.

Now, the situation is reversed. Higher interest rates are being blamed on almost everything except concern about inflation. It is widely believed that labor costs cannot rise rapidly because there are too many people willing to do any given job, if not here, then in some other country..........
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...D8415B8084F1D3
CANDIDATES VS.REPORTERS:OLD BATTLE,SHARPER EDGE
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 19, 1980. pg. A.2

Like every Presidential election, the race between Ronald Reagan and President Carter is not simply a contest between two candidates. It is also a contest between two agendas - which set of issues should voters view as the most pressing. But they are presented to the potential voter not by the candidates directly, but through the filter of the press, which has its own agenda - news. This year, as usual, the candidates' staffs are frustrated by what they perceive to be television and newspaper correspondents' priorities.

Mr. Carter's campaign advisers complain that the President's ''meanness'' in his attacks on the former California Governor was a contrived issue. For several days, following his warning of divisions between Christians and Jews if the Republican were elected, Mr. Carter found himself forced to discuss whether his attacks had been overly personal. His exasperated strategists struggled unsuccessfully to turn the coverage to other attacks, principally those that raise the war and peace questions.

Meanwhile, Mr. Reagan's people were sidetracked by the focus on air pollution. Particularly in California, where Los Angeles had been choking under a bad siege of smog, Mr. Reagan's comment that the pollution problem had become ''substantially controlled'' got headlines daily. The campaign was hard pressed to return to its principal subject, the economy.

And so, last week again, Representative John B. Anderson was besieged by questions about why he is remaining in the race. His own priorities have become submerged in the issue of whether he is a political spoiler.

This year's complaints about the press have a particularly sharp edge. They are that it has dwelt too much on the strictly political aspects of the race, on the horse-race, and that it has tended to highlight the candidate's personal characteristics. Mr. Reagan's gaffes make news while Mr. Carter's do not; Mr. Carter's slashing personal attacks on Mr. Reagan get attention while Mr. Reagan's tone is less remarked upon.

At the center of the discontent is the basic axiom of news coverage - focus on what's new. Generally, candidates find this more of an advantage than a disadvantage. But this year, both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter are trying to win support within the abnormally large undecided bloc. The Undecideds are less likely to be aware of the issues. Thus the need to sound familiar themes, over and over, is paramount. Reporters covering the candidates, however, are looking for what is fresh that day, even if it is only that the candidate has repeated himself in a new way.

Aides to both Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan complain that reporters have, at different times in the campaign, looked for new ways in which the candidate reinforced a stereotype of himself -often, in their view, a stereotype held more by the press than the public.

<b>Early on in the campaign, Mr. Reagan's controversial ad libs about the Ku Klux Klan and about the Vietnam War being a ''noble cause'' created a firestorm of criticism. The Vietnam War comment was the very definition of old news. Mr. Reagan has said the same thing for years.<.b> But at the time he repeated it, the Carter campaign was charging that he was overly inclined to make rash statements. Mr. Reagan accused reporters of going off ''halfcocked,'' looking for ways to create credibility problems for him.

Mr. Carter expressed the same sort of exasperation, more recently, about the ''meanness'' charge. ''The press seems to be obsessed with this issue,'' he said as reporters at a news conference asked again and again about his suggestion that Mr. Reagan's use of ''code words'' had been racist.

A couple of days after Mr. Carter conceded that he had ''overstated'' things a bit and promised to get himself ''back on track,'' he was asked what kind of President he thought Mr. Reagan would make. His reply listed several disagreements, and closed with the statement that his rival would not be ''a good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.'' Shortly afterward, White House press secretary Jody Powell charged that only in a climate of oversensitivity to the ''meanness'' issue could that statement be characterized as the ''strongest personal attack'' yet, as a United Press International story put it.

''News coverage of Presidential candidates often has a selfreinforcing, reflexive aspect to it,'' says political scientist James David Barber. ''A lot of times the stories are really about the observations of the journalists, reifying them as if they were real phenomena. Maybe that's happening because the race is so boring this year. It's like George Burns said when he had his first plate of eggs after going on a salt-free diet, that they tasted like the hens hadn't been paid that day.''

The candidates' planners can hardly claim that they are unfamiliar with how the system works, or that they don't know how to turn it to their advantage.

In the last couple of weeks, for instance, Mr. Carter got publicity for signing an agreement with Israel on oil supplies, and used the occasion of the war between Iraq and Iran to reiterate his positions on helping Israel. Mr. Reagan has traveled to automobile factories, steel mills and construction sites to pound away at his appeals for blue-collar support. Each time the coverage focused on the new setting and slightly different emphasis.

One way all the campaigns get around the priorieties of the socalled national press - the major networks, newspapers and news magazines - is simply to aim for local coverage in those areas where the candidate appears. Mr. Carter's hour-long town meeting in Yatesville, Pa., last week, was covered live on three local television stations. Lately, the Carter campaign has taken to calling in reporters from the Washington bureaus of middle- and small-sized newspapers for fullscale reviews of the issues it feels are not being adequately discussed.

Although several Carter officials have contended recently that the press is ''setting the agenda'' of the campaign outright, many in the press don't agree. ''By itself, the media can't see the agenda,'' said Julius Duscha, director of the Washington Journalism Center. ''The coverage in the end depends on what is picked up from the candidates. In campaigns I've covered, the reporters have heard the set speeches so long that they look for these other things, particularly when there doesn't seem to be much excitement to the campaign.''

''The Reagan gaffes,'' he continued, ''tell us something about what sort of a person he is, and Carter's 'mean streak' gives us insight into his personality. These things get to some of the main problems that people have with the candidates to begin with.'' end
Quote:
Letter
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 5, 1981. pg. A.14

To the Editor:

There is a bold, significant international move that the new Reagan Administration should take which will be practical and constructive: normalize relations with Hanoi. By persisting in its refusal to do this, the United States perpetuates world tensions and problems. Further, we are acting against our own national selfinterest. v. hat could normalization mean? Economically, American business would get a chance to trade profitably in Vietnam, just as our allies do. On the humanitarian level, a normalized American presence in Vietnam could help lead to improved conditions for people in Indochina. They need food and technology. We have both. They don't, in part because we destroyed much of what they had.

Morally, we have an unfulfilled obligation to the people of Indochina. The United States, the country most conspicuously present in Vietnam's destruction, is the nation most conspicuously absent during reconstruction. By refusing to normalize relations, we continue the legal banning of trade, aid, development and exchange programs. We thus make the rebuilding process even harder. Certainly we should help those who flee Indochina. But we should also try to restore the shattered society they are fleeing.

The arguments presented by Daniel C. Arnold and R. Sean Randolph (''Don't Recognize Hanoi,'' Op-Ed Dec.23) are similar to the negative rhetoric voiced by the old China lobby before Richard Nixon chose to alter our policy toward Peking. Messrs. Arnold and Randolph contend that our continuing not to recognize Hanoi contributes to ''geopolitical balance'' and serves our interest in a ''stable, secure Southeast Asia.'' The opposite seems more accurate: our policy contributes to instability and imbalance.

Politically, normalization could diminish Vietnam's great dependence on the Soviet Union, thus readjusting the balance of power more in our favor in Southeast Asia. It could also help prevent further conflict between China and Vietnam. The Chinese are less likely to reinvade Vietnam if their American friends are on good terms with Hanoi. The Chinese need what America now provides, in terms of trade and geopolitics, and are unlikely to give up these advantages if the U.S. chooses to recognize Hanoi.

Not all of Indochina's misery today is Hanoi's fault. In recent years our policy has been to ''squeeze'' Vietnam, to isolate it, perhaps even to help make conditions worse there than that tragic nation would otherwise have endured. It seems clear that Vietnam dominates Laos and Kampuchea now, as it has over the centuries. But to use that as an argument against normalization in 1981, or as a reason to back the genocidal Pol Pot, only fosters continued unrest. Normalization would help signal to China that we will no longer bolster its murderous ally.

The Indochina war was, is and will be a bitter experience for many Americans. Someday we will have to come to terms with what we did there. Candidate Reagan declared our role in that war ''a noble cause.'' President Reagan should consider an even more noble cause - peace. The war is over. Let the peace begin. And that means normalization of relations with Hanoi.

ROBERT RICHTER New York, Dec. 25, 1980 The writer, a former producer at CBS News and ABC News, produced the independent documentary ''Vietnam: An American Journey.''
Quote:
Ten Years After -- Vietnam's Legacy: A Decade After War, U.S. Leaders Still Feel Effects of the Defeat --- For Politicians and Military, Avoiding Next 'Vietnam' Guides Policy Decisions --- No Consensus About Lessons
By David Ignatius. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 14, 1985. pg. 1

By David Ignatius
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 14, 1985. pg. 1

{First of a Series}

WASHINGTON -- In the decade since the Vietnam War ended, the world has changed in ways that no one could have predicted, certainly not the U.S officials of the 1960s who set out to save a shaky regime in a distant nation most Americans knew little about.

Who would have imagined then that Vietnam's arch-enemy today would be China, that Washington and Peking would be friends, that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, twice, and that West Point would be swamped with applicants for admission? Or that a new generation of college students, knowing little about the war, would be eager to learn what the U.S. did in Vietnam and why it lost?

Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong expresses the general sense that things haven't turned out quite as expected. "Yes, we defeated the United States," he says. "But now we are plagued by problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, underdeveloped nation. Waging a war is simple, but running a country is difficult."

What haven't changed are the painful memories of Vietnam. For people who were involved in the war, the images of America's defeat nearly 10 years ago remain fixed in the mind: Desperate Vietnamese refugees clinging to a helicopter. The frantic evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where Americans climbed over the backs of Vietnamese in their rush to flee the country. The thousands of South Vietnamese allies left by the U.S. to the mercy of Hanoi.

"It was one of the blackest days for my country I had ever seen or could imagine," says retired U.S. Army Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, 69, who served as deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Like other Americans, he watched the final collapse in April 1975 on television.

A decade after Vietnam, the war still hurts. The wound hasn't healed. "No more Vietnams" has become a guiding principle -- some would say a crippling obsession -- of American foreign policy. Yet there is no consensus, even now, about what went so wrong in Vietnam or how the U.S. can use military power abroad without making similar mistakes.

The soul-searching over Vietnam extends even to the Reagan cabinet. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argues that the nation should avoid future Vietnams by fighting only popular, winnable wars; Secretary of State George Shultz counters that the U.S. must be ready to use force, even in ambiguous situations, to support its interests.

Vietnam frightened America. It was the nation's first defeat in war, and it made Americans more cautious and less certain about the world. Indeed, in the decade after Vietnam, the U.S. has been wary of military commitments and uncharacteristically worried about the future. The perceived hesitation and drift in foreign policy came to be known as "the post-Vietnam syndrome."

The after-effects of the war can be seen clearly in the two groups that were most involved in running it: the military and the foreign-policy establishment. Both groups waged war in the mid-1960s with bravado and conviction but suffered crises of confidence after the defeat, attacked as they were by the left as warmongers and by the right as losers.

Vietnam set America wobbling. Television brought the killing and the seeming futility of the conflict into every home and sparked public protest, and some old values and institutions were weakened. Much of the public came to distrust the country's leaders, especially those who had involved America in Vietnam. Congress distrusted the executive branch. And press reports fostered an atmosphere of suspicion. The tradition of bipartisan foreign policy disintegrated.

Harold Brown, who was Air Force secretary during President Johnson's buildup in Vietnam and later was President Carter's secretary of defense, explains: "There was more than a loss of confidence among the foreign-policy elite, there was a loss of legitimacy. And it wasn't just the defeat in Vietnam that did it, it was the backbiting that followed."

The acrimony continues. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, says the old establishment lost its will to rule, and that it now wants the U.S. to be loved rather than feared and respected.

"The Vietnam War contributed to a loss of self-confidence and moral self-righteousness with which any elite has to be imbued. Today, the members of the old elite are self-searching, agonizing, apologizing," Mr. Brzezinski says.

"Baloney," responds McGeorge Bundy, who was national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He says of the Brzezinski critique of the establishment: "The people I know who fit into that category -- including me -- don't strike me as demoralized." Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk dismisses the Brzezinski argument as "manure."

Ronald Reagan, who called the war "a noble cause," entered the White House in 1981 hoping to end the post-Vietnam syndrome. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues that Mr. Reagan's election itself was part of the national reaction to Vietnam. "Vietnam put in motion such a weakening of America and created so many frustrations that a reaction to the right was inevitable," Mr. Kissinger says.

President Reagan may have eased the residual pain of Vietnam, with his patriotic talk about standing tall. But certain problems of the post-Vietnam era remain, especially the absence of bipartisan foreign policy. The bitter debates of the past four years over Lebanon, Central America and arms control suggest that the old consensus is dead.

"One of Mr. Reagan's achievements is that he has undone much of the damage we have suffered," says Mr. Kissinger. "But he can't undo the sequence of events -- Angola, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua -- which were the indirect consequences of Vietnam. The fact that we have such difficulty today discussing Central America in strategic terms -- as opposed to abstract moral terms -- is a burden Reagan must carry."

Richard Holbrooke, a politically liberal former State Department official who spent three years in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, sums up how the war changed America's image of itself:

"I grew up in school believing that the United States had never lost a war. My children don't think that. I grew up thinking that the United States was the strongest country on earth. My kids think that maybe Russia is. Suddenly we became fallible."

Looking back at the war and the civilian strategists who haggled over every bombing target, Mr. Holbrooke concludes: "The basic, simpleminded American view was right: Win it or get out."

Vietnam was a "limited" war run by civilians for strategic goals. President Kennedy began a slow escalation of U.S. involvement in 1961 by sending military advisers to help South Vietnam resist a Communist insurgency sponsored by North Vietnam. President Johnson sent troops in increasing numbers starting in 1965. At the peak of the war in April 1969, there were 543,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

John McNaughton, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, described American goals in a March 24, 1965, memo: "U.S. aims: 70% -- to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat . . . 20% -- to keep South Vietnam (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands; 10% -- to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life." That, of course, was not the way it was presented to the public. And, in the end, 58,014 Americans had died.

As the war proceeded, anti-war protest erupted on campus and then in Congress. In 1969, President Nixon began the process of disengagement, which he called "Vietnamization." The 1973 Paris peace agreement ended the direct American combat role. But fighting continued between North and, South and on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.

In 1974, Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard surveyed the attitudes of 108 of the 173 U.S. Army generals who served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. He had just retired from the Army himself and was gathering material for his doctoral dissertation. The Kinnard findings suggested the frustration the brass still felt about Vietnam.

Almost 70% of the Army generals said that U.S. objectives in the war weren't clear, and 52% said that the stated objectives couldn't be achieved. Also, 91% said that if the U.S. ever planned to fight such a war again, it should start by deciding what it wanted to accomplish.

Vietnam severely hurt the U.S. Army, the service that did most of the fighting and lost the most men. The war sapped Army morale, eroded discipline, and embittered both officers and enlisted men. Some soldiers returning home in uniform from Vietnam were heckled and spat upon. The experience taught a generation of officers that the Army had best avoid future Vietnams.

As Gen. Goodpaster puts it: "Many Army people feel that there is something immoral about sending young men to fight and die in war that our country isn't prepared to support. I think the Army leadership doesn't want to see that happen again."

America before Vietnam -- a nation where a confident elite ran foreign policy and expected the rest of the country to follow -- lives on in Dean Rusk's office at the University of Georgia. On the wall behind the former Secretary of State, peering over his shoulder, are portraits of the men he worked under at the State Department during the late 1940s and early 1950s -- George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and John Foster Dulles.

These were the men who had shaped what Henry Luce once called "the American Century." They had helped accomplish heroic deeds: vanquishing Hitler, rescuing Europe, containing Stalin's expansion. Mr. Rusk says that when he became secretary of state in 1961, he was conscious that he was heir to a great tradition.

"I was part of a generation that had been given heavy responsibility during and after World War II," he says. "During the 1930s, we had been led down the path to a war that could have been prevented. We came out of World War II thinking that the key to preventing World War III was collective security."

As Mr. Rusk desribes the doctrine of collective security, he reassembles the premises that he says led the U.S. into Vietnam. Collective security meant forming alliances and signing mutual-security treaties. Maintaining those alliances required the U.S. to demonstrate its credibility. The logic of credibility was such that if the U.S. didn't honor its treaty commitment to, say, South Vietnam, it would appear weak and unable to defend what mattered most -- the Atlantic alliance.

It may seem a peculiar notion that to protect Europe the U.S. had to go to war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. But there was almost universal agreement among the foreign-policy establishment that the U.S. should draw the line in South Vietnam.

Mr. Rusk says he still has no mea culpa to offer about the U.S. attempt to limit the spread of communism in Asia in keeping with the provisions of the now-defunct Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

"If you stand back and look at it," Mr. Rusk concludes, "the U.S. went halfway around the world, lost 50,000 dead and 300,000 casualties, to make good on the promise of the SEATO treaty. Because of that, people still have to bear in mind, even in Moscow, the possibility that those damn fool Americans might do it again."

After Vietnam, the U.S. sought a new approach to foreign policy. The doctrine of collective security, which caused some to regard America as the world's policeman, gave way to the Nixon doctrine of relying on regional allies, such as the Shah of Iran, to maintain local security. That approach failed in Iran during the Carter administration, and Iran became a symbol of American weakness.

If President Reagan has restored an image of strength in foreign policy, it is thanks to his military buildup. But in dealing with regional crises -- especially in Lebanon and Central America -- the administration's foreign policy has seemed confused.

Lebanon illustrates America's continuing difficulty in using military power. It combined unfortunate aspects of Vietnam and Iran: an idealistic but ill-planned strategy, a weak client, and the use of troops for uncertain objectives. The military was wary about the venture from the start, and Congress soon got cold feet.

Lebanon contributed another disturbing image to post-Vietnam foreign policy: the bombed-out rubble of the American Embassy and Marine headquarters of Beirut, which the U.S. couldn't protect and wouldn't avenge.

Gen. Goodpaster argues that the post-Vietnam syndrome isn't all bad. "I think the war made us gun-shy, and I think we need some of that," he says. But he likens post-Vietnam America to Mark Twain's story about the cat that got burned on a hot stove: "Now she won't sit on a hot stove. But she won't sit on a cold stove either."
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Old 09-25-2006, 08:50 PM   #5 (permalink)
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Quote:
The soul-searching over Vietnam extends even to the Reagan cabinet. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argues that the nation should avoid future Vietnams by fighting only popular, winnable wars;
I just found this amusing, because, although I was only alive for 3 years of his Presidency (and therefore unfit to remember any of it), I can't recall hearing about any military endeavour decided upon by our country that was either markedly winnable, or obviously popular.

Quote:
if the U.S. ever planned to fight such a war again, it should start by deciding what it wanted to accomplish.
It's sad that we have fallen into this dilemma also. Maybe only the administration truly knows what our objective is, but the people certainly don't. Because of that, I can fully understand the criticism brought upon the Administration to know the desired goal of all of this, and, since the answers were displeasing at the least, why we ventured there in the first place.

It's easy to see similarities in how both wars are ran back home, but the wars are certainly different, so far... I know very little Veitnam other that what you hear from the occasional broadcast, History Channel documentary, what have you, but it clear that nothing has been learned, and in both cases, nothing has been gained. I always strive to find a why as to why a certain thing is being done, in both Veitnam and Iraq, I can never come up with any reason that even remotely makes sense or seems plausible as to why either took place, and continued to take place as they did/do.

-----

By the way, I'm loving your posts Host, tons of informative material to be read.
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Old 09-26-2006, 05:52 AM   #6 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ustwo
The nobel goal in Vietnam was to save people from the 'joy' of communism.

It failed with tragic results after the US pull out.
So what should have happened?

That's actually a sincere question without any agenda behind it. Your understanding of Vietnam is significantly different from mine, and I'm curious about that.
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Old 09-26-2006, 08:39 AM   #7 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ratbastid
So what should have happened?

That's actually a sincere question without any agenda behind it. Your understanding of Vietnam is significantly different from mine, and I'm curious about that.
ratbastid, if you receive an answer to your question, it will be interesting to compare whether or not it is framed around now prescient talking points, like these:
Quote:
Enough Vietnam Analogies
September 9, 2003

.........But the actions of our enemies are <b>rarely scorned by our media elite.</b> Instead, they’re reported as problems for, or mistakes by, the Bush White House.

<b>The tone of newscasts</b> in the weeks since the last unmissable big success – killing Uday and Qusay, and even these successes were criticized – has been largely gloom and doom, Vietnam and quagmire. Two nights before Bush spoke, <b>Dan Rather was pounding</b> Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, saying "rank and file Americans are asking ‘are we into quicksand? Is this going to be another quagmire?’" Rumsfeld, for once, was far too neutral, saying "time will tell" before noting that we’ve been in Iraq for less than six months.

<b>Dan Rather’s "rank and file Americans"</b> are asking these questions only because <b>the media can’t stop focusing on them</b>. Rumsfeld should have dismissed the whole Vietnam analogy as ridiculous, because:

1. We lost 58,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. <b>Our casualties in Iraq now aren’t on the same planet as the losses in that war.</b>

2. We didn’t liberate Vietnam from communist dictatorship and then have trouble reorganizing it along peaceful and democratic lines. If we were in Month Six and still struggling to depose Saddam Hussein – <b>while losing thousands of lives in the process – the comparison would be more realistic.</b> In Vietnam, we withdrew in defeat and left with the whole country united under tyranny and concentration camps. <h3>In Iraq, we liberated the entire country from tyranny and torture chambers in three weeks.</h3>

<b>The anchors are now anxious to make us forget this.</b>

3. In Vietnam, anti-war activists and <b>anchormen could more plausibly argue (though still incorrectly)</b>that the complete consolidation of communism halfway around the world was not a threat to the domestic security of the United States. Since September 11, are these same anti-war activists and <b>anchormen finding it reasonable to assume that America faces no threat</b>, and the proper response to world terrorism and the states that sponsor it is once again withdrawal and negotiated humiliation?

The only Vietnam analogy that works is <b>the comparison in press coverage.</b> As in Vietnam, <b>the press is eager to discredit American military action,</b> to discourage American support at home for military action, to disintegrate the noble cause of the fight, and to bury any victory under a tidal wave of gloom.

Last week, when he wasn’t hammering Rumsfeld, <b>Dan Rather was highlighting an interview with American-killing terrorists inside Iraq</b>. They told Rather from scarf-covered faces that <b>they hated Saddam, but now they hated Americans more.</b> It’s good and useful to know the enemy. <b>What’s so discouraging about Rather’s treatment</b> is that our sworn enemies are respectfully taken at their word and granted less cynicism about their motives than our own leaders in America.

<b>Tom Brokaw came out of the Bush speech Sunday night with one primary question: When will Rumsfeld or his deputies resign?</b> He asked Democrat Joe Biden this question from the left: "Obviously there has been a profound failure of intelligence about what would happen once we got to Baghdad. <b>Shouldn't someone in the administration be held accountable for that?"</b> Minutes later, he pitched the same question to retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the man who so badly predicted 3,000 casualties in the battle for Baghdad and now, predictably, is again running Rumsfeld into the ground.

<b>In short, anchors are acting like they are the ones who run this country</b>, and could execute this war better than the Bush administration. Instead of covering this new decade of terror threats, these anchormen are better suited to their hot stories of the last decade – O.J. Simpson, Princess Diana, and the McCaughey septuplets.
Ohhhh....he's longing for:

<a href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL380.cfm">if you will, a future wherein the media willfully support the foreign policy objectives of the United States........A time when someone, somewhere in the media can be counted on to extol the virtues of morality without qualifications.........When Ronald Reagan is cited not as the "Man of the Year," but the "Man of the Century."</a>

here.....in "Jesus land"!
<a href="http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/lbbcolumns/1996/col19960925.asp">"The gay and lesbian TV writers of today have been pushing the envelope every chance they get. In fact, they're encouraged to do so."

Remember that when next your children turn on the television. If you are trying to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is decadent and immoral, understand that television is telling them just the opposite -- and telling you to go fly a kite.


</a>
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Old 09-26-2006, 09:30 AM   #8 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ratbastid
So what should have happened?
As we have found out many times now, interfering with a revolution/civil war in another country directly is never adventagous for either side. Especially when dealing with guerrilla warfare.

The US did not properly anticipate its enemy, and had little understanding of them or their tactics until we had engaged them. This is usually detrimental in war, and this case was no exception.
The US should realize that superior technology (to a certain extent) means little. There have been countless wars throughout history wherein the superior force was completely defeated. The Battle of Chi-Fu between Ch'u and Wu in 519 BC, and The Battle of Cannae during the Hanibal campaign in 1018 AD, for example. The superior forces were blinded by their assured victory, and it cost them the battle. In Vietnam, the Vietcon knew the land, were willing to absorb massive casualties, and incredibly determined to win. We should never tried engaging them with our limited experience with their tactics, and region.

What we should have done was thoroughly weight our options and possible ramifications of engaging the Vietcon before going to war. And once their tactics became clear, we should have immedeately pulled out and helped evacuate as many as we could. If we hadn't been so stubborn and "gun-ho" about winning the war, and concentrated on supplying medical care, food, and evacuation, instead of bullets and lives, we could have saved thousands.

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Old 09-26-2006, 11:21 AM   #9 (permalink)
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Host, it's probably one of the worst-kept secrets on the planet that Johnson lied his ass off about Tonkin Gulf II. I believe McNamara recently admitted he lied as well.

How you manage to blame Reagan for all of that is a question for the ages.
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Old 09-26-2006, 11:43 AM   #10 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv
Host, it's probably one of the worst-kept secrets on the planet that Johnson lied his ass off about Tonkin Gulf II. I believe McNamara recently admitted he lied as well.

How you manage to blame Reagan for all of that is a question for the ages.
I always though the Vietnam War and decisions regarding it were made during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon administrations.
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Old 09-26-2006, 11:52 AM   #11 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv
Host, it's probably one of the worst-kept secrets on the planet that Johnson lied his ass off about Tonkin Gulf II. I believe McNamara recently admitted he lied as well.

How you manage to blame Reagan for all of that is a question for the ages.
I think that Reagan had the largest influence on the advancement of an opinion that gathered momentum during his 1980 presidential campaign, and continues to this day.....the crux of it is that from a US centric POV, Vietnam was "a noble war", and that "we could have won it", if "the left" and the "liberal media", hadn't tied "one of our military's hands, behind it's back".

The people who subscribed to this fallacy, failed to learn the lesson that the US had foolishly inserted itself in the middle of Vietnam's civil war, and did not understand, as they (our Reagan influenced leadership) don't again, today, that the US cannot persuade people in another country that the preservation of a US backed government in their country, is worth fighting and dying for.

Thus, largely because of Reagan's opinion of what the US Vietnam experience was, our current government can expect to wait decades for Iraqis to "stand up and fight" to preserve a US installed form of government in their country, so that US soldiers who are fighting and dying on the orders of our leadership, can "stand down".

If Reagan had not opted to politicize and thus obscure, the actual lesson for the US in Vietnam, the US could have avoided, as it skillfully did in 1991, loosing a trillion dollars, so far, 2700 dead US soldiers, and 15,000 or more other seriously wounded military personnel, only to find itseld mired in the middle of an Iraqi civil war, training an Iraqi "security force", which after three years, it does not have enough trust and confidence in, to supply with "top line" weapons and logistic support infrastructure.

Marv, if you don't believe Reagan was the force behind the "noble war" bullshit, why do you agree that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was contrived? If it wasn't Reagan who influenced the "lack of learning", who did? Or....was their even a potential to learn a Vietnam lesson? Is it just more convenient to make believe Reagan had an honest message...."it was all "the left's fault"?
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Old 09-26-2006, 01:25 PM   #12 (permalink)
 
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marv: i think host was referring mostly to the extreme right's particular pseudo-history of the vietnam period, not to vietnam itself. although reagan's actions as governor of california were--well---in keeping with the politics of a true reactionary. have a listen to gil scott-heron's fabulous song "b movie" for a better synopsis of reaganism than i (or anyone) could manage.

i particularly like the line about reagan being "cheap steak tough and bonzo substantial"--but listen for yourself.

on the topic of lying, i suspect that in the bizarre little world of conservative politics, johnson and macnamara would be counted as "leftists"...
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Old 09-28-2006, 09:13 PM   #13 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elphaba
There was no hand tied behind the military's back. It was a futile effort, already abandoned by the French, and fueled on by the lies of McNamera and others. You might recogonize some of those names in Bush's current administration.
I couldn't believe anyone thought this way, so I googled. Yes, there are articles to this effect, but they refer to the number of troops and equipment allocated to the effort, not to strategy and tactics, or politics.

I then repeated this comment to three Vietnam vets I know. I could have asked a dozen more--there are a ton of them where I live. I got jaws dropping, incredulous looks, and these three comments:

l"That's right. We had BOTH hands tied behind our backs."

"Do you have any idea how many places we weren't allowed to bomb? And how stupid our orders were, since they came from politicians, not military leaders?"

"The rules of engagement were ridiculous--when we got shot at, we were supposed to radio for permission to shoot back." And so on.

You may be of an age to remember Vietnam (as I am) but something tells me you haven't seriously talked to many of the people who were there. I lived with one.
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Old 09-28-2006, 11:27 PM   #14 (permalink)
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Marv.....d-i-d y-o-u r-e-a-d t-h-e a-r-t-i-c-l-e i-n t-h-e s-e-c-o-n-d q-u-o-t-e b-o-x i-n t-h-e t-h-r-e-a-d OP?

Compared to the opinions of the US military leaders who served, and led...in Vietnam, your comments seem unpersuasive. If you have something to back what you claim, why not react to the points made in that informative piece:
Quote:
http://www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2000_07/despmeas.htm
A publication of Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc. ®
An organization chartered by the U.S. Congress

June 2000/July 2000
Desperate Measures
Search And Destroy, Rolling Thunder, Agent Orange, Phoenix, And Taking The Night Away From Charlie......
...because, Marv....your posted points remind me more of Reagan's political rhetoric, than of any substantive debate.

....and Marv.... 4 years after the 3 year long, period of "Rolling Thunder" ended, with the '68 Tet Offensive......the US was still bombing, just the way you apparently thought they weren't...."hot n' heavy":
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-07-NBC-4.html
NBC Evening News for Sunday, Nov 07, 1971
Headline: Vietnam / Fighting / Air War / Report
Abstract: (Studio) Battle occurred Sunday E. of Saigon between Americans and VC. Viet Cong casualties reported B-52 bombers hit Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam. United States air support more important Center of International Studies at Cornell University releases report with regard to air war.
REPORTER: Garrick Utley

(DC) Study shows level of bombing greater under President Nixon than under Lyndon Baines Johnson: in 1965-68, 3,015,000 tons dropped; in 1969-71, 3,400,000 tons dropped. United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs in World War II; 1 million tons in Korea and 6 million tons in Indochina. 1,050,000 civilians killed since 1965: 6,000,000 refugees reported Defoliation since 1962 affected 14% total area: 5,200,000 acres forest land, and 560,000 acres crop land. Report's final remark read.
REPORTER: Robert Goralski
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...23-NBC-11.html

NBC Evening News for Tuesday, May 23, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing
Abstract: (Studio) United States pilots bombing North Vietnam may now attack almost anything contributing to North Vietnam's war effort, according to Defense Department, Ind. as well as military targets will now be hit. Electric power plant hit near Hanoi. Americans use new bombs guided by lasers to destroy 6 bridges on rail line leading from Hanoi to P.R. China.
REPORTER: Garrick Utley

Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...20-CBS-12.html
CBS Evening News for Wednesday, Jun 20, 1973
Headline: Bombing Statistics / Cambodia-Laos
Abstract: (Studio) United States drops 50,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia in last 2 mos. Statistics from Senator Harold Hughes. More bombs dropped on Laos than all enemies in WW II.
REPORTER: Roger Mudd
Marv, IMO, the things about Vietnam, that you are convinced of, are absurd, "feelings based" opinions, not supported by the actual record. How many more tons of bombs should have been dropped, and how many more Vietnamese should have been killed of wounded, to "win it"?

With the record of "all that help" from the US.....directly from at least 1964 to the end of 1972, why was the US unsuccessful in it's goal of "Vietnamizing" that civil war? Could the comments in the second quote box on this thread's OP, possibly be the reason?
Quote:
The underlying factor in all this is that while there were people in South Vietnam who didn't like the Vietcong, there were very few people willing to die for the Saigon government. The Saigon government was corrupt and ineffective, and that was the bottom line......
The point of everything that I've posted, Marv...is that because the above "lesson" was and still is obscured....for you....by Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, and that of others, the US is grinding it's treasury, it's military forces, and the people of Iraq....to pieces,,,,relearning, the same lesson. So far....only US troops, in response to orders from civilian politcal leaders, show consistent willingness to reliably counter Iraqi insurgency and preserve the US installed and facilitated Iraqi government. Iraqis have not "stood up", so we can stand down....and they won't...to the point that our forces will ever withdraw without a collapse of the Iraqi security forces, after the US withdrawal,

That is why the Iraqi security forces won't be properly equipped or have full logistics support. The fear of US leaders is that the assets of US trained Iraqi forces will fall into the hands of the insurgents. That is already the case, in too many instances, just as ended up happening with the military assets of ARVN forces, in 1975.
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...10-ABC-12.html
ABC Evening News for Tuesday, Feb 10, 1970
Headline: VIETNAMIZATION
Abstract: (Studio) Melvin Laird arrives in Saigon; says Vietnamization irreversible.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith

(DC) Laird expects to drive home facts to Nguyen Van Thieu. Laird will. make it plain United States cuts to go on; nothing will stop it.
REPORTER: Bill Gill

(Studio) Major part of Vietnamization is teaching South Vietnam to fight for themselves with United States weapons.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith

(Fort Wolters, Texas) Fort Wolters, helicopter training for 300 South Vietnam; 19 weeks of training; more training in Alabama follows; may train thousands. <h3>Many trainees have reservations about their government, especially about its corruption. [South Vietnam SOLDIERS - can t talk about political]</h3>
REPORTER: Gregory Jackson
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-04-ABC-3.html
ABC Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 04, 1972
Headline: Vietnam War / United States Training
Abstract: (Studio) Fall of Quang Tri city to South Vietnam seems near. South Vietnam paratroopers landed in city limits and set up own defense positions 1/2 mile from city center. South Vietnam helicopter pilots trained in US.
REPORTER: Harry Reasoner

(Savannah, Georgia) Over 1400 South Vietnam completed 5 month helicopter pilot course in past 2 years Training to be in South Vietnam by South Vietnam from now on, a loss for Savannah families who housed South Vietnam pilots in training.
REPORTER: David Snell
The record shows that the US gave it an earnest try....Marv.....for more than a decade.....with a half million US troops, all the bombing imaginable, 58,000 American dead....and an impressive Vietnamization of the war.....and it turned out not to be enough Marv. Wishing and indoctrination via political rhetoric and individual anecdotal references of lower echelon US veterans of the Vietnam conflict, cannot turn what happened into what you think happened.

Same shit....different day:
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-17-NBC-7.html
NBC Evening News for Tuesday, Feb 17, 1970
Headline: Vietnamization
Abstract: (Studio) Defense Secretary Melvin Laird reports to Pres-. on Vietnamization; military part of schedule. Dep. United States Ambassador to Vietnam William Colby testifies to Senate committee [Senator Stuart SYMINGTON - asks Colby if South Vietnam could handle situation in Vietnam without Americans] <b>[William COLBY - believes Vietnamization a gradual thing; can give no set time for all Americans getting out.]</b>
REPORTER: David Brinkley
C'mon.....Marv !
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...15-CBS-10.html
CBS Evening News for Friday, Oct 15, 1971
Headline: Reagan / South Vietnam Visit
Abstract: (Studio) California Governor Ronald West Reagan, on Asian tour, congratulates South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu on unopposed election victory; notes George Washington unopposed.
REPORTER: Walter Cronkite

(Saigon, South Vietnam) Thieu puts in urgent request for Reagan's visit; fears appearance of snub if he didn't come. <b>[REAGAN - says doesn't know why such an uproar over uncontested election; feels purposes for Americans dying in South Vietnam still valid; notes United States fighting against totalitarianism.]</b>
REPORTER: Bruce Dunning
I thought it was Ronald "Wilson"....not "West".....the point is.....Reagan knew better....but he was a fucking actor..... it was all a performance, Marv. WINK
host is offline  
Old 09-29-2006, 01:59 AM   #15 (permalink)
Psycho
 
Gonna keep it simple, while Reagon's words were without a doubt designed to give himself a political edge over the Democrats, there was a certain amount of truth to them. The same damn thing is happening in Iraq that happened in Vietnam, we are failing to turn our boys loose and let'em kick some ass. We spend millions training our military to kill and kick ass with class then we send them to a foreign country and tell them to be policeman and not to kill. It's fundamentally wrong. Whether you like it or not the far Left plays a big part of this giant political/military clusterfuck. The far Leftist movement of this country should feel guilty and no wonder it still bothers them some 25 years after the words was spoken. Sometimes I think the far left of the Democratic Party rejoice when the body bags of fallen Americans come off the planes much like they did during the Vietnam era. Shit, we even have traiters much like Hanoi Jane that are visiting and collaberating with the enemy just for a few minutes in the spotlight. So just keep fueling the fire and giving the "insurgents" that shiny glimmer of hope. Apparently that's what the far left does best. And yes history does repeat itself.
scout is offline  
Old 09-29-2006, 05:39 AM   #16 (permalink)
Banned
 
Scout, how would you react if doubt were to gain enough of a foothold in your "thinking" to cause you to take a serious look at everything you "know" about Vietnam?

Consider that Jane Fonda is villified by folks of your opinion....when it is entirely possible that she was a humanitarian whistleblower, and GW Bush, as US ambassdor to the UN, lied to the world to cover for war criminals in the white house. I know it's probably too great of a threat to your "belief system", but others can judge for themselves:
Quote:
http://www.agrnews.org/issues/200/culture.html
If you only knew: insiderism and Secrets

By Bill Boisvert

With each new corporate scandal reminding us how far out of the loop we are, Americans are obsessed with insiders. We are convinced that inside information is superior to public information, and lionize whistle-blowers who lay bare the hidden workings of power. But strangely, when revelations come, they invariably do no more than affirm what is already common knowledge. When the secret tobacco company files surfaced in the ’90s, a development hyperbolized in the movie The Insider, the revelation they contained was that — steady, now — cigarettes are addictive and bad for your health. And if Congress ever succeeds in prying loose the secret files of Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, will anyone be shocked by the discovery that Enron was rewriting the nation’s energy regulations?

One touchstone of the cult of insiderism — the idea that what the public knows is a smokescreen of lies, that what’s really going on goes on behind the closed doors of institutional secrecy — is the Pentagon Papers. When this top-secret government study of US policy in Vietnam through 1968 was leaked, the legend goes, it told the real story — the inside story — of Vietnam, documenting the callousness of policy-makers’ calculations and the duplicity with which they were sold to a gullible Congress and public. The revelations provoked unprecedented acts of censorship. The Nixon administration went to court to try to bar newspapers from publishing the documents, making the Papers a cause célèbre. The controversy set a template — a conspiracy of the powerful, unmasked by a crusading press that rouses an enraged populace from its slumber — that would inform populist iconography for a generation to come.

But like other insiderist legends, this tale is a myth.

<b>Although the Papers stood the official story on its head, they had virtually no effect on Americans’ perceptions of the war. For all the commotion surrounding their publication in June 1971, they were yesterday’s news. By that time, six years of stalemated fighting had discredited the government’s claims of progress. TV newscasts had broadcast the devastation of South Vietnam by US bombing and search-and-destroy missions. A huge anti-war movement had grown up to contest the government’s pronouncements on the conduct and motives of the war. “We had to destroy the town to save it” had become the war’s absurdist epitaph.</b> By June 1971, the Tet Offensive had driven Johnson from office, the My Lai massacre had made the front pages, students had been shot at Kent State, Jane Fonda had been to Hanoi and a majority of Americans were telling pollsters the war was morally wrong. <b>There was no one left to disillusion.</b>

That’s the unintended irony of Secrets, a memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. His premise is that “secrets of the greatest import ... can be kept reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders,” to the detriment of democracy. It’s a dubious claim that’s hardly borne out by the evidence in his book, and it’s part of a wrongheaded but still influential idea on the left — that the American people are innocents whose inchoate anti-imperialism will erupt once the facts about the government’s interventionist schemes are exposed. These misapprehensions mar Ellsberg’s often very perceptive account of the times, causing him to grossly inflate the relevance of inside information to the forces that shaped the Vietnam era.

Ellsberg went from high-level berths at the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation, advising the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, to center-stage in the peace movement, getting maced by cops while marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Noam Chomsky. Along the way, he spent two years in Vietnam, nominally with the civilian pacification program, but really as a student-at-large of the war.

Ellsberg was an insider at the Pentagon, in the rice paddy and on the picket line. The breadth of his experience is probably unique and gives him, at times, a sharply insightful perspective.

By the time he returned from Vietnam in 1967, Ellsberg says, the policy establishment agreed with him that the war was a lost cause; but despite his and others’ arguments for de-escalation, the war dragged on. And there was a deeper problem, which Ellsberg points out to Kissinger:

“It will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have [super-secret] clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know?’ ... You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. ... You’ll become something like a moron ... incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have.”

As insiders stopped listening to the world, the world stopped listening to insiders.

Much of Secrets is an account of Ellsberg’s efforts to escape this hall of mirrors. As his frustration over the war mounted, he gravitated to the peace movement and began to experience the paradigm shift that was radicalizing so many others. Indeed, his was a classic ’60s journey of protracted consciousness-raising. The tension between his insider and outsider perspectives led to what was clearly an intellectually and emotionally traumatic break with the Rand-Pentagon elite. His leaking of the Papers may have been on some level an atonement for his past association with it.

In reading the Papers, Ellsberg found that policy-makers understood from the outset that South Vietnam was unsalvageable, that US intervention would require upwards of a million troops (and possibly nuclear weapons), and that even then victory would be doubtful. Rather than being misled by bad advice, presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson had gone against the insider consensus, dragging the American people along through manipulation and fraud. Ellsberg therefore decided to breach the wall of secrecy shielding “inordinate, unchallenged executive power” from accountability for its “desperate, outlaw behavior” in Vietnam.

His portrait of an executive branch run amok is no more tenable than the quagmire theory. It downplays serious disagreements among advisers about the prospects for intervention and gives short shrift to the political context of presidential decision-making.

Domestic opinion was never uniformly dovish (Ellsberg admits that the public were usually more hawkish than the insiders), and presidents acted with an eye to powerful pro-war constituencies. As late as the summer of 1967, Senate hawks held hearings demanding an escalation of the air war. Far from a “desperate, outlaw” tangent, presidential policy persistently aligned itself with domestic political pressures.

Even the Tonkin Gulf incident, exhibit A in Ellsberg’s indictment of executive branch deception, tells more about congressional acquiescence than presidential perfidy. Ellsberg quotes Sen. William Proxmire saying he would not have voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had he known the incident was a fraud, but lets this self-serving excuse pass without asking why Proxmire felt a bloodless patrol-boat skirmish justified writing a blank check to the president for unlimited war. Instead of probing congressional support for the war, he offers a morality play about a Machiavellian executive and a bamboozled legislature.

One could argue that the public would have been more dovish had they possessed inside information; that’s Ellsberg’s rationale for leaking the Papers. But secrecy never impeded a substantive anti-war critique, as Ellsberg’s own experience shows. Writing of an anti-war demo in April 1965, just weeks after American ground troops landed in Vietnam, he notes that the speakers “were on solid ground, even if they didn’t have inside information.” They had their own sources, no less (and perhaps more) informed than the Pentagon. Indeed, Ellsberg’s own keenest insights into the war’s illegitimacy, he tells us, came from reading French historians, not the Papers. The truth was out there — theorized by intellectuals, reported by journalists, confirmed by veterans, propounded by activists — from the start, even if it took a while to sink in.

Because Ellsberg still sees the war as a struggle between policy factions arguing over intelligence estimates, the larger picture eludes him. Vietnam was not the pet project of a rogue president or a coterie of planners; it was a product of the Cold War consensus. It was the long, twilight struggle Kennedy promised us, a reprise of conflicts over Korea or Berlin of the sort the country had decided it would fight without a clear-cut victory. Insider pessimism was matched by a conviction, widely shared by the body politic and policed by anti-communist ideologues, that the effort was worth it.

The war would therefore end not with the revelation of secrets but with a revolution in consciousness that repudiated the Cold War consensus — one grounded in public weariness with the material and moral costs of “twilight struggles” and swayed by the New Left’s overt anti-imperialism and nonviolence. Ellsberg’s own change of heart on the war was a microcosm of how that revolution reoriented public attitudes. The revolution penetrated the Pentagon Papers themselves. “A feeling is widely and deeply held,” wrote Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, “that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind ... that we are trying to impose some US image on distant peoples we cannot understand (any more than we can the younger generation here at home).”

The Papers were an anti-climax. The war continued; six months after their publication, Ellsberg glumly notes, they had accomplished “nothing.” Thus Ellsberg’s hopes that the Papers would help thwart Nixon’s secret intentions to expand the war in Indochina proved illusory.

But the Papers’ effects were illusory largely because Nixon’s plans were not secret — even the “secret” bombing of Cambodia was rather promptly reported in the New York Times — and not out of line with public opinion. Indeed, the Nixon administration, for all its skulduggery, shows quite dramatically the irrelevance of insiderism. <h3>Nixon deliberately cultivated a reputation for desperate outlawry to frighten the Communists. Unlike the Papers, his secret tapes, which Ellsberg generously quotes, are unsettling to this day:

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the [North Vietnamese] dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

N: ... I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

K: That, I think, would just be too much.</h3>

N: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Nixon settled for conventional bombing, with the proviso that “we’re gonna bomb those bastards all over the place. Let it fly, let it fly.” But despite his deranged bunker mentality, his overall policy was one of dutiful de-escalation and withdrawal — cannily calibrated to undercut opposition to the war and win re-election in a landslide. As much as he longed to, he could not ignore the new consensus that the country would not bear any burden or oppose any foe, and that some things would just be too much — the unfinished revolution in consciousness we call the “Vietnam syndrome.”

By focusing public ire on corporate evildoers and corrupt politicians, by deflecting attention from bad policy to the cover-up of bad policy, the cult of insiderism has left a pernicious legacy. Take the 2000 presidential election, a textbook case of an insider cabal — the Jeb Bush-Katherine Harris cabal, the Supreme Court Five cabal, take your pick — thwarting the popular will, and also a textbook case of insiderist obtuseness. The firestorm over a few hundred Florida ballots took the spotlight off Gore’s extra half-million ballots; while in the debate over which gang had betrayed the Constitution, the Constitution’s betrayal of democracy by way of the Electoral College was swept under the rug. Thus an opportunity for systemic reform, embedded in a priceless teachable moment of constitutional crisis, was dissipated in a trivial search for villains.

Even worse are the insidious long-term effects of insiderism. By deriding the machinery of democratic governance as a sham that disguises the behind-the-scenes machinations of insiders, it implies that democratic government is for suckers, that democracy is inescapably the captive of well-connected interests at odds with the public good. The result is to further a political culture of irresponsibility and uninvolvement that lets everyone off the hook — legislators, who ratify bad policy behind feigned ignorance and belated outrage, and the public at large, who retreat from the hard work of political engagement into free-floating cynicism.

Ellsberg’s concerns about the constitutional separation of powers and abuses by the executive branch are pertinent today, as an undeclared war gathers under the most venal and secretive administration in recent history. The Republicans’ wholesale auction of policy to campaign donors, their lockdown on formerly public information and their penchant for incognito detentions make such anxieties plausible again. And unlike the witch hunts of the Clinton years, suspicions about the Bush administration are well-founded in real damage done to the public weal.

But it would be a mistake to revive the cult of insiderism. All of Bush’s misdeeds are done in the glare of press coverage, with the informed consent of Congress. And they are in no way a departure from our national culture of heedless, oil-addicted crony capitalism. Bush comes from Texas; Texas doesn’t come from Bush. What we need is not secret information, but a revolution in consciousness that will, as in the ’60s, challenge the national consensus in far-reaching ways.
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-21-NBC-9.html
NBC Evening News for Friday, Jul 21, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing
Abstract: (Studio) Pentagon refutes charges that American planes are bombing dikes in North Vietnam.
REPORTER: John Chancellor

(Man Ha, North Vietnam) Rice is North Vietnam's most important crop. Most is grown in fertile Red River Delta. Majority of nation's. population lives here. Widespread network of irrigation canals, dams, locks, and dikes covers area. It provides rice fields with water, even during dry season, and protects lowlands against floods, in rainy season. Village officials say dike attacked by American bombers on June 18. Bomb craters on dike shown. Repair work underway.
REPORTER: Erik Eriksson {Swedish TV}

(Studio) North Vietnam refuse NBC news team admission to country. Eriksson reports raise questions. He was shown what North Vietnam wanted him to see, but extensive damage to civilian areas were filmed.
REPORTER: John Chancellor

(Pentagon) Pentagon officials don't dismiss Eriksson report as pure propaganda. They say, however, American pilots are assigned only military targets. They think it a gross distortion to compare bombing of North Vietnam with W.W. II when cities deliberately wiped out (Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima). North Vietnam air defense located in population ctrs. near military targets. US planes go after missile and gun sites before they attack aircraft. Some stray bombs may hit villages. American planes also tune in on radar signals to knock out installations. If radar is turned off after bomb dropped, it goes wildly astray. Deny Eriksson report Phuc Loc was bombed.
REPORTER: Robert Goralski
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...24-ABC-17.html
ABC Evening News for Monday, Jul 24, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / United Nations and Administration
Abstract: (Studio) United States bombing of North Vietnam touches off controversy between United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and Secretary of State William Rogers.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith

(DC) Waldheim almost calls Nixon administration liars. Says North Vietnam dikes have been bombed by US. Rogers calls accusation false; says Waldheim helping North Vietnam in world-wide propaganda campaign. United States Ambassador to United Nations George Bush meets with Waldheim.
REPORTER: Ted Koppel
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-25-ABC-5.html
ABC Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) There have been charges that United States is deliberately bombing dikes in North Vietnam. Actress Jane Fonda ends visit in North Vietnam.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith

<b>(Paris, France) Miss Fonda shows film to back her charges that United States is bombing North Vietnam dikes and other civilian targets. [FONDA - says although bombs are falling on North Vietnam, it is an American tragedy.] Says every American President involved in Vietnam war is guilty of treason. [Her film of her North Vietnam tour shown. Shell holes in rice fields and dikes shown.</b> She meets with 7 American POWs who say they feel they are being used as political weapon by United States and want families to work for peace.]
REPORTER: Lou Cioffi

(State Department) State Department briefing called off. Officials were to have shown pictures of damage to North Vietnam dikes located near military installations, making point that dikes were not the target. Secretary of State Rogers denied yesterday that United States planes were intentionally hitting dikes.
REPORTER: Ted Koppel
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...25-NBC-10.html
NBC Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) President Press Secretary Ron Ziegler says North Vietnam having success with campaign to get world to believe United States is systematically bombing dikes in North Vietnam. Says they are not military targets. If dikes are destroyed, serious flooding would result. <b>Yesterday United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said he had info. dikes were being bombed. Secretary of State William Rogers complained. American ambassador to UN, George Bush, discussed matter with Waldheim.
REPORTER: John Chancellor

<b>(NYC) [BUSH - told Waldheim there is a massive North Vietnam propaganda campaign on United States bombing of dikes.</b> Bush convinced that Waldheim did not mean to lend credibility to view that United States was deliberately bombing dikes.]</b>

(Pentagon) Admin. denies deliberate bombing of dikes, but says they may be hit when part of military targets. Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim says North Vietnam antiaircraft batteries, bridges, rds. electric power plants, fuel pipeline are often on or near dikes.
REPORTER: Ron Nessen

(Studio) Waldheim refuses further comment on dikes. <b>Actress Jane Fonda says she saw 2 dikes hit by American bombs during recent visit to North Vietnam. Insists she did not go on Radio Hanoi to urge American servicemen to disobey orders.</b>
REPORTER: John Chancellor
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-25-CBS-7.html
CBS Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) American ambassador to UN, George Bush, says he is certain United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim didn't mean to side with Hanoi when he said he had information North Vietnam dikes were bombed by US. State Department postpones news conference to demonstrate proof bombs were not dropped on dikes deliberately.
REPORTER: Roger Mudd

<b>(State Department) Columnist Joseph Kraft, returning from North Vietnam, saw bombed dikes but does not think there is a policy for their systematic destruction. [KRAFT - describes bomb damage to 2 dikes at Phu Loc and Nam Dinh.</b> Says these random hits indicate no orderly plan to destroy hydraulic system is in effect.] China accuses United States of launching 100 bombing raids on dikes and dams.
REPORTER: Marvin Kalb
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...8CD85F468785F9
U.S. ISSUES REPORT TO REBUT CHARGES ON DIKE BOMBINGS; Intelligence Document Says 12 Hits Were Unintentional and Damage Was Minor U.S. Releases a Report Rebutting Dike Charges

Jul 29, 1972, Saturday
By BERNARD GWERTZMANSpecial to The New York Times
Page 1, 858 words

DISPLAYING FIRST PARAGRAPH - WASHINGTON, July 28 -- The Administration today released a Government intelligence report finding that American bombing had damaged North Vietnam's dike system at 12 points. But the report concluded that the hits were unintentional, their impact was minor "and no major dike has been breached." ....
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...04-NBC-11.html
NBC Evening News for Friday, Aug 04, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) 8 years ago today, American planes bombed North Vietnam for first time. 250 more attacks carried out yesterday. 3 Senators accuse Nixon administration of deliberate bombing of North Vietnam dikes: Senators Edward Kennedy, John Tunney, and Fred Harris. White House calls action irresponsible and helping enemy propaganda effort.
REPORTER: Garrick Utley
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-10-CBS-5.html
CBS Evening News for Thursday, Aug 10, 1972
Headline: Paris Peace Talks
Abstract: (Studio) United States Ambassador William Porter says tone at Paris Peace Talks has improved. Communists claim Americans bombing North Vietnam dikes; cite statements by Senator Edward Kennedy, actress Jane Fonda, and Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
REPORTER: Dan Rather
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...16-ABC-14.html
ABC Evening News for Wednesday, Aug 16, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Clark
Abstract: (Studio) Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, back from North Vietnam tour, appears before Senate subcommittee
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith

(Capitol Hill) [CLARK - reports extensive bomb damage to North Vietnam dikes. Hopes it was not deliberate.] Senator Edward Kennedy chairs committee Senator Hiram Fong suggests dikes used for military purposes. Defense Department photograph shows oil drums stored on dike. [CLARK - saw no military targets on dikes. Shows bomblets from North Vietnam. Said used to kill people. Said dropped in populated area of Hanoi.]
REPORTER: Sam Donaldson

(Pentagon) [Pentagon Press Secretary Jerry FRIEDHEIM - denies American use of antipersonnel bombs in North Vietnam.] Pentagon releases reconnaissance photos showing antiaircraft and artillery weapons on top of dikes.
REPORTER: Roger Peterson
Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-16-NBC-2.html
NBC Evening News for Wednesday, Aug 16, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Clark
Abstract: (Studio) Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testifies before Senate subcommittee that he saw widespread damage to civilian installations in North Vietnam, caused by American bombing.
REPORTER: John Chancellor

(DC) [CLARK - shows antipersonnel bomb he brought back from North Vietnam.] [Senator Hiram FONG - asks if dikes looked deliberately bombed.] [CLARK - hopes bombing of dikes was not deliberate-fears it was.] [FONG - displays Defense Department photos of oil drums stored on dikes.] [CLARK - says he saw mo guns or SAM's mounted on dikes. Requests Defense Department photos of Thanh Hoa hospital after it was bombed.]

(Pentagon) Senator Edward Kennedy requests reconnaissance photos of bombed areas of North Vietnam. Defense Department photos of military targets on dikes shown, described.
REPORTER: Robert Goralski
Scout, I can't help thinking that you have a long history of supporting politicians who are as "dumb as dirt". Multiple chances to learn strategic lessons.....and today the US military is in a similar position in 2 countries, as the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1988, and the US, in 1972, and.....????
Quote:
Echoes of Vietnam; A Superpower Is Desperate to Leave, But in Afghanistan It Is the Russians; [News Analysis]
CRAIG R. WHITNEY, Special to the New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 8, 1988. pg. A.13

LEAD: Only a few weeks ago, the Reagan Administration seemed to be risking failure in the Afghan peace talks - insisting, because its conservative supporters in the Senate insisted, on the right to keep supplying the insurgents with weapons after a Soviet withdrawal began, despite an earlier pledge to cut them off.

<b>In fact the risk may have been blown out of proportion, exaggerated by distorted memories of how the Vietnam War was lost to the Communists after a ''sellout'' cease-fire 15 years ago. There are parallels - in Afghanistan this year, as in Vietnam in 1973, a superpower tired of entanglement in an unwinnable war is determined to get itself out. But this time it is the Soviet Union.</b>

Most doubts here about the seriousness of the Soviet intention to leave vanished in early February, when the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, made a speech on Soviet television saying he was ready to begin a pullout of the 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan by May 15 if agreement could be reached in the negotiations in Geneva sponsored by the United Nations. A political settlement of the civil war in Afghanistan, he said, was up to the Afghans afterward.

Since Moscow was no longer insisting on leaving a Communist-dominated government in power after it left, the main political question for the Reagan Administration was how easy the United States should make it for the Russians to get out. An Embarrassing Hitch

''They invaded that country, and they have to get out,'' a senior Administration official said at the time.

But there was an embarrassing hitch: Two years ago, American negotiators had pledged in the United Nations talks to guarantee that all ''outside interference'' - including supplies to the insurgents - would stop once a Soviet withdrawal began.

President Reagan, who according to his advisers was aware of the pledge to stop supplying the guerrillas, nevertheless said, ''You can't suddenly disarm them and leave them prey to the other Government.'' The Russians, for their part, had made no promise to stop aiding the Government in Kabul.

So conservatives in Washington, inside and outside the Administration, began pressuring the President to insist that the Russians also stop sending supplies to Kabul. Without such a provision, Senator Gordon J. Humphrey, Republican of New Hampshire, said in Geneva yesterday, President Reagan should reject the agreement. Supplies for Both Sides

But Administration officials discovered a face-saving way out of the quandary: if the Russians were determined to get out, and apparently resigned to leaving their Afghan allies to an uncertain fate, the United States could insist on the right to keep supplying the insurgents as long as the Soviet Union kept supplying Kabul.

When the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, was in Washington last month, he apparently agreed to this idea.

The Afghan Communist leader, Najibullah, is believed to have objected, which is why American diplomats believe Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Shevardnadze took him to Tashkent, the largest Soviet city near Afghanistan, for some serious talk yesterday and today.

Since they got him to agree that the ''last obstacles to signing the agreements have now been removed,'' as a joint Soviet-Afghan statement put it today, the Russians can now free themselves for foreign-policy initiatives elsewhere unencumbered by the heavy mortgage of foreign military intervention in an Islamic third-world country. A Question of Survival

What happens to their ally is not so clear. Even if the Soviet Union keeps supplying it, how can Mr. Najibullah's regime, which controls little more than the area around Kabul and has hundreds of thousands of well-armed insurgents sworn to bring it down, survive without the Soviet Army's help?

The circumstances seemed strongly reminiscent of the arm-twisting that President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had to do on on their nervous ally in Saigon, Nguyen Van Thieu, when the United States finally decided to get out of Vietnam.

Then, after an offensive by the Communist forces of North Vietnam in 1972, the United States reached agreement with Hanoi on a cease-fire and a withdrawal of American forces - only to be thwarted by Mr. Thieu, who correctly feared that his Government could not survive on its own. ''I see that those whom I regard as friends have failed me,'' he said.

He stalled until January 1973, when Mr. Nixon had to threaten the South Vietnamese leader with ''inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your Government,'' before Mr. Thieu bowed to the cease-fire terms. Conservative Support

As in Afghanistan, the cease-fire in Vietnam did not come with a finished political settlement. During the next two years, the Soviet Union and China continued to supply the North Vietnamese with military aid, while Congress cut back aid to the South Vietnamese. Mr. Thieu lost his nerve, and when Hanoi staged a new offensive in 1975, Saigon was quickly overrun.

So in Afghanistan in 1988, conservatives in Congress - who saw to it that the Afghan guerrillas were supplied covertly with arms, ammunition and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to fight Soviet helicopters - were determined not to leave them in the lurch.

In fact, both the insurgents and the Kabul regime have reportedly been oversupplied in recent weeks by their superpower patrons as a hedge against a negotiated arms cutoff.

In Congress and in the Administration, the view is that Mr. Najibullah will probably not survive in power very long after the Russians leave, no matter now much aid they give him. But if the Communist regime does fall, what will succeed it is not so clear.

The guerrillas are divided, but a victory by them could lead to an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan, linked to Iran, which has also supplied them. In that case, all the sophisticated Stinger missiles now being rushed to the insurgents could become a threat to United States interests.

But in their eagerness to speed a Soviet withdrawal, few officials here seem to be much concerned with such long-term questions.
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Old 09-29-2006, 06:04 AM   #17 (permalink)
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host if there were not odd rules of conduct.....why did we not invade North Vietnam in the first place? The answer is obvious, but shows a difference between Iraq and Vietnam right there.
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Old 10-02-2006, 01:55 AM   #18 (permalink)
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All that and you still missed the basic point of my post. Oh well, such is life. I'm not argueing the fact that Vietnam {or Iraq for that matter} was a cause that needed to be supported or perhaps isn't/wasn't the wrong war at the wrong time.

I am argueing the fact that the Liberals are so desperate to embarrass the current adminstration that somethings are "leaked" or just blown out of proportion that shouldn't have even been released because it puts our troops in more danger and adds fuel to the fire of the insurgents. There are ways to handle things without making it worldwide news. We don't need celebrity actors meeting with hostile politicians. Much of the same thing happened in Vietnam hence the reference to Hanoi Jane.

.....
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Old 10-04-2006, 08:35 AM   #19 (permalink)
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nevermind...
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Last edited by silent_jay; 10-04-2006 at 08:41 AM.. Reason: politics...not worth it
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Old 10-04-2006, 10:16 AM   #20 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scout
Host,
All that and you still missed the basic point of my post. Oh well, such is life. I'm not argueing the fact that Vietnam {or Iraq for that matter} was a cause that needed to be supported or perhaps isn't/wasn't the wrong war at the wrong time.

I am argueing the fact that the Liberals are so desperate to embarrass the current adminstration that somethings are "leaked" or just blown out of proportion that shouldn't have even been released because it puts our troops in more danger and adds fuel to the fire of the insurgents. There are ways to handle things without making it worldwide news. We don't need celebrity actors meeting with hostile politicians. Much of the same thing happened in Vietnam hence the reference to Hanoi Jane.

.....

The problem in Vietnam and Iraq is not "left or right" "Dem or GOP"... however, it looks good and keeps the parties fighting and blaming each other so they look different to voters.

The truth is it's other world powers.

In 'Nam and Korea it was the threat the USSR and China would get involved and create a WW3. (Yes, those 2 countries were involved, but as "advisors" and suppliers, neither truly commited to Vietnam and China only committed to Korea after MacArthur moved troops deep and said we needed to invade China (for which he promptly lost his job and we were pushed back).

In the end it wasn't politics that fueled those wars, it was business. The economy at that time was heavily military based. We needed the conflicts to keep our factories open, even if we weren't allowed to "win". *see below*

Iraq is very similar, in that we cannot truly do much because we have a lot of people with nukes and nasty germs that could truly escalate this war. We have China watching our every move..... we owe them billions upon billions and we make them too mad, 1) they call in the debt, 2) they have an army of 1 billion ready and able to fight, 3) they let the funny, nutty little guy in Korea and his friend in Iran loose and give them nuke help. Soooo we have to watch our step.

We also have every other Middle East country watching us and readying for war and waiting for us to misstep, and it is a war we cannot win.

Also, we don't have the industry machinations we once had, and economically we cannot keep this pace up. So we will have to "cut and run" and the Right will say it's the Left's fault because it makes good politics and the truth that our policy on Iraq is dictated by other countries can remain that dirty little secret.

In the end, agree, disagree, right or wrong we are there but our hands are not tied from within but from outside forces. Same as Vietnam, same as Korea.

*Our government subsidized businesses by their military contracts, it is what made our economy move. When Reagan came out and exposed the $1,000 hammer and so on, that was the death knell for US business. If someone would like to start a thread to discuss this let's.... I don't want to threadjack this thread with that discussion.*
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Last edited by pan6467; 10-04-2006 at 10:19 AM..
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