Yet another jihadist attack in Turkey, this time a car bomb and shoot-up at a courthouse in Izmir.
By now you've heard about the horrific capture / torture / racial taunting of the mentally challenged white guy in Chicago, the live video of which was posted on Facebook. CNN's Don Lemon - he of the New Year's Eve drunken on-camera subjecting of himself to an ear-piercing - says it wasn't evil.
Bookworm is on a trip of some sort to Vietnam and is blogging about sites she's visiting and insights it's giving her into US involvement in that land when the then-sovereign nation-state of South Vietnam was trying to stave off conquest by the Communist north.
Quinn Hillyer at NRO says that if you want substantiation that Jeff Sessions is no racist, there are several black Democrats you can ask.Four days ago, we visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, which is the Viet Cong version of the war. It’s factually accurate, although slanted to show the Americans as mass slaughterers — which is to be expected, because to the victors belong the narrative. Of course, the word “victors” in this case is one I choose carefully, because the US won the war on the ground but, as it has since the Vietnam War, abandoned the fight in the court of public opinion and, therefore, effectively lost the war anyway.One of the interesting things that the museum admitted was that the Viet Cong violated the Paris Peace Accords because of Watergate. Back in 1973, when Kissinger negotiated a Korea style peace treaty with the Viet Cong and the democratic (and painfully corrupt) South Vietnamese, the museum says that the VCs intended to abide by the agreement because they were scared of Nixon. That is, they expected rough treatment if they violated the Accords.According to the museum, all that changed when Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal. The VCs (correctly) assessed Ford as weaker than Nixon, and that was the green light they needed to invade South Vietnam and conquer the country. The lesson I drew from that is that, as we’ve seen with Obama and the Middle East is that weak presidents are dangerous to peace. Bad guys need to be afraid of the good guy, not comfortable walking all over him.The second interesting thing was that our guide admitted that the VCs lost the Tet Offensive, adding that the Americans lost the war anyway because “the political climate changed.” His statement led me back to something I wanted to explain to the Little Bookworm who’s on the trip with me.Wars, I said, are often won and lost, not on the battlefield, but amongst the civilians. That’s why Sherman’s march through Georgia was what was needed to end the Civil War. As long as Southern civilians supported the war, their soldiers would just keep fighting until they could fight no more.In the 1960s and 1970s, although the battles took placer in Vietnam, the real war was between America, on the one hand, and the Russian Soviets and Chinese Communists on the other hand. While the bloody military battles themselves barely reached America’s civilians, the communists were able to do something that Americans were unable to do: namely, wage psychological war against the American population.My parents, who were no fools, never doubted that the entire anti-war, hippie, drug scene originated with the communists. As Ion Mihai Pacepa explains in Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, my parents were correct. The Vietnam War was a two-front war and the anti-war movement was the second front.
And I had no doubt that the entire war thing in Nam originated with the French before the goddam Commies.
ReplyDeleteVery strange that Ike pulled us out of Korea with little public outcry, although there were a few hawks out there wanting to impeach him over it. Then, when the French couldn't get it's imperialistic ways, the Commies moved in and so did we. We had no more success than the French. As for winning the ground war there, at the cost of some 1,353,000 lives, most of them gook, many civilian gook, we dropped more firepower on them than all the combined forces dropped on Europe during the last Big One. Shock us, awe us again now. Get your Mad Dog SOD and your oil baron SOS to work. And see what you got then, though the protesters are already marginalized, there will be many many more! " I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." Ike in a TV talk with Prime Minister Macmillan (31 August 1959)
ReplyDeleteYou're distorting what happened. The 1954 Geneva accord which ended the French presence in Vietnam set up the two countries. The agreement was that the North could be a totalitarian Marxist-Leninist regime, but was to keep its hands off the south. No direct invasion and no fomenting internal Communist insurgency in the South. By the time William Colby arrived to be the CIA station chief in Saigon in 1960, he was alarmed at the rise of the National Liberation Front (Viet Long) and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the North was supplying it.
ReplyDeletePlain and simple, the North violated its end of the bargain.
Plain and simple. The French lost and we lost and neither of us should have invaded there in the first place. Memo to your ilk: win will ya boys?
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine the signal that would have been sent to the world if the US had sat idly by circa 1965 and let North Vietnam conquer the south? Would have changed the entire Cold War dynamic and not in a good way. Actually, that's pretty much how it played out ten years later. The feckless Congress would not send aid - we're merely talking aid; US troops came home in 73 - even though the South had successfully routed the Communists. As Bookworm notes above, the North came right back over the border and the grim final chapter was written
ReplyDeleteTear into em all again! Can't wait for the new battle cry, but it's all in the game of making America great again. It will be spun as sAcrifice in defense of freedom. Many a tear will fall again, but it's all in the game....
ReplyDeleteThe signal Nam sent to the world is that to the killers a couple million lives meant nothing. Yeah I know Pol Pot was a killer too.
ReplyDeleteAs most of us know, on Halloween 1968, LBJ announced a halt to bombing in North Vietnam in hopes that the Soviets would pressure Hanoi into coming to the table. However, the South Vietnamese balked, in part because Republicans held out the prospect of a better peace deal if Nixon won. The main intermediary between the Nixon campaign and Saigon was Anna Chennault, widow of Flying Tigers leader Claire Lee Chennault. Two days before the election, Chennault called Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, and told him to tell his superiors, “Hold on, we are gonna win.”
ReplyDeleteLBJ hit the ceiling when he learned about this, and even went as far as to say that Nixon was guilty of treason. While it has long since been proven beyond any doubt that Nixon campaign operatives were involved in this effort to derail the peace effort, Nixon adamantly insisted to the day he died in 1994 that he was not personally involved. However, John A. Farrell, who is working on a new biography of Nixon due out in March, “Richard Nixon: The Life,” recently discovered evidence that proves beyond all doubt that Nixon was lying.
http://www.liberalamerica.org/2017/01/03/wtf-richard-nixon-threw-a-monkey-wrench-in-vietnam-peace-talks-after-all/
Pretty dumb to trust the Soviets and the North Vietnamese, as Nixon and Kissinger found out.
ReplyDeleteThe only way a war ends is when one side wins and one side loses.
If you are still blaming a bunch of dirty hippies and Walter Cronkite for "losing" the Viet Nam war, you will be condemned to repeat the fiasco, quite likely with the same result, and you just might have a screw loose and should see a mechanic for tightening.
ReplyDeleteThe hippie-Commie connection was a hot topic at the bridge tables back then. Sure mom, I want to fight and kill gooks in the jungle but these Commie dogs brainwashed me and I smoked pot and became one too.
ReplyDeleteSessions might not be racist, but this big time former prosecutor who was a Young Republican for Nixon is a lot of other dastardly things. Big Jefferson Beuregard Sessions III, Republican from Alabam, what a cool cat!
ReplyDeleteThe "peace" movement in America has always been orchestrated by Communist front groups. There is ample documentation of this. Pacepa's book cited above by Bookworm, is a good place to start learning about this. As is Radical Son by David Horowitz. As are the works of Ronald Radosh. SDS leaders were going to Hanoi as early as the spring of 1965 to express solidarity with the enemy's cause. 1980s opposition to US policy in Central America? Completely orchestrated by Communist front groups and their fellow-travelers. The upcoming mass protest being planned for the Trump inauguration is being led by the Workers World Party.
ReplyDeleteAm I missing the bigger picture? Where does one land on the side against a long held adversary, stand the ground or "lets be buddies". It should be an interesting year.
ReplyDelete