Nixon docs: Democrats backed Cambodia escalation

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/06/24/nixon-docs-democrats-backed-cambodia-escalation/ ^ | June 22, 2009 | ED MORRISSEY

[RobinMasters]

For almost 40 years, people have blamed Richard Nixon for escalating the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos unilaterally, and painted Nixon as just short of a dictator for doing so. History has a habit of turning contemporary opinion on its ear as information comes to light, and a Washington Post story shows that will happen with Nixon and the war as well. According to newly-released documents, Nixon sought and received the support of Democratic leadership in Congress in expanding the war:

[rocksblues]

Betting Ted “Killer” Kennedy was one of them!

[JrsyJack]

So did Bush but it hasn’t stopped the ‘Rats from lying about it and claimimg they opposed the war from the beginning. In the words of a great Viet Nam hero, “I voted for it before I voted against it.”

[xkaydet65]

I know Ed and AllaP thought this big news, but as one who atually saw and heard John Stennis, his support for Cambodia is not only no surprise, it would have been shocking if he’d opposed it. Stennis was a firm believer in the only good red is a dead red theory of international relations. Not as out there as his mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia who once said “If a nuclear war has only two survivors I want them both to be American.”, but Stennis was a hawk’s hawk.

[Sans-Culotte]

Someone should forward this to Oliver Stone.

[Rapscallion]

The democrats betrayed Nixon on Cambodia.

The democrats betrayed George H.W. Bush on taxes ("Read my Lips").

The democrats are about to do it all again by telling you the national health plan will not make America a third world beggar nation.

[Williams]

First off, only in the liberal mind was the war “widened” or “escalated” into Laos or Cambodia by Nixon.

The North Vietnamese were in full occupation of vast areas of those countries and used them as sanctuaries from which they attacked South Vietnam - as in massively and on a continuous basis.

Nixon merely tried to deal with reality.

[cripplecreek]

The democrats betrayed Ford and the Vietnamese as well.

No matter what you say about Ford, he did want to keep our promise to the Vietnamese people.

[Bulldawg Fan]

A war won on the battlefields and lost in the streets and marble halls of Washington. God bless our valient Vietnam Veterans.

[ETL]

This needs to be included on any Nixon/Vietnam War thread...

Helps put things in perspective.

"Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
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"As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young under John Ehrlichman's supervision created the 'White House Plumbers,' which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Fallout
_____________________________________________________________

So what is Daniel Ellsberg up to these days? Well, for one thing, he is an endorser of the Revolutionary Communist Party's "World Can't Wait" movement...

Click on the 'World Can't Wait' link just below and see: "Endorsers of the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime Include" You may recognize a few other names as well, including the democrat chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr. Conyers' name appears right after Ward Churchill's.
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2538&Itemid=2
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Endorsers of the [World Can't Wait] Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime Include:

James Abourezk, Aris Anagnos, Rocky Anderson, Anti-Flag, Edward Asner, Russell Banks, Ed Begley Jr., Harry Belafonte, St. Clair Bourne, Gabriel Byrne, Margaret Cho, Ward Churchill, Paulette Cole, US Rep John Conyers Jr., John Densmore, Jesse Diaz Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Steve Earle, Niles Eldredge, Daniel Ellsberg, Eve Ensler, Laura Flanders, Jane Fonda, Martin Garbus, Senator Mike Gravel, Andre Gregory, Sam Hamill, Suheir Hammad, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rickie Lee Jones, Sarah Jones, Brig. Gen. (Ret) Janis Karpinski, Jonathan Kozol, Rabbi Michael Lerner, US Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Robin Meyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Tom Morello, Viggo Mortensen, John Nichols, US Rep. Major Owens, Grace Paley, Harvey Pekar, Sean Penn, Michelle Phillips, Harold Pinter, Michael Ratner, Mark Ruffalo, US Rep. Bobby Rush, Susan Sarandon, Richard Serra, Jeff Sharlet, Rev. Al Sharpton, Cindy Sheehan, Martin Sheen, Nancy Spero, Gloria Steinem, Lynne Stewart, Serj Tankian, Sunsara Taylor, Studs Terkel, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Naomi Wallace, US Rep. Maxine Waters, Cornel West, Ann Wright, Howard Zinn, and thousands more who have already joined us.

http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2538&Itemid=2
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World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime is a Maoist-revolutionary movement organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party. (scroll down the list that appears (after clicking link) to find the World Can't Wait organization --rwor.org is the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party):
http://rwor.org/a/rwlink/links.htm
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From David Horowitz's FrontpageMag.com /DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
Profile: World Can't Wait (WCW)

*Revolutionary communist movement that stages protests against the Bush administration

*Organizes college and high-school students

*Founded in June 2005 by Charles Clark Kissinger, a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7213
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The RCP calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government...

From the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party (revcom.us or rwor.org) :

"Create Public Opinion, Seize Power: We are preparing minds and organizing forces for the time when there is a major crack in the system, whenever it comes and wherever it comes from: an opening that makes it possible to bring the future Revolutionary Army of the Proletariat (R.A.P.) into the field and wage a revolutionary armed struggle that actually has a chance of winning.

And we have said that building our party itself is the most important part of organizing forces for revolution. This is true now, and it is true looking forward to the creation of that future R.A.P. and the waging of that armed struggle.":

http://revcom.us/a/v20/1000-1009/1000/barw.htm

[spintreebob]

What Cambodian escalation? As was accurately reported by the far left media in 1965-66-67 we were in Cambodia and Laos under LBJ when the Dems controlled all branches of governemt.

But of course, we had an understanding with Prince Sihanouk. We would pretend we weren’t there and he would pretend we weren’t there because he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

I was there in 66-67 under LBJ and my unit did Laos.

The irony is that the Kent State riots and suicides were allegedly over Nixon-Kissinger expanding the war to Laos and Cambodia. But the far left organizers of the Kent State riot openly stated before the riot that we had always been there. They alleged we had been there under Kennedy and Eisenhower ... which may be true in small numbers.

There is so much in the pop history of the Vietnam war that just isn’t so. Both the left and the right (eg Medved) get a lot of the facts wrong ... or out of importance and relevance.

[mono]

This new release also shows Nixon and Kissinger forced the SV government to accept the truce and ceasefire when Nixon and Kissinger knew it would not hold and that the NV would violate it and take over. Lots of dishonor to go around back then except for our brave fighting men who shed their blood for cowardly politicians of both parties. Alas, it continues today.

[Ole Okie]

The Democrats of the 50’s and early 60’s were almost indistinguishable from Republicans on matters of foreign problems. The party bore very little resemblance to today’s “Democrat Socialist” party.

I remember John Stennis and Richard Russell as men of integrity.

[spintreebob]

re: “A war won on the battlefields and lost in the streets and marble halls of Washington”

Not quite accurate. Yes, we won on the battlefield. But I saw our troops do a lot to lose the war off the battlefield.

Some would get drunk and do stupid things and embarrass themselves and all of us.

Some would aim their vehicle at the “gooks” walking, or on bikes and animals on the shoulder and force them to jump into the rice paddy beyond the shoulder of the road.

Some would rape the local women: “You like American, yes?” What’s the woman going to tell the big guy with the gun? From what I saw in Pleiku 66-67 this was under 5% of us. But with 550,000 in uniform in Vietnam when I was there, that is 27,000 rapists.

There are numerous stories of Fundamentalist and Catholic women with an attitude typical of their religion who would hold a Bible to their chest and say “I’m a Christian. I’m married. My husband is right now fighting the communists. Please don’t rape me.” And their protests fell on deaf ears.

Accurate public opinion polls were taken all during the 50s, 60s and 70s til the fall. In the 50s and early 60s South Vietnam was overwhelmingly anti-communist. Catholics and Evangelicas (about 8% of the population were 100% anti-communist. Bhuddists were 85% anti-communist and 14% “neutral” ala Sihanouk of Cambodia.

They were not only anti-communist, they were extremely pro-American. They knew only 2 types of Americans. There were large numbers of American missionaried (and Canadians who looked American to the Vietnamese) in S Vietnam. This included missionaries who went with their entire church from N Vietnam to S Vietnam in the late 40s.

These missionaries were extremely meek and shy. They read the Bible, prayed, held prayer meetings and church services. They taught grade schoola nd high school. They worked as doctors, nurses and medical support people.

The second type of Americans were diplomats and then Special Forces of the type JFK sent. They were trained to be diplomatic. They were quality people.

Then LBJ took over. As with the war on poverty, LBJ/McNamara thought if you throw enough money and enough people at a problem you’re bound to solve it. So LBJ threw 550,000 of us at the problem with no proper training, no training in how to use our weapons (just how to clean it in basic training) and no training or filtering out of those who did stupid things after a little alcohol. (The other drug problem existed but was small when I was there.)

The bad apples among the 550,000 gradually turned the population against us. The public opinion polls in Vietnam showed that gradual decline. Some of them were deep polls that asked “WHY”. The #1 reason was the way we acted off the battlefield.

Compare it to a hypothetical situation if 5% of Republicans were to rape pro-life Democrat women. What would be the reaction.

I’ll admit. I’m biased. For my high school senior WORLD GOVERNMENT CLASS in ‘61 I was to do a term semester paper on a significant country in the world. I chose S Vietnam. I personally knew many Regions Beyond and Alliance missionaries there. My personal “role model” since 1948 was Dr Griebenow.

I did massive research, reading the communist analysis of Vietnam in French communist papers; reading the personal stories of both the Vietnamese and the mountain people. Especially following the activity in Dalat, which was the last city to fall and resisted and fought the commies even after Saigon fell.

For all of that in ‘61 my WORLD GOVERNMENT teacher Scholen gave me an “F” on my 50+ page term paper and said I had chosen an insignificant country and I should have chosen Cuba or one of the emerging African countries as they would dominate world affairs and not S vietnam. Of course, in my paper in ‘61 I quoted Griebenow and Rexillius and others who were on the ground in S Vietnam and accurately predicted exactly what would happen there and how it would happen.

So I have a chip on my shoulder about this.

[IronJack]

The Democrats betrayed George W. on Iraq.
The Democrats betrayed America on the WOT.

So what's new? Equivocation, denial, and outright lies are the Democrats' stock in trade.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

For all of that in ‘61 my WORLD GOVERNMENT teacher Scholen gave me an “F” on my 50+ page term paper and said I had chosen an insignificant country

As someone once said, it's absolutely no use being more than ten minutes ahead of the times.

[dfwgator]

Yep, “Scoop Jackson” Democrats have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

[Bulldawg Fan]

27,000 rapists? You sound like John Kerry comparing our soldiers to Ghengis Kahn. Don’t bother passing your left wing “its all our fault” crap to me.

[El Gato]

blamed Richard Nixon for escalating the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos unilaterally, and painted Nixon as just short of a dictator for doing so

The whole noition is idiotic. The US and South Vietnamese forces were not going after Cambodian or Laotion forces, they were going after VC and (mostly) NVA forces, WHO WERE ALREADY THERE, having invaded some years earlier.

You might just as well say Churchill and Roosevelt "escalated" WW-II by invading France and Italy.

[xkaydet65]

Ahhh Scoop Jackson. So fondly referred to in the Senate as “The Gentleman from Boeing.”