Vietnam and Iraq. History repeated.

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis

Wednesday May 04, 2005 13:26

by Tyler

The lies persist.

Robert Jensen vibrantly illustrated the mindset of America’s fifth column Left when he wrote, “The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.”

Jensen and his fellow ideologues do not wish for “peace” but the triumph of America’s enemies. Yesterday, L.A. Times columnist Robert Scheer extended this animus 30 years into the past, exulting over America’s lone military defeat in South Vietnam. “Sometimes it is better to lose,” Scheer wrote in his latest broadside against reality and human decency, entitled, “Out Loss was Our Gain in Vietnam.”
Reflecting that April 30 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Scheer claimed America has profited from normalized trade with Vietnam, benefiting from that nation’s cheap labor as we became Vietnam’s chief export market. He claims the modern Vietnamese economy, which he describes as “a mix of Karl Marx and Adam Smith,” provides “renewed proof of the viability of Marx's labor theory of value.” But not even sophisticated Marxists believe in the labor theory of value anymore. Our present peaceful coexistence with the regime that tortured John McCain, executed 100,000 Vietnamese without trial after the war, and submerged its economy in a Marxist depression for the next 30 years, in Scheer’s mind, proves that anti-communists were wrong to have opposed handing the country over to the Communists in the first place.
For Scheer, the Vietnam War had nothing to do with actual Communist aggression but was entirely created by American Cold War paranoia, obsessed by “the specter of a Communist movement with a timetable for the takeover of the world.” This is what Scheer was claiming 30 years ago, when he was a member of the Red Sun Rising commune and a follower of Kim Il Sung. Unfortunately for this thesis, many Vietnamese leaders have been unburdening themselves of facts that refute these New Left fantasies.
When Lyndon Johnson issued a White Paper in 1964 saying the North Vietnamese Communists were infiltrating troops into South Vietnam with the intention of conquering it, Scheer earned himself a little notoriety on the Left by publishing a pamphlet snickering at the claims and calling the president a liar. Now, we know from the mouths of North Vietnamese leaders themselves that Johnson was telling the truth – and greatly understating it. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was built so that the Communist military could move into South Vietnam and subvert it, and by 1964 Hanoi had infiltrated a small army into South Vietnam and created a phony “indigenous” guerilla movement called the “National Liberation Front of South Vietnam” in order to fool credulous leftists like Scheer and advance the Communist world revolution. But Scheer – who has apparently been asleep for 30 years and missed these facts – still clings to the myths he was spinning back in Berkeley.
According to Scheer, Ho Chi Minh – who spent 20 years in Paris as an agent of Stalin’s International – was just a “nationalist” and “pragmatist.” Apparently taking on the world’s superpower and sacrificing millions of his own people to realize the dreams of a German exile rummaging in the British Museum a hundred years before is just practical politics. So if we had just let the nationalists and pragmatists do their thing, we would have gotten the same result. As fellow L.A. Times reporter David Lamb, put it, “if you took away the still-ruling Communist Party and discounted the perilous decade after the war, the Vietnam of today is not much different from the country U.S. policymakers wanted to create in the 1960s.”
Ah, yes, the “perilous decade.” What Lamb means (and Scheer omits) is the decade when the Communist Party killed 100,000 Vietnamese and drove a million boat people into exile (something that had not occurred in a thousand years of Vietnamese history under many less brutal conquerors). The antiwar movement that Scheer and his comrades launched successfully forced America to abandon the people of South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia, which the Communist had used as an invasion route. This abandonment resulted in the postwar slaughter of 2.5 million Indo-Chinese. (The Khmer Rouge who cleaned up Cambodia were protégés of Hanoi and were also advancing the “world revolution” and not, obviously, Cambodian nationalism and pragmatism.) The Communists also liquidated 1.5 million Laotians while they were at it.
Noticing the fact that Vietnam now trades with us, Scheer concludes that they would have done so earlier if only we had stepped back and allowed them to conquer South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos without opposition. In fact, he claims, “Ike himself resisted committing significant forces to the conflict.” In part, that’s because there was no full-scale North-South Vietnamese conflict until March 1960, and the Communist Party of North Vietnam did not call for deposing pro-American South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem until the following September, as lame duck Ike was nearly free to golf full-time. However, Eisenhower did have a solution for Ho Chi Minh: in 1954, he approached the French and British about conducting an air strike to save the French military stationed at Dien Bien Phu. However, Churchill would not support military action on behalf of the French empire as the sun was setting on his own; and just a few months later, the French elected Radical-Socialist Pierre Mendés-France both president and foreign minister. In true French fashion, he fled the battlefield and left half the nation in the hands of a dictator. (Ike also threatened to nuke China if Mao invaded the seemingly inconsequential islands of Quemoy and Matsu; that’s some peacenik.)
What made Vietnam’s relationship with the United States possible is the fact that, in the interim, the Soviet Union – the chief subsidizer of Communist Vietnam – mercifully collapsed. The Soviet Union provided Vietnam with a $1 billion annual subsidy and the vision of a future dominated by Marxism-Leninism. If these pillars of Vietnam’s Communist faith were still present, Vietnam’s economic wooing of the West would not be taking place.
Notwithstanding the good news, North Vietnam even now has that little problem of the “still ruling Communist Party” and consequently has shown no concurrent improvement in its human rights record. According to the State Department, this record has “remained poor” as the nation “continued to commit serious abuses,” including police beatings, detentions, and disappearances. The knock-in-the-dead-of-night persists in the land that Scheer’s buddies Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda once referred to as a “rice-roots democracy.”
How can a man so innocent of the history of his own era and so complicit in its crimes be a powerful columnist at one of America’s most important newspapers, not to mention a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications? (And what does that tell you about the times we live in?)
Scheer began his career with a 1961 book defending Fidel Castro and was the Cuban dictator’s chosen publisher of Ché Guevara’s diaries. Scheer’s history of support for Communist revolutionaries (not nationalists or pragmatists) stretches back 40 years and began with his Cuban romance. Cuba, of course, is the exemplar of Communism’s imperial ambitions – the very ambitions that Scheer pretends don’t exist. In 1963, Castro sent 22 tanks and more than 100 Cuban troops to the Algerian National Liberation Front led by Ahmed ben Bella, ultimately giving two billion francs to the Arab Marxists. Ché Guevara famously called for radicals to “create two, three…many Vietnams” – the title also of a book by Ché wannabe Tom Hayden – and died trying to launch one in Bolivia. This martyrdom inspired Ho Chi Minh's followers to host Raul Castro shortly after the Fall of Saigon.
Castro reached his imperial apex when he sent 50,000 troops to aid the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in its efforts to foist Leninism in the former colonial nation. Cuban troops fought in the Congo well into the Reagan administration and Fidel sent aid to the brutal “Red Rule” of Ethiopia’s Communists, architects of one of the worst politically devised famines in world history. Castro’s efforts to build an airport for Soviet bombers in Grenada provoked Ronald Reagan to take defensive military action. The Sandinista dictators were his personal protégés, trained in Havana to spread Marxist police states throughout Central America. The trainers of Nicaragua’s secret police were Cubans loaned by Castro for that very purpose.
So Scheer is well aware that Communism was a messianic creed and an imperialist enterprise and one that the North Vietnamese Communists shared. But acknowledging this would prevent him from writing yet another column (he has written them before) on how it would be good thing for America to lose its wars with totalitarian enemies. But this is the very column that Scheer has been writing for the last three years about America’s war against the Islamic totalitarians in Iraq – another nation in which French self-interest left the United States to take care of a murderous autocrat they kept in power. Plus ça change….

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Comments (15 of 15)

Some interesting links...

by redjade

Mon May 09, 2005 12:23

→ The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Ago:
Lessons from the Total Defeat of the U.S.
By Gabriel Kolko
http://hnn.us/articles/11717.html
Washington correctly assumed that its diplomatic strategy had won Moscow and Peking to its side by threatening to swing its power to the enemy of whatever nation would not support its Vietnam strategy – triangular diplomacy.

But it was irrelevant what Hanoi's former allies did--and essentially they did what the Americans wanted by cutting military aid to the Vietnamese Communists. The basic problem was in Saigon: the regime was falling apart for reasons having nothing to do with military equipment. The Communists were stunned by their fast, total victory over the nominally superior Saigon army, which refused to fight and immediately disintegrated.

-- -- --

→ Teaching the Vietnam War in a Time of War
By Marilyn B. Young
http://hnn.us/articles/11540.html

The most common analogy made between Vietnam and Iraq is topographic: Vietnam was/Iraq is a quagmire. At a press conference in the summer of 2003, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld had a hard time with the word. He had opened with an analogy of his own, comparing the growing insurgency in Iraq to, of all things, the situation in the U.S. immediately after the American Revolution. “There was rampant inflation and no stable currency. Discontent led to uprisings, such as Shays' Rebellion, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings…" He added that the “transition to democracy is never easy” and seemed unaware or indifferent to the logic of his analogy which left American troops in Iraq in a rather anomalous situation. A reporter wanted to know whether the Iraqi resistance could be called a guerrilla war and whether the U.S. might not have landed itself in a quagmire. Rumsfeld flatly replied that it was not a guerrilla war. As for “Quagmire. We have had several quagmires that weren’t thus far… Why don’t I think it is one? Well, I opened my remarks today about the United States of America. Were we in a quagmire for eight years? I would think not. We were in a process. We were…evolving from a monarchy into a democracy. If you want to call that a quagmire, do it. I don’t.” So there.

--- --- ---

Also see:
Who Protected the Khmer Rouge? (what is Article 98?)
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68830

Tyler makes sense. Run before you learn something!

by Lungs McPherson

Mon May 09, 2005 01:28

Excellent truth laden writings! Many of our fellow posters here seem to have bought into the "blame America first" rhetoric hook, line and sinker. That's a shame. I happen to have family and roots in the US and Europe and have respect and love for folks on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, people are not really all that different from one another. We all want the same things from life. Opportunity to be all that you can be, freedom, love, health, family, etc. I also hear a lot of criticism of the right wing extremists but no mention of their equally whacked out counterparts, the left wing fanatics. It may surprise some of our fellow posters but they do exist. Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. Truth be told, most people are not part of the more vocal fringe groups. They are the “silent majority” and a much more accurate reflection of the world. And as history can attest, the fact is than, when the chips are down and people are really in trouble, who are they gonna’ call to lay down their hearts, their time, their money, and even their lives to come to the rescue? I’ll give you a hint. It ain’t Ghostbusters!

US army trawls psychiatric wards for recruits

by billy

Fri May 06, 2005 16:49

It's getting like the days of the press gangs. They'll have to re -introduce the draft if they don't get shot of that chimpanzee in the Whitehouse pronto
see:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/mili-m06.shtml

Tyler

by Ho Chi Minh

Fri May 06, 2005 14:04

Me seea mista tyler you access all the facts of the wa from internet.

Dont matta what all myths are , tuth is we beat your ass and kill lotsa gi , love the gi's very young very innocent easy to kill

Myth versus reality in Vietnam

Fri May 06, 2005 13:43

The Vietnam War has been the subject of thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, hundreds of books, and scores of movies and television documentaries. The great majority of these efforts have erroneously portrayed many myths about the Vietnam War as being facts. (Nixon Library)

Myth: Most American soldiers were addicted to drugs, guilt-ridden about their role in the war, and deliberately used cruel and inhumane tactics.
The facts are:

91% of Vietnam Veterans say they are glad they served (Westmoreland papers)
74% said they would serve again even knowing the outcome (Westmoreland papers)
There is no difference in drug usage between Vietnam Veterans and non veterans of the same age group (from a Veterans Administration study) (Westmoreland papers)
Isolated atrocities committed by American soldiers produced torrents of outrage from antiwar critics and the news media while Communist atrocities were so common that they received hardly any attention at all. The United States sought to minimize and prevent attacks on civilians while North Vietnam made attacks on civilians a centerpiece of its strategy. Americans who deliberately killed civilians received prison sentences while Communists who did so received commendations. From 1957 to 1973, the National Liberation Front assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499. The death squads focused on leaders at the village level and on anyone who improved the lives of the peasants such as medical personnel, social workers, and schoolteachers. (Nixon Library) Atrocities - every war has atrocities. War is brutal and not fair. Innocent people get killed.
Vietnam Veterans are less likely to be in prison - only 1/2 of one percent of Vietnam Veterans have been jailed for crimes. (Westmoreland papers)
97% were discharged under honorable conditions; the same percentage of honorable discharges as ten years prior to Vietnam (Westmoreland papers)
85% of Vietnam Veterans made a successful transition to civilian life.(McCaffrey Papers)
Vietnam veterans' personal income exceeds that of our non-veteran age group by more than 18 percent. (McCaffrey Papers)
Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than our non-vet age group. (McCaffrey Papers)
87% of the American people hold Vietnam Vets in high esteem.(McCaffrey Papers)
Myth: Most Vietnam veterans were drafted.
2/3 of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers. 2/3 of the men who served in World War II were drafted. (Westmoreland papers) Approximately 70% of those killed were volunteers.(McCaffrey Papers)

Myth: The media have reported that suicides among Vietnam veterans range from 50,000 to 100,000 - 6 to 11 times the non-Vietnam veteran population.
Mortality studies show that 9,000 is a better estimate. "The CDC Vietnam Experience Study Mortality Assessment showed that during the first 5 years after discharge, deaths from suicide were 1.7 times more likely among Vietnam veterans than non-Vietnam veterans. After that initial post-service period, Vietnam veterans were no more likely to die from suicide than non-Vietnam veterans. In fact, after the 5-year post-service period, the rate of suicides is less in the Vietnam veterans' group."[Houk]

Myth: A disproportionate number of blacks were killed in the Vietnam War.
86% of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasians, 12.5% were black, 1.2% were other races. (CACF and (Westmoreland papers)

Sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, in their recently published book "All That We Can Be," said they analyzed the claim that blacks were used like cannon fodder during Vietnam "and can report definitely that this charge is untrue. Black fatalities amounted to 12 percent of all Americans killed in Southeast Asia - a figure proportional to the number of blacks in the U.S. population at the time and slightly lower than the proportion of blacks in the Army at the close of the war." [All That We Can Be]

Myth: The war was fought largely by the poor and uneducated.
Servicemen who went to Vietnam from well-to-do areas had a slightly elevated risk of dying because they were more likely to be pilots or infantry officers.

Vietnam Veterans were the best educated forces our nation had ever sent into combat. 79% had a high school education or better. (McCaffrey Papers)

Here are statistics from the Combat Area Casualty File (CACF) as of November 1993. The CACF is the basis for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall):

Average age of 58,148 killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years. (Although 58,169 names are in the Nov. 93 database, only 58,148 have both event date and birth date. Event date is used instead of declared dead date for some of those who were listed as missing in action)(CACF)

Category Deaths Average Age
Total 58,148 23.11 years
Enlisted 50,274 22.37 years
Officers 6,598 28.43 years
Warrants 1,276 24.73 years
E1 525 20.34 years
11B MOS 18,465 22.55 years

Five men killed in Vietnam were only 16 years old.[CACF]

The oldest man killed was 62 years old.[CACF]

11,465 KIAs were less than 20 years old.[CACF]

Myth: The average age of an infantryman fighting in Vietnam was 19.
Assuming KIAs accurately represented age groups serving in Vietnam, the average age of an infantryman (MOS 11B) serving in Vietnam to be 19 years old is a myth, it is actually 22. None of the enlisted grades have an average age of less than 20. [CACF] The average man who fought in World War II was 26 years of age. (Westmoreland papers)

Myth: The domino theory was proved false.
The domino theory was accurate. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand stayed free of Communism because of the U.S. commitment to Vietnam. The Indonesians threw the Soviets out in 1966 because of America's commitment in Vietnam. Without that commitment, Communism would have swept all the way to the Malacca Straits that is south of Singapore and of great strategic importance to the free world. If you ask people who live in these countries that won the war in Vietnam, they have a different opinion from the American news media. The Vietnam War was the turning point for Communism.(Westmoreland papers)

Democracy Catching On - In the wake of the Cold War, democracies are flourishing, with 179 of the world's 192 sovereign states (93%) now electing their legislators, according to the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union. In the last decade, 69 nations have held multiparty elections for the first time in their histories. Three of the five newest democracies are former Soviet republics: Belarus (where elections were first held in November 1995), Armenia (July 1995) and Kyrgyzstan (February 1995). And two are in Africa: Tanzania (October 1995) and Guinea (June 1995). [Parade Magazine]

Myth: The fighting in Vietnam was not as intense as in World War II.
The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.

One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,169 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.59 million who served. Although the percentage who died is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds were 300 percent higher than in World War II. 75,000 Vietnam veterans are severely disabled. (McCaffrey Papers)

MEDEVAC helicopters flew nearly 500,000 missions. Over 900,000 patients were airlifted (nearly half were American). The average time lapse between wounding to hospitalization was less than one hour. As a result, less than one percent of all Americans wounded who survived the first 24 hours died. (VHPA Databases)

The helicopter provided unprecedented mobility. Without the helicopter it would have taken three times as many troops to secure the 800 mile border with Cambodia and Laos (the politicians thought the Geneva Conventions of 1954 and the Geneva Accords or 1962 would secure the border) (Westmoreland papers)

More helicopter facts:

Approximately 12,000 helicopters saw action in Vietnam (all services). (VHPA Databases)

Army UH-1's totaled 7,531,955 flight hours in Vietnam between October 1966 and the end of 1975. (VHPA Databases)

Army AH-1G's totaled 1,038,969 flight hours in Vietnam. (VHPA Databases)

NOTE*
[All That We Can Be] All That We Can Be by Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler
[CACF] (Combat Area Casualty File) November 1993. (The CACF is the basis for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, i.e. The Wall), Center for Electronic Records, National Archives, Washington, DC
[Houk] Testimony by Dr. Houk, Oversight on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 14 July 1988 page 17, Hearing before the Committee on Veterans' Affairs United States Senate one-hundredth Congress second session. Also "Estimating the Number of Suicides Among Vietnam Veterans" (Am J Psychiatry 147, 6 June 1990 pages 772-776)
[McCaffrey] Speech by Lt. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, (reproduced in the Pentagram, June 4, 1993) assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Vietnam veterans and visitors gathered at "The Wall", Memorial Day 1993
[Parade Magazine] August 18, 1996 page 10.
[VHPA Databases] Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association Databases.
[Westmoreland] Speech by General William C. Westmoreland before the Third Annual Reunion of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association (VHPA) at the Washington, DC Hilton Hotel on July 5th, 1986 (reproduced in a Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association Historical Reference Directory Volume 2A)

Nam Won ???HAHAHAH

by Gi Joe

Fri May 06, 2005 13:24

A country that was bombed back into the stone age.Over a quater of its ground and water is polluted with various chemicals.It is still dangerous due to unexploded munitions.Still communist with gaining capitalist tendencies,but still dirt poor.
Some victory!!!

Stolen Honor

Thu May 05, 2005 20:38

Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. Chinook helicopters teetering precariously on the embassy roof, evacuating the last Americans even as North Vietnamese Communist Army tanks rolled into the outskirts of the city. Huey gunships, the very symbol of American combat power in Vietnam, commandeered by fleeing South Vietnamese Army pilots, either ditched into the sea or pushed overboard from the decks of crowded American aircraft carriers.

If the film footage wasn't compelling enough to make the point, all three television networks, the only sources of broadcast news in the last days of April 1975, made certain their audience got the message. This undignified, ignominious retreat, they reported, marked the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful chapter in U.S. Military history, "the first war America lost."

Even today, that same theme is echoed by one of those network news anchors, CBS' Walter Cronkite. "We knew we had lost in Vietnam before we saw that final day," he said in a recent interview marking the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war. We were clearly not omnipotent. We shouldn't be arrogant about our power and the use of our power."

You could almost hear Cronkite's familiar sign-off, "And, that's the way it is."

But, was it, really? Did the U.S. military lose the Vietnam War? If not, who was responsible? And, what about the Cronkite's remark: "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war." Unpopular with whom, the dominant Leftist media?

Perhaps, a more important question: Is it the fog of war or the dense smoke of over three decades of political, anti-military propaganda that continues to confuse and divide Americans about the true history of Vietnam? Certainly, Vietnam is used routinely today to accuse the U.S. military in Iraq and to question America's Global War on Terrorism. But, is that rhetoric based in fact, or, so much 1960's anti-war revisionist bunkum, more the stuff of Hollywood fantasies than the real, documented history of those who served in Vietnam?

Now, thanks to a distinguished group of Vietnam combat veterans, the American public is beginning to hear different, far more factual answers to those questions and many others. This time, they will get it straight from those who know Vietnam best, former POWs, American pilots held in North Vietnam prison camps for years, in places like the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" where they were brutally tortured, beaten, starved and sometimes murdered by their Communists captors.

Earlier this year, the former POWs created the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a non-profit educational organization, designed, in part, to "separate truth from fiction, to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them and, to do so, factually and accurately."

The chairman of the VVLF is Col. George E. "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient and Air Force pilot who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese Communists for six years. Other VVLF Board Directors include POWs Col. Kenneth Cordier, CMDR. Paul Galanti and Marine pilot James Warner. Mary Jane McManus, the wife of former POW Kevin McManus, is also on the board, along with Army combat veterans Robert A. McMahon and Wallace Nunn, who also serves as Chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation.

Last week, the VVLF launched its new website www.vietnamlegacy.org which contains full bios of each Board member and several links to other informational web pages and references for scholarly works on Vietnam history.

If the names of Col. Day and others on VVLF Board seem familiar, they should be. Last year, they were among the handful of Vietnam combat veterans who publicly denounced Sen. John Kerry for his post-Vietnam activities, for his "slander and betrayal of all those who served in Vietnam." First, in Swift Boat TV ads and later in the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal," the VVLF Board members excoriated Kerry for his 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate where he accused the POWs and other Vietnam combat veterans of genocide, deliberately "murdering" and "torturing" hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians.

At the time of Kerry's Senate testimony, all of the VVLF POWs were still being held in North Vietnam prison camps under constant threat of execution as "war criminals." In "Stolen Honor" they vividly recall the reaction of their Communist captors to Kerry's accusations and the demoralizing effects of propaganda by such anti-war activists as Jane Fonda.

"Stolen Honor" was scheduled for airing in early October 2004 on 62 Sinclair Broadcast network stations. However, the Kerry Campaign, the Democratic National Committee, 18 U.S. Democrat Senators and several "Old Media" national news organizations launched an all out, concerted effort to have the documentary censored from the airwaves and banned from being shown even in privately owned theaters.

Eventually, however, "Stolen Honor" was seen by millions of Americans in the closing days of the election when it was made available for free on the website www.stolenhonor.com

Frustrated by the political Left's determination to silence them, and concerned about the public's lack of understanding about Vietnam history and those who fought in that war (most Americans alive today were not born before 1972), the POWs hope to provide a counter-balance to the propaganda that still permeates the media and public education today.

For example, contrary to the assertions of Cronkite and others in the mainstream press, the American military had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon, much less losing the war. The last American combat unit left Vietnam in August 1972, nearly three years before the 1975 Communist invasion. The U.S. military remained undefeated in battle throughout the Vietnam War.

Instead, it was Congress or, more specifically, the nearly two to one Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam. Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "reeducation" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army.

There's another little known fact.

Several months after the last U.S. ground combat forces left Vietnam in 1972, the North Vietnamese Communists and the Vietcong signed the Paris Peace Accords, promising, among other things, to cease all hostilities and to NOT invade South Vietnam, much less conquer it, as they did in 1975.

Then, or now, 30 years later, rarely is there ever a mention of this diplomatic treachery. Broken treaties, even ones for which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, apparently aren't worthy of mention in the evening news, certainly not in history text books, at least not when it comes to Vietnam.

As for the popularity of the war, among Walter Cronkite's friends and colleagues in the "Old Media" and the anti-war community, the war became "unpopular" in 1968, immediately after Democrat President Johnson announced he would not seek a second term and Republican Richard Nixon, who vowed to "bring peace with honor" to Vietnam, was elected. For his efforts to withdraw American troops, eliminating the draft in the process, Nixon was rewarded with a landslide reelection victory in 1972 (521 to 17 electoral votes), burying his liberal Democrat opponent Sen. George McGovern who advocated a "cut and run" policy, a complete and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.

If the only accurate polls are those taken in the voting booth, Nixon's lopsided reelection victory (46 to 28 million votes) clearly demonstrated an overwhelming majority of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam at least through 1972, probably much longer. Media polls taken prior to the November 1972 election somehow missed tens of millions of Americans who supported the Nixon Administration's war policies -- the so-called "Silent Majority" -- much as last year's media exit polls apparently failed to count a majority of Americans who had just voted to re-elect President Bush.

Those are but a few Vietnam myths spawned by political propagandists and the mainstream media, ones the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation hopes to dispel. While protecting and preserving the "honor and reputations" of those who served in Vietnam is paramount for the VVLF, their "mission" today is to prevent an inaccurate history of Vietnam to erode U.S. national security. They do not want history to repeat itself, provide "terrorists" a political victory in the Halls of Congress or on the streets of America they could not possibly achieve on the battlefield, much like the Communists did in Vietnam three decades ago. Nor, do they believe the media, academics and show business entertainers should be allowed to go unchallenged when they regurgitate enemy propaganda and advocate the wholesale defeat of the U.S., as John Kerry, Jane Fonda and numerous other Leftists did while Americans were still fighting and dying on Vietnam battlefields and in Communists prison camps.

"The false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security," Foundation chairman Col. Day said. "Radical leftists such as Sen. Kerry and Jane Fonda lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. The goal of the VVLF is to continue the work of countering more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda, and set the record straight."

Reply to Anon

Thu May 05, 2005 18:00

Ah Anon

We gotta you in the vietnam now we getta you in the Iraq, you maka big mistaee cometo fight me in the vietnam against my viet cong gorillas, we beata you good tommy san and we love it hope you neva forget

love you long time GI, cos death is long time to be gone,

Lets Not Get Over It

by Anon

Thu May 05, 2005 17:52

As an American, I wish we had not "gotten over" Vietnam. The lesson of Vietnam was that you can (if you are a powerful imperialist nation) play the bully with a tiny, third world country, and bomb the crap out of it, but occupation is another matter-- your enemies look no different than your friends, and you are just a conspicuous target in an unfamiliar foreign land.

Perhaps if we remembered how badly it ended for us, we would not have repeated the experiment with Iraq.

Of course, the American ruling class learned a different lesson- they made big money on the Vietnam war, used a bunch of working class kids as cannon fodder, and sent a strong message to the rest of southeast Asia that they better all be submissive to global capitalism, or else!

And yes, the author of the parent article is just a right-wing propagandist. Even Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, now acknowledges that it was a civil war in which the US had not business interfering.

you lost, get over it

by philbo

Thu May 05, 2005 14:00

There's no point calling people names just cos they took their country back from your murderous carpet bombing lunatics.

do you know the 5 finger star punch of Dong-Hoi?

by raspberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrries!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wed May 04, 2005 23:54

Ho Chi Minh. inspiration to millions.

raspberries!

by -

Wed May 04, 2005 23:49

you Americans were beaten soundly by a dishwasher.

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69631

I took the bother of getting my text and commentary rants in - on the actual anniversary

by .:.5º

Wed May 04, 2005 23:48

complete with photos.
make good T shirts.
It is quite concievable that the best ideals of the American constitution have already been defeated by forces within, and that defeat without will help the poor americans adjust to their proper place in a equal world. Thats how ending hegomany is supposed to seem, watching it happen though is something else because it will take another generation to grow up completely with "multi-polar geo-political viewpoints and prejudices" to just ignore them. Raspberries too you, I'm a european, i eat mayonaise on my chips.

america's fifth column is getting mighty big

by eeekkkk

Wed May 04, 2005 19:37

Fifty-seven percent of Americans now say that the war in Iraq was "not worth it," according to a new USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, up from 50 percent in early February.

A War Of Liberation From Colonialism

by IIB Team - IrishinBritain.com

Wed May 04, 2005 18:39

team at irishinbritain dot com

The Vietnam War was NOT, as this article states, a war of communist aggression. It was a war of NATIONAL LIBERATION against Colonialism. Does the author really believe that The French should have been left in Control in Vietnam? Does he not realise that there was really no "South" Vietnam - just one Vietnamese nation that wanted freedom and autonomy?

This article is another example of the kind of right-wing baloney that is currently so popular in the US - revisionist rot.

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Vietnam and Iraq. History repeated.

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