Post by Colonel Edmund J. BurkeFinally, do you really believe a 'Nam vet, fresh out the jungle,
would stand to be spit on...? The original post was written by a
moron.
fagvet
http://www.vvawai.org/
You mean straight outa the Killing Fields of Nam, doncha?
No returning Vietnam war veteran was spat upon. That's a convenient
myth for idiot right-wingnuts who cling to the debunked belief that a
lack of public support is what caused the war to be lost. The war was
lost because it was unwinnable from the outset.
The war was lost because the president lied.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/02/vietnam-presidents-lie-to-wage-war-iraq
When presidents lie to make a war
Fifty years on we know the trigger for war with Vietnam was a fiction.
Will it be another 50 before we know the truth about Iraq?
Once there was a president who warned the world about conduct his
government would not tolerate. And when this red line was crossed, or
seemed to be, he took the US to war. Though this might sound like
Americas involvement in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Belgrade, or Libya,
and what may yet become a wider war in Syria, this story began 50 years
ago, on 4 August 1964.
That was when Lyndon Johnson interrupted TV broadcasts shortly before
midnight to announce that two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident> had come under
fire in international waters, and that in response to what the president
described as this unprovoked attack, air action is now in execution
against facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these
hostile operations.
The Americans launched 64 bombing sorties, destroying an oil depot, a
coal mine and a significant portion of the North Vietnamese navy. Three
days later, both houses of Congress passed a joint resolution
authorising the president, as commander-in-chief, to take all necessary
measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the US and to
prevent further aggression. Within three years the US would have
500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. Even today, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
remains the template for presidential war-making.
That 4 August, Daniel Ellsberg was starting work at the Pentagon. A
young mathematician who had served as a captain in the marines, then
gone on to graduate study at Harvard and a job as a civilian analyst for
the Rand Corporation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation>,
where he had helped shape Americas response to the Cuban missile
crisis, Ellsberg was among the first to receive the classified flash
signal from the USS Turner Joy, the destroyer that claimed to be under
attack.
At the time a devout cold warrior, Ellsberg told me his initial reaction
was We must strike back. Yet within a few days, when Johnson repeated
his accusation that the attacks were deliberate. The attacks were
unprovoked, and assured the world that we seek no wider war, Ellsberg
knew all of those statements were false the beginnings of a
disillusion that would eventually lead him to leak the top secret
Pentagon Papers
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/13/pentagon-papers-daniel-ellsberg>
seven years later. What he didnt know, and what remained for decades
one of Americas most tightly guarded secrets, is that the attack on 4
August may never actually have happened.
I recently interviewed Ellsberg for the BBC. His memory of the Gulf of
Tonkin incident was vivid, detailed and totally consistent with the
documents many of them classified top secret which historians have
spent years tracking down. But what struck me most forcefully in talking
to him and to other witnesses and historians about those events were the
remarkable parallels with our world today.
Like Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson was a president who felt the fierce
urgency of now to address the glaring inequalities of American society.
Just a month earlier, with Martin Luther King Jr standing at his side he
had signed the civil rights act, ending racial segregation. And as the
Pulitzer prizewinning historian Frederik Logevall told me, Johnson
apparently said in the spring of 64, I dont think we can win in
Vietnam and I dont think we can get out. You can have all the military
power in the world, but if you cant win the thing politically then
youre not going to succeed.
Reading headlines from Syria, or watching the news from Iraq where an
army which had been trained and equipped at enormous expense simply laid
down their weapons and ran away, abandoning territory that had cost
British and American troops their lives it has been impossible to
resist the sensation, in the words of the great Yankee catcher Yogi
Berra <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/y/yogi_berra.html>,
that this was deja vu all over again. Listening to Obama and David
Cameron respond to the debacle in Iraq, I kept hearing echoes of
President Kennedy declaring in September 1963: I dont think that
unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support
that the war can be won out there.
Thanks to Edward Snowden
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/edward-snowden> and the Guardian we
know a great deal more about how Britain and America view the world
and their own citizens than was even suspected in 1964. But we still
may have to wait decades to find out what George Bush said to Tony Blair
about Iraq, or what Obama told David Cameron about Syria. We can,
however, finally tell the full story of what happened and didnt in
the Gulf of Tonkin.
/War, Lies and Audiotape/ <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04c9lp4>/,
an episode of BBC Radio 4s Archive Hour, will be broadcast on Saturday
1 August at 8pm/
This article was amended on 6 August 2014. An earlier version
described the destroyer Turner Joy as a battleship.