lies about "liberals"

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Irvine511

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[q]Are congressional liberals to blame for Vietnam?
Legend of the Fall
by Rick Perlstein
Only at TNR Online | Post date 01.25.07

When Senator Hillary Clinton stepped up to the microphones Wednesday to introduce her new anti-surge bill, the language was so defensive you'd think she was proposing to outlaw Christmas--not to stop one of the most unpopular ideas a president has ever dared to propose. She framed her bill not as an effort to keep President Bush from adding more troops to Iraq (though a Newsweek poll suggests that only 23 percent of Americans support adding troops) but as a bill to add troops to Afghanistan. Most importantly, she made sure to emphasize, "I do not support cutting funding for American troops." (She repeated that on the NewsHour the next evening: "Instead of cutting funding for American troops, which I do not support because still, to this day, we do not have all of the equipment, the armored Humvees, and the rest that our troops need... .")

If Americans didn't think so irrationally about war and the politics of ending it, more people might have thought to ask: Who had suggested she had? Who was she defending herself against? Why would the most cautious politician in the Senate commit anything so morally enormous as "cutting funding for American troops" as they faced a dangerous enemy on the battlefield?

It was one of those Faulknerian moments where the past is not dead--it's not even past. In fact, no senator in history I'm aware of has ever proposed such a thing. It's just that we think they did. There is a popular fantasy that liberals in Congress, somehow, at least metaphorically, abandoned American troops in Vietnam--and that, if liberals had their way, they'd do it again in Iraq. This notion was nurtured in the bosom of popular culture--as when Sylvester Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), sent back to the jungles of Vietnam by his old commander, plaintively asks, "Sir, do we get to win this time?" But it survives even in elite discourse--as when Nixon's former defense secretary, Melvin Laird, wrote--in a Foreign Affairs article called "iraq: learning the lessons of vietnam"--that "the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973."

The fact that Hillary Clinton has to sprinkle any Iraq speech with irrelevancies about how she won't leave American troops without armor is testament to the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history. And who's the figure most responsible for the absurdity? Our new, late, secular saint: the thirty-eighth president of the United States, Gerald Ford.

In 1970, during the Vietnam war, an amendment to the military procurement authorization act introduced by Republican Mark Hatfield and Democrat George McGovern proposed that, unless President Nixon sought and won a declaration of war from Congress, no money could be spent after the end of the year "for any purposes other than to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all United States forces." Of course, withdrawing forces is not cutting funding for them (in fact, it might have turned out to be more expensive in the short term), and Hatfield-McGovern never got more than 42 votes in the Senate--even though, in its second go-round in 1971, 73 percent of the public supported it.

The first time the Senate actually voted to suspend funding for American military activities in Vietnam was in the summer of 1973, two months after the last American combat brigades left, by the terms of a peace treaty Nixon negotiated. That amendment passed by a veto-proof majority--encompassing Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals--of 64 to 26.

Peace was not quite at hand in Vietnam. The corrupt, incompetent, and hardly legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon was fighting for its life against the advancing Communist forces from the North. Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam." The House turned down the president's emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic ("The Unrealist," November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an "austere program." Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a "decent interval" until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, "no one will give a damn."

Apparently, they didn't tell Gerald Ford. He addressed the nation in April of 1975, eight months after becoming president, and implored Congress for $722 million in military aid. The speech was overwhelmingly and universally unpopular--the kind of thing that made Ford seem such a joke to the nation at the time. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called it "blundering." Seventy-eight percent of the public was against any further military aid; Republicans like James McClure of Idaho and Harry Bellmon of Oklahoma opposed the appropriation. Republican dove Mark Hatfield said, "I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy"--and Democratic hawk Scoop Jackson said, "I oppose it. I don't know of any on the Democratic side who will support it." The Senate vote against it was 61 to 32.

Leading up to the vote, however, Saint Gerald made extraordinary claims--saying that "just a relatively small additional commitment" to Vietnam (compared with the $150 billion already spent there) could "have met any military challenges." With it, "this whole tragedy"--the imminent fall of Saigon--"could have been eliminated."

So much for the Pentagon's claim that $1.4 billion would be an "austere program." So much for Nixon and Kissinger's belief that "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." Ford's miraculous $722 million somehow became enshrined in public memory as the margin that assured American dishonor. As Laird put it in that Foreign Affairs essay, "[W]e grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. ... We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973."

The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth--that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam--conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger's terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses--exclusively Democratic and liberal--that kept us from "winning" in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, "abandoned" there."

It requires some filthy lies to sustain. But the fact that a sad old man is allowed to propound some of them in the foreign policy establishment's journal of record shows how successful it remains. And the fact that the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to take it as second nature that she has to defend herself against them shows it, too. Stop it now. No responsible American politician has ever cut funding an American troop needed to fight while he or she was in the field. No responsible American politician ever would. Limiting the number of troops in the theater of operations is not cutting funding for American troops. Neither, of course, is withdrawing them "over the horizon." Nothing's getting stabbed in the back here except reason.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.[/q]
 
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The strict conservative viepoint is that of an isolationist foreign policy which both thinks Iraq and Vietnam were both wrong and sort of similar. Then again, there was such a fear of communism, I'm not sure where those lines bled over and didn't.

I am a reformed conservative, I am much more a social liberal than the man I supported in 1992 (Pat Buchanan, I was 17 at the time) I support gay marriage, and believe in social programs for the poor, among many other things.. etc. but it terms of foreign policy, I still think the conservative line is quite solid. The myth seems to be that conservatives are all about war war war, fight fight fight, the truth is, in my opinion, fight wars that you need to fight and fight them 1,000%. Like dropping the A-bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it made sense. A war worth fighting, a means to an end.

Don't fight unless you are willing to win.
Never fight a political war, the public will not support it, regardless of propaganda spewed from either side, if you go to war, you should be willing to accept the heinous, innocents, women and children will perish, horribly.

For God's sake, last cause only. We violate both the true conservative viewpoint and the common sense viewpoint in Iraq. GHW Bush knew this, his son was idealistic enough to be duped.
Popular to say neo-conservatives, which is actually probably true, I think the idea was to spread democracy by force, which certainly wasn't a conservative viwepoint at all. Just my view.

It would be nice to say "water under the bridge".
The truth is, we'll be dealing with this for decades.
The hardline stance that doesn't understand nuance is as dangerous as the passive dove stance that doesn't understand a need to win certain conflicts.

Among many other things, it's one of our great dilemmas.
I believe that you must ackowledge that a fight must be made and choose to fight it wisely. In between a whole lot of grey area and nuance that is somewhere near the heart of the conflict of the politics of any war. At this point, failure can't be an option in Iraq.....unless you think failure is already upon us.

It's a fascinating quandry, I just had a good bluster with my 65 year old dad. He's pretty wise and hardheaded. Gives an interesting look to the current situation for sure. We need to succeed in Iraq, understanding it may be too late, where to go from here? It does no good to dwell on mistakes of morons. Ideas is what we need. Who has them? Not very many.

I hope I was on topic Irvine, I'm quite nice and drunk and loving it. :wink:
 
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U2DMfan said:
I hope I was on topic Irvine, I'm quite nice and drunk and loving it. :wink:



it was a great post. :up:

and i think more than a few doves would agree -- i think war is far, far worse than most of the American (and, let's be honest, Western) world understands.

however, there are a few people on earth who really only understand bombs falling on their heads, and they'd never hesitate to do to you what you could do to them if only they could.

if that makes sense.

but war as a political tool, or war used to further a specific foreign policy or ideology, as opposed to a war that confronts an "imminent" threat to national security ... which is why anyone with half a brain knows that the american public would never have supported a war designed to remove someone we don't like because of their potential for regional havoc, but the American public *would* support the invasion of a country if it could be demonstrated that the leader and his, say, WMDs presented an clear and present and imminent danger to the citizens of the US. the american public *would* support the repelling of a foreign invading army, but it would never support actually being that foreign invading army unless American citizens themselves were under imminent threat.

hence, we have WMDs and Gulfs of Tonkins.
 
Irvine511 said:
[q]Are congressional liberals to blame for Vietnam?
Legend of the Fall
by Rick Perlstein
Only at TNR Online | Post date 01.25.07

When Senator Hillary Clinton stepped up to the microphones Wednesday to introduce her new anti-surge bill, the language was so defensive you'd think she was proposing to outlaw Christmas--not to stop one of the most unpopular ideas a president has ever dared to propose. She framed her bill not as an effort to keep President Bush from adding more troops to Iraq (though a Newsweek poll suggests that only 23 percent of Americans support adding troops) but as a bill to add troops to Afghanistan. Most importantly, she made sure to emphasize, "I do not support cutting funding for American troops." (She repeated that on the NewsHour the next evening: "Instead of cutting funding for American troops, which I do not support because still, to this day, we do not have all of the equipment, the armored Humvees, and the rest that our troops need... .")

If Americans didn't think so irrationally about war and the politics of ending it, more people might have thought to ask: Who had suggested she had? Who was she defending herself against? Why would the most cautious politician in the Senate commit anything so morally enormous as "cutting funding for American troops" as they faced a dangerous enemy on the battlefield?

It was one of those Faulknerian moments where the past is not dead--it's not even past. In fact, no senator in history I'm aware of has ever proposed such a thing. It's just that we think they did. There is a popular fantasy that liberals in Congress, somehow, at least metaphorically, abandoned American troops in Vietnam--and that, if liberals had their way, they'd do it again in Iraq. This notion was nurtured in the bosom of popular culture--as when Sylvester Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), sent back to the jungles of Vietnam by his old commander, plaintively asks, "Sir, do we get to win this time?" But it survives even in elite discourse--as when Nixon's former defense secretary, Melvin Laird, wrote--in a Foreign Affairs article called "iraq: learning the lessons of vietnam"--that "the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973."

The fact that Hillary Clinton has to sprinkle any Iraq speech with irrelevancies about how she won't leave American troops without armor is testament to the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history. And who's the figure most responsible for the absurdity? Our new, late, secular saint: the thirty-eighth president of the United States, Gerald Ford.

In 1970, during the Vietnam war, an amendment to the military procurement authorization act introduced by Republican Mark Hatfield and Democrat George McGovern proposed that, unless President Nixon sought and won a declaration of war from Congress, no money could be spent after the end of the year "for any purposes other than to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all United States forces." Of course, withdrawing forces is not cutting funding for them (in fact, it might have turned out to be more expensive in the short term), and Hatfield-McGovern never got more than 42 votes in the Senate--even though, in its second go-round in 1971, 73 percent of the public supported it.

The first time the Senate actually voted to suspend funding for American military activities in Vietnam was in the summer of 1973, two months after the last American combat brigades left, by the terms of a peace treaty Nixon negotiated. That amendment passed by a veto-proof majority--encompassing Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals--of 64 to 26.

Peace was not quite at hand in Vietnam. The corrupt, incompetent, and hardly legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon was fighting for its life against the advancing Communist forces from the North. Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam." The House turned down the president's emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic ("The Unrealist," November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an "austere program." Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a "decent interval" until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, "no one will give a damn."

Apparently, they didn't tell Gerald Ford. He addressed the nation in April of 1975, eight months after becoming president, and implored Congress for $722 million in military aid. The speech was overwhelmingly and universally unpopular--the kind of thing that made Ford seem such a joke to the nation at the time. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called it "blundering." Seventy-eight percent of the public was against any further military aid; Republicans like James McClure of Idaho and Harry Bellmon of Oklahoma opposed the appropriation. Republican dove Mark Hatfield said, "I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy"--and Democratic hawk Scoop Jackson said, "I oppose it. I don't know of any on the Democratic side who will support it." The Senate vote against it was 61 to 32.

Leading up to the vote, however, Saint Gerald made extraordinary claims--saying that "just a relatively small additional commitment" to Vietnam (compared with the $150 billion already spent there) could "have met any military challenges." With it, "this whole tragedy"--the imminent fall of Saigon--"could have been eliminated."

So much for the Pentagon's claim that $1.4 billion would be an "austere program." So much for Nixon and Kissinger's belief that "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." Ford's miraculous $722 million somehow became enshrined in public memory as the margin that assured American dishonor. As Laird put it in that Foreign Affairs essay, "[W]e grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. ... We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973."

The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth--that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam--conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger's terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses--exclusively Democratic and liberal--that kept us from "winning" in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, "abandoned" there."

It requires some filthy lies to sustain. But the fact that a sad old man is allowed to propound some of them in the foreign policy establishment's journal of record shows how successful it remains. And the fact that the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to take it as second nature that she has to defend herself against them shows it, too. Stop it now. No responsible American politician has ever cut funding an American troop needed to fight while he or she was in the field. No responsible American politician ever would. Limiting the number of troops in the theater of operations is not cutting funding for American troops. Neither, of course, is withdrawing them "over the horizon." Nothing's getting stabbed in the back here except reason.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.[/q]


Most of the country, congress and even the Nixon Administration can be blamed for the abandonment of South Vietnam. In 1969, there were over 500,000 US troops on the ground in South Vietnam, still fighting an insurgency that had suffered a serious set back a year earlier in 1968. The South Vietnamese military was still growing and being strengthed.

Over the course of the next three years, the insurgency in South Vietnam would be eliminated, all of the efforts to defeat South Vietnam came exclusively from the North. South Vietnamese forces would take over ALL of the fighting in the south. By 1972, there were no US combat brigades in South Vietnam. The total number of US troops in South Vietnam had dropped to 22,000, all of them in an advisory role.

In the Spring of 1972, the North Vietnamese launched the largest offensive of the entire war from over the borders in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Initial success's were soon halted, and the North Vietnamese were thrown back with some of the worst casualties they had suffered in the war. South Vietnamese forces were imbedded with US officers and advisors and this proved very successful in helping these forces operate efficiently and effectively during the large scale invasion. Also vital was US airpower, that was able to shore up any weak points in South Vietnamese defenses with massive B-52 airstrikes. The 1972 Easter Offensive by North Vietnam was crushed, despite the fact that there were NO US combat brigades on the ground and only 22,000 US advisors. Vietnamization was working and 1972 showed just how successful it had been.

In early 1973, a peace treaty was signed, US prisoners were set free, and the US advisory team was withdrawn. But fighting resumed between the North and the South later that year. The Senate unfortunately blocked anymore US military involvement in the war. In addition over the next two years it would block and cut funding vital to maintaining the strength of the South Vietnamese military. Generals such Norman Swartzkopf who was a junior officer when he first went to South Vietnam in the early 60s has testified to the fact that the cut in funding seriously hurt the South Vietnamese military.

The facts of the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive show that sending back US advisors as well as US airpower, would have defeated the March 1975 North Vietnamese offensive that succeeded in cracking South Vietnamese defenses and then once a brake through was achieved, succeeded in quickly overrunning the rest of the country. The advisors as well as US airpower should have been sent back in 1973 and may have even convinced the North Vietnamese of the futility of continuing to attack South Vietnam.

But by cutting of any further US military involvement as well as cutting necessary funds for the South Vietnamese military, the US government help to insure an eventual victory of North Vietnam over the South. Such measures no doubt increased the confidence of the North Vietnamese after so many military failures and over 1.5 million war deaths. South Vietnam needed several more years of limited US military advisory support as well as continued required levels of funding. Had the United States not abandoned South Vietnam during this critical point in its history, it would still be an independent state today, and likely as properous and succesful as South Korea.

Both Democrats and Republicans can be blamed for this abandonment. But it was a majority Democratic congress that cut funding and blocked further US military involvement, while those that actually opposed these efforts to abandon South Vietnam were primarily Republicans.
 
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Many Americans and Europeans understand the risk and cost of war all to well as World War I, almost exclusively fought in Europe with the exception of the campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, and World War II demonstrate. Since that time, of all the Western Countries, only the United States has engaged in war resulting in heavy casualties, nearly 3/4 of a million.

The 20th and 21st centuries have shown that the US Security interest extend far beyond its borders. The US economy has become increasingly dependent or impacted by international trade with certain regions of the world as well as natural resources located in certain parts of the world. US Security is dependent upon a stable global economic order as well as the natural resources that fuel this and our society.

The majority of American citizens understand the threat Saddam posed in August 1990, which is why the majority of them supported the largest deployment of US forces anywhere since World War II to Suadi Arabia as well as supporting the use of military force to remove Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Liberal Democrats opposed both measures and George Bush's Sr's war resolution only passed in the Senate by a few votes.

In this day and age, anything that is a threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, is a threat to the United States as the build up to and actual 1991 Gulf War so accurately demonstrated.


Much US defense planning since World War II has been informed by the failures in international security which led to World War II. World War II perfectly demonstrated the risk and cost of NOT acting or intervening in countries or events which at the time, do not appear to be eminently threatening. The failure of Europe to enforce the treaty that ended World War I and to effectively respond to Hitler's rising power, led to the worst war in human history that killed over 60 million people. There were understandable reasons why Europe was reluctant to respond after the slaughter of World War I, but this failure to act only led to a far worse war that killed nearly 10 times as many people and could have led to the domination of the world by a ruthless dictator.

Ever since World War II, United States defense policy has worked to protect US security interest in Western Europe, Southwest Asia, as well as Korea, Japan and the Pacific. The days that the United States could look the other way when it came to conflicts in these area's of the world has been gone for over a century now. Global economic interdepence has forever banished the idea that the United States only had to worry about securing just its borders and not anything else.

After Saddams invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the 1991 Gulf War in which Saddam came very close to siezing or sabotaging much of the planets energy supply, the international community passed multiple resolutions, under Chapter VII rules of the United Nations allowing for enforcement to be brought about with military force, in order to insure the security of the region and the world, and to prevent the near disaster of August 1990. The region and the world would not simply allow Saddam to repeat his past behavior. The criteria now for further military action would be based on Saddam's compliance with UN Security Council resolutions.

The South Vietnamese were no less deserving of US aid and support than the South Korea was and South Vietnam's take over by the Communist was no less detrimintal to overall US Security interest than South Korea's take over by the Communist would have been. Iraq is just as deserving of continued US military support as Afghanistan, given the fact that Al Qaeda is far more present in Iraq, and the fact that stability in Iraq impacts US security far more than Afghanistan does, do to its potential oil reserves and its close proximity to current and vital energy reserves in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The United States has not been invaded by a foreign army since 1812. Yet, the US population has supported the majority of its foreign wars and conflicts since that time. The fact is, most understand that US National Security interest extend far beyond just its borders. But there are those that have yet to grasp this even in the year 2007 and still insist on a national security policy that has not been relevant or adequate since the mid 1800s.
 
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Re: Re: lies about "liberals"

STING2 said:

The facts of the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive show that sending back US advisors as well as US airpower, would have defeated the March 1975 North Vietnamese offensive that succeeded in cracking South Vietnamese defenses and then once a brake through was achieved, succeeded in quickly overrunning the rest of the country. The advisors as well as US airpower should have been sent back in 1973 and may have even convinced the North Vietnamese of the futility of continuing to attack South Vietnam.



[q]Peace was not quite at hand in Vietnam. The corrupt, incompetent, and hardly legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon was fighting for its life against the advancing Communist forces from the North. Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam."[/q]


and, further, this is a wild overestimation of the South Vietnamese. if not for American airstrikes, the south would have fallen. the South was no match for the well-organized and foreign-funded North Vietnamese, especially compared to the chaotic, disorganized South, and much of Nixon's motivation to engage in the bombing came from a desire to look tough before an upcoming meeting with Soviet Pemier Brezhnev.. the Easter offensive also killed 100,000 North Vietnamese and 60,000 South Vietnamese.

and let's also not mention how American airstrikes so destroyed Cambodia that it enabled the Khamer Rouge to seize power. yes, American bombs are always good bombs.

so what do you do? end the war, allow a Communist takeover, but prevent more grand scale death, or continue a war of attrition that would guarantee many more tens of thousands dead?
 
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Re: Re: Re: lies about "liberals"

Irvine511 said:




[q]Peace was not quite at hand in Vietnam. The corrupt, incompetent, and hardly legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon was fighting for its life against the advancing Communist forces from the North. Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam."[/q]


and, further, this is a wild overestimation of the South Vietnamese. if not for American airstrikes, the south would have fallen. the South was no match for the well-organized and foreign-funded North Vietnamese, especially compared to the chaotic, disorganized South, and much of Nixon's motivation to engage in the bombing came from a desire to look tough before an upcoming meeting with Soviet Pemier Brezhnev.. the Easter offensive also killed 100,000 North Vietnamese and 60,000 South Vietnamese.

and let's also not mention how American airstrikes so destroyed Cambodia that it enabled the Khamer Rouge to seize power. yes, American bombs are always good bombs.

so what do you do? end the war, allow a Communist takeover, but prevent more grand scale death, or continue a war of attrition that would guarantee many more tens of thousands dead?

No one argues that the US involvement in the Korean War was wrong, but no doubt less people would have died if we had just let the Communist overrun it in 1950.

Yep, American bombs killed millions of civilians in World War II as we removed Nazi Germany and Japan from the area's of the world they had overrun, yet such criticism is reserved only for the wars that liberals considered to be "bad". Had the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviet Union, not used Cambodia as a base from which to attack South Vietnam, it would never have been bombed.

To those in the military with knowledge and experience in the training of the South Vietnamese military as well as how they performed on the battlefield, it is far from being a wild overestimation of the capabilities of the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese made no serious gains against the South Vietnamese until March 1975, despite the fact they had vital funding for their military forces cut, no US advisors or trainers on the ground for their troops, as well as no US airpower. Without some of the unfortunate military setbacks suffered by South Vietnam in 1975, its potentially possible the South could have thrown back the offensive, without the aid they needed, especially given the successful defense of some positions by South Vietnamese units against enormous odds that typically would have resulted in those positions being overrun within hours.

The fact remains, had their continued to be a limited US advisory presence on the ground with the South Vietnamese military, and US airpower to back it up, South Vietnam would still be an independent state today. There is simply no justification for the death, destruction and enslavement of the South Vietnamese by the Communist. South Vietnam had turned a major corner and it simply needed continued support for several more years, which as conditions continued to improve, could have been gradually reduced. Over the long run, greater US support for South Vietnam would change the conventional military balance in favor of the South vs. the North, just as it has on the Korean peninsula.
 
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Re: Re: Re: Re: lies about "liberals"

STING2 said:
Yep, American bombs killed millions of civilians in World War II as we removed Nazi Germany and Japan from the area's of the world they had overrun, yet such criticism is reserved only for the wars that liberals considered to be "bad".

You stupid liar.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: lies about "liberals"

financeguy said:


You stupid liar.

fg, why do you find it so difficult to engage people in debate without insulting them?
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: lies about "liberals"

STING2 said:
The fact remains, had their continued to be a limited US advisory presence on the ground with the South Vietnamese military, and US airpower to back it up, South Vietnam would still be an independent state today.



[q]Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?

Ted Stroehmann: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.

Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.

Ted Stroehmann: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.

Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

Ted Stroehmann: I would go for the 7.

Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.

Ted Stroehmann: You guarantee it? That's -- how do you do that?

Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".

Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?

[Hitchhiker convulses]

Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

Ted Stroehmann: That -- good point.

Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.

Ted Stroehmann: Why?

Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired![/q]
 
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