Posted on 08/23/2007 11:37:57 AM PDT by tobyhill
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - President Bush resurrected Vietnam's agonizing legacy yesterday, vowing to fight on indefinitely in Iraq to avoid the bloodbath he predicted would follow a U.S. withdrawal without victory.
"Then, as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," Bush reminded in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.
"As long as I am commander in chief, we will fight to win," he vowed to cheers and applause.
Bush also dialed back on earlier remarks widely perceived as signaling lukewarm support for embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He called Maliki "a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him."
The VFW speech was the first of two major Bush addresses aimed at setting the tone for congressional debate after Gen. David Petraeus, the Iraq commander, gives a progress report next month.
A Republican source said White House strategists, believing anti-war Democrats will liken Iraq to the Vietnam War "quagmire," launched a preemptive strike "to inoculate Bush."
In his remarks, Bush drew lengthy historical parallels to earlier wars that were sure to be questioned. He said the U.S. commitment to freedom in World War II and Korea spread democracy in Asia and set an example that could be emulated in today's Mideast. He also dwelled on the aftermath of Vietnam's fall to the Communists in 1975.
"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 'reeducation camps' and 'killing fields,'" Bush said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
Uhmmm... dear NYDaily... what exactly did he say which is to be questioned? Bush was spot on.
How dare he throw their own words at them.
Sickening how the Left, via their PC media stoodges, continually try to rewrite history. Bush is dead on factually correct.
The factual record is the South had stopped the North cold and forced them to the table with limited US Air support in 1973. It was ONLY after the post Watergate Democrat Congress cut off all funds to the South in 1974, that the South collapsed.
And no surprise, pretty tough for the South to stop a heavy armor column when you only can issue a single clip of ammo to your troops or have to tell your medics to reuse bandages cause you are running out of supplies.
Pres. Bush is putting a stake thru the heart of the root, which is Vietnam. One day the truth will be widely accepted; at that point the Dem party will be in tatters.
Notice how these leftist pigs squeal (throw a rock into a group of pigs - the one who squeals is the one you hit)
but never specifically refute anything he says about the aftermath of the Vietnam pullout.
Next step: Bush or a spokesman needs to get out there and state that the “political progress” that the Dems are currently bitchin’ about would be completely solved if the Iraqi pols didn’t think they’d be thrown to the wolves by the Dems if they get their way.
Tet was a devastating defeat for the NVA. Giap was ready to throw in the towel, but the U.S. Media led by Walter Cronkite came to their rescue. Now once again, the media is trying to turn victory into defeat. Will they win again?
More BS from the MSM....in reality...Bush "dialed back" the press and their lousy reporting.
There I fixed it ...
Oh and BTW ... “F” The libs
The Korean War, as usual, is barely given mention. I loved the way that he dug at today’s democrats by comparing their attitude toward the present war with the REPUBLICAN Party’s vacillation about Korea. The whole Taft wing of the Party wanted NO military intervention overseas. Today it is the Democrats who want to pull out. The big difference is that the Republicans had IKE as a meaningful alternative. The Dims have Joe Biden ;-). I sure hope that we come up with someone better than Adlai Stephenson, the Democratic candidate in 1952.
I’ve been telling you.....”At a time and place of my choosing” W
No sense sooting at pop bottles. Make every shot count
That picture of Kerry boils my blood as much as the one of Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Thank God for what the Swift Boat Veterans did in 04.
YES!
President Bush gave a fantastic speech and nail the libs at every point. I hear my grandchildren repeat some of the “history” about the VietNam era and I immediately correct them. I will make it a point to have them read the President’s VFW speech.
What am I missing here....why did Fox news just reported that troop pullouts will begin September 15th? What are they talking about?
One of my pet peeves for a long time.
This is a tactical win/win Dem whine; by which they always get some mileage by way of sympathetic public sentiment. . .and they know it. They win on public opinion by gaining more yes/yes 'head-shakers' because at it's core; it seems no more than reasonable. . .save for the Dems commitment to defeat while asking people to put their lives on the line here.
Another oft heard claim that wins the Dems an affirming, head-shaking response; is their promotion of 'defeat in Iraq' while laying claim to genuine patriotism as American citizens.
"We want to bring our soldiers home safely!!!' appears to 'get them there'; but of course, only under the most false of pretenses and typically arrogant Lib assumptions of who should control another man's choices; his life and destiny.
Bush is entirely correct. The Left has never acknowledged its misjudgment and lies with regard to the Vietnam War, and it never will. The Left considers the Vietnam War one of its great historic moments. Everything that happens in Iraq is seen through the false prism of Vietnam.
RINO Warner just made some wacky press announcement asking President Bush to start withdrawal and bring “let’s say” 5000 home by Christmas.
As a Fox News Fan from day one, I will have to tell you, I have switched them off. They have become so sloppy in their reportage, they are doing nothing more than spin, spin, spin, and tabloid trash. I’m disgusted with them. How sad, that a once good station where conservatives could go for facts have to turn away because whatever tack they decided to take once Brit’s wife left, was the wrong tack. They cannot be counted on to live up to their “we report, you decide” standard any longer.
I tend to channel surf anymore. Who was Brit’s wife?
-PJ
I read that 2.3 million SE Asians died at the hands of Communists, Pol Pot, and other military adventurists after we left. (A Univ. of Hawaii study). Anything else out there?
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 am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting 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 is 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. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
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.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. 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. 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. 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. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
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.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. 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. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. 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. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. 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.
Bravo, Sir! Well said.
The truth you cite is why I signed up in 1975. When Saigon fell I felt shame for our nation.
Thank you for serving our country. Welcome home!
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