Posted on 06/20/2005 5:46:45 AM PDT by SJackson
There are many valid criticisms of America’s involvement in Vietnam, as there are of our involvement in Iraq, many based on realpolitik. What distinguishes such valid criticisms from those of the leftist anti-war movement in both wars is the focus on besmirching America's and our allies' character.
I’ve witnessed striking parallels when I supported our commitments in Vietnam both on campus and then as a Marine in Vietnam, and as a supporter of our efforts in Iraq.
The Iraqis/South Vietnamese are not ready for democracy:
In 1966, I attended an anti-war teach-in where Bettina Aptheker, daughter of the U.S. Communist Party’s theoretician Herbert, spoke. She stressed that America was imposing Western ideas of democracy on the South Vietnamese, who couldn’t care less. I commented this was a racist assertion, creating an uproar at challenging the supposed egalitarian purity of the left.
In following years, South Vietnam held elections, internationally judged as pretty honest, that had higher participation rates than common in the U.S., despite threats of attacks on voters. This didn’t stop such ongoing racist assertions from the left about the South Vietnamese, nor did the absence of free elections in North Vietnam.
In Iraq, before their January 30, 2005 elections, anti-war commentators predicted the elections wouldn’t garner participation and would be a failure. The Iraqis were not “into” free elections and democracy. Guess what? The elections were remarkably successful, with higher participation rates than common in the U.S., despite threats of attacks on voters. Even the 20% of the Iraqis who are Sunnis, who withheld voting as protest against losing their former positions of control under Saddam, now join actively in drafting the new constitution. But, still the left repeats the Iraqis don’t really care about, or are incapable of, democracy, without a murmur about the absence of free elections elsewhere in the despot-ridden Arab world.
It is hogwash character assassination that the Iraqis and South Vietnamese didn’t care about or aren’t capable of democracy, that only the fatally gullible or determinedly anti-U.S. can swallow.
he Iraqis/South Vietnamese Won’t Fight:
In Vietnam, President Johnson did largely brush aside the South Vietnamese army for several years before President Nixon poured resources and training into Vietnamization. The Vietnamese forces did come along rapidly to be able to replace us. In August 1971, as a civilian, I traveled unprotected, safely, via Jeep throughout South Vietnam. We had won the war within South Vietnam. By late 1972, only about 5% of the U.S.’s former force levels remained in South Vietnam. However, when faced with a massive Soviet-armed invasion from the North in 1975, the U.S. Congress defaulted on U.S. pledges of arms and air support, and effectively disarmed the South Vietnamese. Even the North Vietnamese were surprised at their own success.
In Iraq, Saddam’s army was one of the largest and heaviest armed in the world. Yet, in 1991 and 2003, it rolled up and flew away like a carpet in the face of U.S. and allied troops. Today, the U.S. is building a new Iraqi army, literally from scratch. It is rapidly improving and being successful. Still, it takes years to build an army. Also, as the tide of battle against the anti-democracy forces is turning, so has the intelligence from ordinary Iraqis markedly increased, leading to more successes. At an increasing clip, U.S. and Iraqi forces are rooting out terrorists and closing down enemy refuges and logistics routes. Whether the U.S. Congress, increasingly restive at the burdens, will repeat its 1975 default remains to be seen.
But, it is hogwash character assassination that the Iraqis and South Vietnamese won’t fight, that only the fatally gullible or determinedly anti-U.S. can swallow.
The U.S. is too stupid or culturally-blind to care about planning for peaceful conditions in Iraq/South Vietnam:
Despite the war, the economy of South Vietnam grew, infrastructure was developed, and social services spread. A UPI reporter, Alan Dawson, critical of the U.S. and South Vietnamese, who remained behind in South Vietnam after the North’s takeover in 1975, wrote: “Although it is a cliché that the Communists were well organized when they entered Saigon, I found the reverse to be true, especially in fields affecting the people in general.”
The truth is, it’s rare to have a quick recovery from a war or political change of control. Foggy memories think it was rapid in post-World War II Germany and Japan. Actually, it took many years, and massive U.S. investments, even in those already highly developed countries.
The U.S. did not foresee all the post-war complications in Iraq, but did see many and prevented them. The U.S. did not foresee the post-war determination of Saddamists and neighboring satrapies to brutally undercut recovery, and the resulting distraction of resources, but is overcoming that.
The U.S. is an imperfect seer as any. But, it is hogwash character assassination that the U.S. is too stupid or doesn’t care about post-war planning and recovery, that only the fatally gullible or determinedly anti-U.S. can swallow.
The U.S. military are brutal oppressors:
Many thousands of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese surrendered or defected to the U.S. and South Vietnam. Almost a million Vietnamese fled the North to the South in 1954, and as many fled the South when the North took over in 1975. There were no reverse flows. After 1954 and 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died and were tortured in communist concentration camps.
My Lai happened. (One might add a consideration that Lt. Calley in charge was the product of the U.S. Army scraping the barrel for officers, as campus recruitment was opposed by the anti-war movement then as now.) Con Son Island happened. (One might add that it was a South Vietnamese facility, and conditions did not approach what our POW’s endured.) Terrible things happen in wars, but these were far from the norm. One might add the exceptions of U.S. and South Vietnamese brutalities pale by comparison to the pervasive North Vietnamese atrocities, which were matters of the highest policy.
Still, the U.S. anti-war movement delighted in calling U.S. military personnel “baby killers,” without a murmur about North Vietnamese behavior either during the war or after. And, they are silent today about the innocents slaughtered by terrorist car bombs, beheadings and tortures.
After the Vietnam War, this defaming of our forces was compounded by painting American troops as suffering widespread PTSD for our guilt of participation in a “wrong” war. A counseling industry has profited from exaggerating PTSD as far more frequent than it is and encouraging soldiers to make such claims in order to get benefits.
A psychiatrist at a VA hospital recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times (6/13/05) that, “experience shows that the VA must be skeptical about claims of combat-related distress.” She goes on to cite, for example, a report in the British Journal of Psychiatry, checking on the backgrounds of 100 Vietnam War veterans being treated for PTSD that 59% did not have combat exposure.
Another recent study of Americans found about 15% demonstrating anxiety and related disorders, maybe comparable to PTSD, a far higher percentage than among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, the myth is repeated that U.S. troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering widespread PTSD.
The uproar over conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo ignores that the enemy combatants there (repeat, these are enemy combatants) suffer much less than most U.S. fraternity pledges or trainees in our boot camps, that almost all the cases of disrespecting the Koran were committed by prisoners and not U.S. military guards, and that many when released have quickly returned to the battlefield against us.
It is, again, hogwash character assassination that the U.S. military is a brutal oppressor, that only the fatally gullible or determinedly anti-U.S. can swallow.
There are, truly, few and feeble parallels between wars. However, there are important parallels across wars in the strategy of character assassination tactics used by the anti-U.S. left. The left’s canards from the Vietnam War are being repeated over the Iraq War. There’s a new generation to trick, and older fools to be tricked again.
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Bruce Kesler was a Marine sergeant in Vietnam from 1969-70. In 1971, he founded the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which John O’Neill joined, to combat John Kerry’s lies, and they finished the job in 2004. Kesler has been a finance and business operations executive for Fortune 100 and smaller companies, and now owns an employee benefits consulting firm.
But, that doesn't deter them from using the same old shopworn tactics. After all, it worked marvelously in Viet Nam and even chased two sitting Presidents from office. It is hard to argue with that kind of "success".
It goes like this. You concoct outrageous lies and repeat them often and loudly enough with the able help of your friends in the mainstream media and academia. You don't let up. You just attack. You drown out and marginalize the thoughtful opposition who may have the truth but don't have the catchy sound bites, slogans and cranked-up bullhorns.
The din eventually wears out and undercuts the once-obvious truth, putting it on the defensive and the weary people in the middle simply give in and clamor for peace of mind and a return to back to "normal". Support for the war "collapses" in the battle of the pollsters and more politicians start running for cover. Then, now tired of it all and sensing an irrepressible trend, the troops are brought home and allies are left to twist slowly in the wind. America retreats back into it's comfortable and quiet shell.
So, the same vicious Leftists are back to the same old well peddling the same old bottles of snake oil with the same old phony labels (but with a different color) to the rubes in the crowd.
Some things just never change with the Left. They are as predictable as the latest printing of The Communist Manifesto!
"You concoct outrageous lies and repeat them often and loudly enough with the able help of your friends in the mainstream media and academia. You don't let up. You just attack."
The difference is .. there is talk radio and the internet to counter their idiocy. It's not going to be easy to win this one .. but WE CAN IF WE'RE WILLING TO CONTINUE TO ATTACK THEM RIGHT BACK.
I agree. We now have a forum which was not available in years past, and an effective one it is. Their course of action will be to shut it down or at least greatly mute it.
Well .. with a repub congress I don't see that happening .. and if we add even more repubs in 2006 - which is looking real good after the Durbin blunder and no response from the democrats.
This cuts to the heart of the matter: the current goal of the Left is to reprise the slander of American troops they used to subvert our defense of South Vietnam 35 years ago, in the hope of preventing an American success in Iraq.
You are exactly correct! WE CANNOT ALLOW THIS SCUM TO GET AWAY WITH IT AGAIN.
The Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history.
1st American advisor was killed on June 08, 1956,
and the last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled. Officially there are still 1,991 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia.
Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said: "ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran. For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win. They were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, most neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they'd tasked their soldiers. And the war was reported by a self serving Media who penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations because they were more interested in a story than the truth! It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.
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Nothing new is there re the rat slander of our military except their worthless mantra of "We support our troops".
Agreed. Same playbook. This is the same crowd that said TET was a defeat. Even Hagel recently said we were losing in Iraq. Bush better round these guys up and have the GOP singing from the same sheet of music. The Dems and the MSM are hell bent again on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Bump!
I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.
I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.
There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.
He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thanks for the ping!
Great post. Thanks...
Their slander of American troops isn't working quite as well now as it did then, but they are weakening American support of the war.
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