Posted on 07/07/2009 1:17:55 PM PDT by Interesting Times
I never understood the fear of hitting Russian or Chinese “advisors”. It’s war. What were they going to do about it? Certainly isn’t worth a nuclear exchange over if it should happen. It telegraph’s strategic weakness.
Frankly we should have closed Haiphong harbor much earlier than they did. If a Russian freighter hits a mine, that would have been too bad. You were warned.
You can still loose a war even if you are tactically superior — just ask the Germans.
Mcnamara was the ultimate Incompetent mocked on the every soldiers Zippo.
The unwilling, led by the incompetent to do the impossible for the ungrateful.
I agree. I will say most of Nixon’s cease fires were as a direct result of Congress giving him so much heat, he basically had no choice. LBJ, not the same thing at all.
Those stupid cease-fires. Good grief.
We should have given North Vietnam five days to stop all hostilities or we would level Hanoi within 48 hours, then move on to the next biggest city.
We pussy footed around.
McNamara was registered Republican when Kennedy appointed him, but I doubt he's voted Republican since then.
Everybody hated McNamara forty years ago.
PBS gave him chances to plug his books, and he took that as some sort of redemption, but it wasn't.
People just forgot about him and didn't want to be reminded he was still around.
Some people say McNamara changed his name to Rumsfeld and picked up where he left off, but that's not right either.
Truman lost China and allowed it to invade Korea.
McCarthy saw the infiltration and Venona confirmed it.
Johnson November 65 threw the Joint Chiefs out in "The Day It Became the Longest War".
McNamara the supreme narcissist sacrificing tens of thousands of far, far better men.
Johnson was enormously corrupt. NSAM 273 had circulated in draft fashion before JFK's killing. Johnson signed it the Tuesday thereafter.
Imagine bombing Hanoi, mining Haiphong, allowing no sanctuary anywhere.
No more the ivory tower.
Our current Secretary of Defense comes from the effete CIA.
He coauthored with Zbigniew Brzezinski the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations paper "Iran: Time for a New Approach" calling for negotiating with people who believe a woman's uncovered hair can drive a man mad, and that the Twelfth Imam can be coaxed from a well near Qum after centuries by a nuclear Holocaust and subsequent chaos.
Our new Johnson and McNamara are vastly more evil: ali Hussein and his swordsman slashing the F-22 are the clear and present danger.
Kerry and Kennedy et al have still to answer for their role in the mountain of skulls in Cambodia.
Karma, some call it. Judgment Day, others.
Actions have consequences.
Our Republic will always owe her survival to her brave warriors putting duty, honor, country before the narcissism and lust for power of history's vermin.
Nam Vet
“The French expected to have their possessions back, as did the Brits, Dutch, Belgians, etc. This issue was the basis for suspicion amongst the Allies over what they would “claim” after WW II. Read “Retribution” by Max Hastings, which covers the last year of the war in Asia.
I don’t think Truman “lost” China (not supporting Chiang Kai Shek) since the generalissimo and his people were more corrupt than the French were in Indochina. The Nationalists were looters of their own country. Unfortunately, Mao was the uniter.”
Good points I have heard that before My point was this:
Letter to President Harry Truman, February 16, 1945. The letter was never answered and was not declassified until 1972
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:
Our VIETNAM people, as early as 1941, stood by the Allies’ side and fought against the Japanese and their associates, the French colonialists.
From 1941 to 1945 we fought bitterly, sustained by the patriotism, of our fellow-countrymen and by the promises made by the Allies at YALTA, SAN FRANCISCO and POTSDAM.
When the Japanese were defeated in August 1945, the whole Vietnam territory was united under a Provisional Republican Government, which immediately set out to work. In five months, peace and order were restored, a democratic republic was established on legal bases, and adequate help was given to the Allies in the carrying out of their disarmament mission.
But the French Colonialists, who betrayed in wartime both the Allies and the Vietnamese, have come back, and are waging on us a murderous and pitiless war in order reestablish their domination. Their invasion has extended to South Vietnam and is menacing us in North Vietnam. It would take volumes to give even an abbreviated report of the crisis and assassinations they are committing everyday in this fighting area.
This aggression is contrary to all principles of international law and the pledge made by the Allies during World War II. It is a challenge to the noble attitude shown before, during, and after the war by the United States Government and People. It violently contrasts with the firm stand you have taken in your twelve point declaration, and with the idealistic loftiness and generosity expressed by your delegates to the United Nations Assembly, MM. BYRNES, STETTINIUS, AND J.F. DULLES.
The French aggression on a peace-loving people is a direct menace to world security. It implies the complicity, or at least the connivance of the Great Democracies. The United Nations ought to keep their words. They ought to interfere to stop this unjust war, and to show that they mean to carry out in peacetime the principles for which they fought in wartime.
Our Vietnamese people, after so many years of spoliation and devastation, is just beginning its building-up work. It needs security and freedom, first to achieve internal prosperity and welfare, and later to bring its small contribution to world-reconstruction.
These security and freedom can only be guaranteed by our independence from any colonial power, and our free cooperation with all other powers. It is with this firm conviction that we request of the United Sates as guardians and champions of World Justice to take a decisive step in support of our independence.
What we ask has been graciously granted to the Philippines. Like the Philippines our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the UNITED STATES. We will do our best to make this independence and cooperation profitable to the whole world.
I am Dear Mr. PRESIDENT,
Respectfully Yours,
(Signed) Ho Chi Minh
So important to be reminded of such realities now and again.
Our Great War alliances with the the imperialist nations of france, G.B. Russia and Japan had utterly poisoned the well for us in Asia as in Europe.
American ideals and values were sold then so cheaply, the costs to future American generations became always more dear.
Or behind all of the Earths Ill's is a Rat!
In 1958 Cambodia, they thought American streets were paved with gold. They couldn’t wait to embrace us.
Of course Viet Nam was a mistake to him because he made the mistake of not winning it. Early on the war had great public support and by the Johnson-McNamara system of engagement lost that.
IMHO, The Viet Nam conflict drained the Soviet treasury, therefore robbing them of the ability to build their own defense. The Johnson-Mac team is due given some sort of credit for keeping our strategic military strong. If the USA had decent intel on the USSR at the time I'm quite sure they would have sacrificed a lot of our global ability.
"In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere; I remember this."
The 60s were a very complex political environment.
McNamara:
"I was on the island of Guam in General Curtis LeMays' command in March 1945. In a single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children."
McNamara was frozen decisively by the Russians and ignored the obvious: mine Haiphong, declare Laos and Cambodia an open theater and invade, make peace with Red China, Viet Nam's greatest enemy. None of these moves would have started war with Russia but would have created an end game for the Viet Nam war. LBJ was grossly and IMO criminally negligent as a war commander, his incompetence and failure to lead, that caused our will power to decline. Then appeasement by Nixon and Kissinger wasted more time and lives until the war was finally fought and lost in the halls of Congress.....
Thanks for posting this article. Mike Benge has it precisely right.
Yes I see the same from every group that floats, flies and swims there way into the Governments welcome Wagon of Goodies!
“McNamara was frozen decisively by the Russians and ignored the obvious: mine Haiphong, declare Laos and Cambodia an open theater and invade, make peace with Red China, Viet Nam’s greatest enemy. None of these moves would have started war with Russia but would have created an end game for the Viet Nam war. LBJ was grossly and IMO criminally negligent as a war commander, his incompetence and failure to lead, that caused our will power to decline. Then appeasement by Nixon and Kissinger wasted more time and lives until the war was finally fought and lost in the halls of Congress.....”
Yes him and LBJ Traitors to the Core.
Ditto that. Johnson could have ended that war after Tet by just leveling Hanoi. Instead he stopped bombing, turned a gerat victory into defeat, and pissed on the guys both American and ARVN who won those battles -- all because that f***'n lefty Walter Cronkite raised his eye brow at him.
Johnson was an political idiot who lived for popularity not leadership. When Johnson blinked in the face of a creep like Cronkite, that was the moment the media realized that they set the agenda, not the people.
Things have never been the same since.
0.5% of the people who died in South East Asia in the Commie bloodbath after McNamara/LBJs failed policy.
Sorry, make that 5%. The point still stands.
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