“The false notion that it is “the left” that has distorted the history of the Vietnam era is so patently false as to be laughable. The Vietnam War was lost by the US because of two main reasons–one, the US military on the ground was simply unwilling to fight and die for a cause the made no sense, while the Vietnamese were willing to die by the tens of thousands for a cause–freeing their country from foreign domination–in which they believed passionately (Communism had little or nothing to do with it), and two, the American people were simply fed up.”

That is so completely false as to be utterly absurd! Spoken like a true believer in a failed cause. Did you cry when the Soviet Union realized the utter failure of the Marxist system and disbanded itself?

You say “the US military on the ground was simply unwilling to fight and die for a cause the made no sense.”

Like all useful lies there is a vestige of truth within that which you now want readers to accept as valid in the entire sweep of your statement.. Otherwise it could never have a chance of working.

Where you opened this exchange with the false assertion that the Viet Nam theater of action of the Cold War (a fact that you utterly ignore and hope will go away since you know it is true and can’t be refuted) began in 1954, you now want to apply a loss of meaning in the effort there by our military to the entire sweep of time of our involvement there, an assertion that is completely false and fallacious. Morale and belief in the cause in our action there was not lost in the minds of the men who fought it until the leftist propaganda in America had done its work and eroded support and belief in the cause in the minds of the American people at home.

And how good was that propaganda? Even I who had supported our efforts there at first bought it completely, and turned against what I had previously believed and supported! That’s right! I too believed the lies of those believing as you still do! But I didn’t close my mind ever after to the reception of facts previously not known or understood by myself. I wanted to understand and know the truth whatever it was! And so I continued to read and gather information, until well over two decades later I finally came to understand that I and the rest of the country had been duped and were wrong to believe those lies, the result being that now I can confront leftists such as yourself with the truth concerning it, presenting you and the readers here with a picture that is not distorted by propaganda but simply comprised of the facts that you and all your ilk will simply ignore because you know you have no answer for them.

Where I respond to what you say, you don’t do that. You don’t address the issues I have raised but simply go on with your leftist assertions that the picture those facts compose is false without refuting the underpinnings of history that comprise it. But I will respond to actual points of your argument, where you won’t to mine.

First, it was never an “all out war” as you say. Otherwise we would have gone into the North on the ground, something that was ruled out from the beginning.

Second, after the Tet offensive of 1968, the actual Communist forces of South Viet Nam, the VC were pretty much broken as a fighting force. They were only marginally effective from then on. The North had to take over the fighting completely after realizing that the Tet offensive had failed to materialize the “popular” uprising of the people of the South as they had thought and planned for. And what does this mean?

The myth that you strive so hard to preserve that “communism had nothing to do” with the efforts of the forces against us there—it was strictly a nationalist will to free their country from foreign invaders—-is just that: a myth! Otherwise the 1968 Tet offensive would have succeeded as its planners thought and hoped for! The people of South Viet Nam would have risen up to throw off the yoke of the foreign invaders as planned for! But that didn’t happen. Why? Simply because of something that you wish to utilize, but in a completely different way: The people of the South who were not under the Communist yoke truly wanted to live in peace and with their own government, but they had no loyalty to or belief in the system—Communism—that the Viet Cong leaders as well as the leaders of the North were trying to impose!

Now, can you address and refute the points I made in my first response here to base my argument on? Or will you just continue to say that what I say is false without actually addressing them, and go on to more assertions in your cause? And here is one paramount to your entire argument: You said “The background of the war in Vietnam dates from 1954, when Vietnam, after a long struggle, won its independence from its colonial ruler, France.” I showed that that was false, with specific facts and not just assertion, which is the form that your argument takes. Will you deny that?

Lets get Viet Nam cleared up, and then I will be glad to talk with you about Islam. You obviously have no more understanding of that than you do of Viet Nam and Communism. And I promise you, I have facts at hand to support my argument there just as I do and have shown that I do with regard to Viet Nam.

The right wing revisionists who would try to claim now that the military was fighting with “one hand tied behind its back” and that the military was “stabbed in the back” by domestic leftist opposition, are wrong on two counts. First, our military killed millions of Vietnamese peasants. That was all-out war. We dropped more tons of bombs on Vietnam than all the ordnance of WWII. That was all-out war. What I suppose they are refering to is simply destroying Vietnam totally, maybe with nukes, and killing tens of millions of Vietnamese. But that’s not winning. That is a holocaust. Second, the war in Vietnam was lost long before the public anti-war position became mainstream. Nixon came to office in 1968, pretty much convinced that the war was lost, and with a plan to extract the US, but without admitting it was defeated. His plan was Vietnamization, so that the US could get out, and the situation could last past his term of office, with the north defeating the puppet south after a decent interval, allowing Nixon and the Republicans to blame incompetent South Vietnamese for the defeat.

Finally, I want to debunk Rhea’s absurd claim that the US is “at war” with Islam and that Islam is “more dangerous” than Communism.

The Taliban was not, and in the future will not be at war with the US. Hell, most of the people iin the Taliban probably don’t even know where the US is (most Americans don’t know where Afghanistan is, either). And when they finally oust the US from their country, and take control of Kabul, they will have their hands full trying to gain control over the various non-Pashtun tribes and the warlords in the North and elsewhere. They will have zero interest in the US. Furthermore, if the US makes it clear that it will continue to make life difficult the Taliban through trade cut offs, lack of aid, and occasional air strikes if they readmit Al Qaeda, you can bet the Taliban will drive and keep out Al Qaeda in the future. All that for no war. It could be done today, with no more killing and dying by US troops.

As for the alleged global Islamic threat, this is just a chimera. Look at the Islamic state of Malaysia. No threat. An ally of the US. Even Iran, which is supposedly such a threat, has no desire to attack the US. In fact, poll after poll shows that despite all the history of the US in undermining democracy in Iran, most Iranians have a very favorable view of America, its people, and its culture.

Islam is not at war with the US or the West. Furthermore, nationalism is far more powerful than any ideology or religion. International Communism was always more an imaginary idea than a realilty, as Communist nations and movements worked in the interest of their own nationality, while only giving lip service to the international ideal. Stalini undermined the Communists in the Spanish Civil War as early as the early 1930s, undermined the opposition to Hitler at the same time, and for decades, undermined the Communists in China. China undermined the Vietnamese during their war with the US. The story goes on and on. One of the few real internationalist Communist leaders I can think of is Fidel Castro, though even he was seen as insufficiently internationalist by his lieutenant, Che Guevarra, that Che left his post to go foment revolution in South America on his own in frustration.

Islam is the same. It has adherents around the globe, but you had a bitter war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic nation of Iraq, a takeover of Islamic Kuwait by Islamic Iraq, and Iraq and Saudi Arabia are rivals. There is a fanatic element but it is a small handfull of people, and by most accounts they are not even really Islamic–just in name perhaps.

Most of this “Islamic Jihad” stuff is propaganda coming straight out of the Pentagon and CIA.

America is not threatened by Islam. It is threatened by the powerful forces in our own government and on Wall Street who push the idea that the US needs to rule the world, and that we need to have a one-trillion-dollar military–a policy that is hollowing out our country, making us despised the world over, and that will eventually leave us, like Rome, a smoking ruin fit only for visits by tourists who will come and ooh and aah at the relics of what once was.

As for Afghanistan, here is the only thing I said on that subject: “Yes, there is a parallel between Viet Nam and Afghanistan. Each has been forced upon us by ideologies with long range goals of global control and domination, Communism first, and no(w) Islam which has that as its goal written into its book the Koran, even as jihad as a means of achieving that is.”

But there the parallel stops. Islam is not Communism. Communism seldom if ever had anywhere near a majority of its subject people who actually believed in and supported it in its leaders. Islam does, and therein lies a big, big difference. Trying to build a pro-Western style government in an Islamic nation which we have invaded whether in good cause or not is doomed to failure from the outset, unless the complete conversion of the vast majority of its people from Islam to something else is accomplished as well. And that is simply not a reasonable expectation at this time.

But we are at war with Islam because Islam is at war with us and has been since its founding, and by us I mean every non-Islamic nation in the world. America is just their focal point right now. So we have to prepare ourselves for that,. and that means we have to prepare ourselves to understand that, which means that we have to understand as a nation and as a people Islam itself. This means that different tactics entirely are necessary, and I doubt very seriously that this is understood by any of the occupants of the White House past or present.

That being the case, the best tactic shot term for Afghanistan and for us is simply to locate and kill or capture Osama Ben Laden whereever he may be. If this means invading Pakistan briefly in order to do so, whether by a snatch and run operation or by full scale troop movements, then by all means do it. And then close up shop and get out of both countries.

This is my own personal view. And I don’t see a long range goal of occupation and nation building as having any more chance than the Soviets had in their attempt to make it a satellite nation within their sphere of dominance.

Americans need to understand Islam as we never understood Marxism, because Islam is far more dangerous to our lives and ideals than Marxism ever was.

Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?
http://www.alternet.org/story/51975/

And by the way, the Afgan war is already lost,

“Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices. ”

from #2 We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us posted at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175101/chalmers_johnson_dismantling_the_empire

Johnson was once a cold-warrior who came to his senses. In a similar vein, Kevin Phillips, whose book Wealth and Democracy comes to the same conclusion as Johnson (that the American economic empire needs to be scaled back, but offers the hope of doing that by a more equitable wealth redistribution–conservatives have disowned him for this–leave us with a ray of hope that more conservatives will think about what they’ve written and follow suite.

But anybody who chooses can look at a map and locate all the countries mentioned, doing as Chuck suggested in his paper, coloring them in with different colors on a year by year basis indicating the year of their fall, with perhaps a fiery orange for those nations in which so called Peoples Wars of Liberation were begun but didn’t succeed to see that there was a very real basis for believing that Premier Khruschev meant exactly what he said when he stated point blank, “We’ll bury you.” And given the nuclear power of the Soviet Union at the time as well as all the insurgencies they were financing, fomenting and trying to foment, coupled with all the nations that had already fallen, it is easy to see that the threat was very real and the goal was as he stated it.

As for Ho being a Nationalist and no threat to anyone outside his own country, try selling that to Laos, his neighbor who had drawn the ire of Moscow and Hanoi by accepting diplomats from Taipei and Saigon, prompting him to send his forces into that country to support the communist Pathet Lao in 1958 and 1959. You would like to ignore that with your continuing myth of him being just a Nationalist patriot, but his history and actions speaks volumes to counter it.

As for China, if they were strictly Nationalist, then why did they intervene so forcefully in Korea when it became clear that their client state in the North was about to be defeated utterly? Or invade and annex Tibet as another of its provinces?

And contrary to your firm belief in a Communist victory over the U.S. in Viet Nam, while we didn’t ultimately achieve our local goals there, (thanks in large part to leftist propaganda eroding the will of the American people to pursue the fight to the finish in that Theater,) it ultimately was successful in the over all goal of confronting them there in order to put a stop to the World Communist plan of so-called wars of liberation around the globe.

Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, has said in several different venues that it was our involvement in Viet Nam that forced the Soviets and other World Communist powers to concentrate their resources and energies there against us rather than in the numerous insurgencies they were backing and wanted to back in other nations including his own, thus giving them the time to build up their economic base and political stability so that by the time that war was over the would be insurgents had no chance of any success.

Viet Nam was a Theater of Operations of the Cold War, just as North Africa was a Theater of Operations in World War II. Unfortunately, because it was such a major Theater of Operations it began to take on the aura of being a war on its own, which it was not, on the stage of world politics. And it ultimately served the purpose that we wanted it to, though not so immediate and successfully locally there as we wanted. Ultimately it was a pyrrhic victory for World Communism. And if you and other like you have your way, our successes in the larger goals which we did attain through that action will also prove to be pyrrhic in nature.

The Soviets saw us go half way around the globe to fight the longest war in our history to that point, and never come close to collapse militarily or economically either one. And then not even ten years later, they entered into one right on their own eastern border only to find that they were ultimately unable to sustain it. Don’t you think that these facts had a major impact on President Gorbachev and the Poliboro later on in convincing them that the 70 year old Marxist experiment and dream ultimately was only that, a dream?

It’s been a pleasure exchanging ideas with you. And I’m not really surprised to learn that you lived several years in China.

Anyhow, if anything created a domino effect, it was the US aggression against Vietnam, which Nixon spilled over into Cambodia, destabilizing the Sihanouk’s goverrnment, and paving the way first for the coup by the fascist Lon Nol, and then in reaction to that corrupt regime, of the insane Pol Pot. Any reality-based analyst would have to say that it was the US that was playing dominos.

As for your alarmist scenarios, none of them happened, even though the US got blown out of the water in Vietnam. Thailand and Malaysia never were seriously threatened. The domino theory was just alarmist Red Scare propaganda.

Nor, by the way, was anyone except South Korea ever threatened by North Korea. Certainly not Japan. And again, North Korea was far more worried about China making it a colony all over again, than it was interested in “conquest.”

With the benefit of hindsight, even you rabid anti-commies ought to be able to see your were wrong. But the sad thing is that the smart people in the government back in the ’50s and ’60s knew all this too–they just didn’t want to talk about it, because they were too busy trying to scare the American public into approving absurdly large military budgets.

And just so today with Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Not one of those countries poses a threat to the US, existential or otherwise. They are all backward, weak, and internally deeply troubled nations that are far too busy with their own problems, politics and the need to try and satisfy the clamor of their own people for a better life to pose a threat to the mightiest nation on earth. Get real.

The irony of all this is that the obsession of the US with these bogus threats, which have us spending close to $1 trillion a year on war making and war preparations, is bankrupting the country and genuinely threatening our national security in ways that are far more serious than anything any country of whatever size, or any terrorist organization, could do to us.

Dave Lindorff
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

You are obviously as ignorant of history as you are dull of imagination. All the left thinks it has to do in any case of hostilities is begtin its chant of “Viet Nam! Viet Nam!”

Viet Nam was in our future long before 1954, but I will only take it back to 1939. There was at that time only one communist nation in the world, the Soviet Union. Skip to 1946 and you had the countries of Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lituainia, and Estonia all under Communist domination with Austria as well for a time, not to mention Germany and Korea having been divided with major portions given over to Communist control.

There were Coimmunist insurgencies in the Philappines and Malaysia, and Chairman Mao’s Red Chinese were in a full scale war to take over China. Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party and one of the co-fonders of the French Communist Party after World War 1 was leading his forces against the French in North Viet Nam.

In 1948, the Soviets blocked all access to West Berlin which was by treaty under U.D., British and French control and administration but completely isolated and surrounded by Communist controlled East Germany, necesitating the Berlin Airlift to supply it and prevent its loss to Communist aggression. There was a communist insurgency in Greece, and Albania too began to fall.

In 1949, Manila was in danger of falling, China did fall, and Czecholslovakia went Communist. The French and Italian parties were both gaining strength, the Viet Minh were gaining ground in Viet Nam, and by 1950 there was a communist insurgency in Aden and one Province of India voted itself communist. Communist insurgencies were in full gear in Malaysia and Southern Thailand and North Korea invaded South Korea.

In 1953 a very tenuous armistice was signed in Korea and hostilities there have never been declared over to this day. (My thanks to Chuck Guzman on the History of Vietnam War 101 website for the vast bulk of this information.)

But you want to go back only to 1954 after the French had fallen in Viet Nam and we realized that we were the only nation on the earth with a chance of withstanding the worldwide communist plan of aggression and goals of dominence. enda only on such events as fits your wishes.

Yes, there is a parallel between Viet Nam and Afghanistan. Each ihas been forced upon us by idologies with long range goals of global control and domination, Communism first, and not Islam which has that as its goal written into its book the Koran, even as jihad as a means of achieving that is.

Clear your brain of all the anti-American propaganda you have packed in there and go back to school. You need a different outlook to understand what is going on in the world.