The Ghosts of Viet Nam Haunt a President

[G_j]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_john_kel_051112__3cb_3ethe_ghosts_of_vet.htm

The Ghosts of Viet Nam Haunt a President
A Protester Contemplates Veteran's Day
by John Kelley


http://www.opednews.com

On Veterans Day, George Bush exploited the veterans once again by trying to push forth his agenda for oil, save the rotting legacy of his presidency and blame others for his failed policies. It is an old story that those who were alive during Viet Nam will well remember. Those causing the death of our young men and women and tens of thousands of innocents abroad while proclaiming their patriotism and calling opponents cowards are a common phenomena. My father an 83 year old WWII combat veteran cannot even force himself to watch George Bush on television, turning the channel while shouting “lying bastard” at the disappearing image. He told me he doesn’t know one combat veteran who supports George Bush’s war in Iraq. A retired truck driver, union man, WWII vet, small town councilman, hardly lunatic fringe.

George Bush is like most of his affluent friends during the Viet Nam war who supported the war but didn’t participate. Always someone “lessor” must take their spot on the firing line while they profit from their death. Bush’s behavior and current events in Iraq make necessary a discussion of the revisionist history provided by the Republicans of Viet Nam that they are still using today to try and rally support for their criminal exploitation of the American military.

It is interesting that those supporting George W. Bush say that his service record, or lack of it, is irrelevant to the election but point out the anti-war record of John Kerry after his return from the war. John Kerry’s change from war hero to anti-war activist is understandable when history is remembered as it was, not as the Republicans have revised it for political gain. I have watched for some time the interesting distortion of events that has happened in order to court veterans of the Viet Nam War and to absolve the Republican Party of the death of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese under Richard Nixon. The Republican version goes somewhat like this; the war was a right and justified intervention that was distorted and lost by war protestors in this country who hated veterans and undermined them at home. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is the anti-war movement sprung from young people who saw their brothers and friends being drafted for an illegal and immoral war based on lies. There too the Johnson and then the Nixon Administration lied about the reasons they went to war, repeatedly violated international law to advance an agenda based on a false premises and failed to properly support the young men they sent there. The premise that time was to prevent the scourge of communism. I have to shake my head when I hear the same justification for our war in Iraq. “We have to stop them there or fight them in the street here”. There is no more reason to think that the Iraqi’s posed any danger to the U.S. then North Vietnam was going to invade the U.S.

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[frogbison]

1. 57,000 lost in Vietnam

What a terrible waste. 2,062 in Iraq.

If it is true that three are maimed to one to casualty, then that hurts me more than I can say as well.

"When will we ever learn?"

[TahitiNut]

3. 58,178 US deaths and 304,704 US wounded in action

:cry:

223,748 ARVN deaths and 1,169,763 ARVN wounded in action

:cry:

4,407 ROK deaths and 17,060 ROK wounded in action

:cry:

469 Aussie deaths and 2,940 Aussies wounded in action

:cry:

An estimated 1.1 million NVA/VC deaths

:cry: :cry:

[Octafish]

2. Vietnam was a money maker for the connected scuzzbuckets...

...just like illegal Iraq invasion.

For those new to the subject, here's the hidden history on Vietnam:

In November, 1963, Kennedy wanted the USA out of Vietnam by the end of 1964 and had asked the State Department to start back-channel negotiations with North Vietnam. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith is on record. The paper record (National Security Action Memorandum 263) shows Kennedy ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for the complete withdrawal.

Meanwhile, Kennedy gave the OK for the South Vietnamese military to overthrow the corrupt Diem government. Unbeknownst to JFK, Ambassador at Large Averell Harriman (Prescott Bush business partner in the NAZI dealings) appears to be the US official who gave the go-ahead to kill Diem and his brother.

South Vietnam never recovered from the resulting chaos of the Diem murder. The divided nation could not act in its in its best interest, let alone defend itself militarily.

A few weeks later, Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.

America still hasn't recovered from that treason.

A week later, Lyndon B Johnson signed orders (National Security Action Memorandum 273) countermanding JFK, stating the US would do whatever was required to support the government of South Vietnam in its war with North Vietnam.

The end result was America's longest and most divisive war. One group did benefit. The Vietnam War was most profitable for the ruling elites of the United States -- the same people Harriman and Bush served in World Wars 1 and 2, as well as in the Cold War.

[SammyWinstonJack]

11. BFEE has their evil hands in everything. Who really was behind the JFK

murder? The Bush Family, a VERY Un American family.

[Octafish]

13. Poppy told FBI he was in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

Here it is, an official FBI memo in which George Herbert Walker Bush reported he heard a man threaten to kill President Kennedy. The FBI reports Bush called an hour after the President was murdered. I'd like to see a Federal Grand Jury ask him why he didn't report this before the assassination.



SOURCE: http://www.internetpirate.com/bush.htm

[G_j]

4. "search and destroy"

From Vietnam to Fallujah

by Fran Schor September 13, 2004

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=6217

<snip>
For those who have studied the historical record of the US prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia, neither the Republicans nor Democrats have confronted the full measure of those atrocities and what their legacy is especially in the war on Iraq. While most studies of the war in Southeast Asia acknowledge that 4 times the tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than that used by the US in all theaters of operation during World War II, only a few, such as James William Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, analyze the full extent of such bombing. Not only were thousands of villages in Vietnam totally destroyed, but massive civilian deaths, numbering close to 3 million, resulted in large part from such indiscriminate bombing. Integral to the bombing strategy was the use of weapons that violated international law, such as napalm and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. As a result of establishing free-fire zones where anything and everything could be attacked, including hospitals, US military operations led to the deliberate murder of mostly civilians.

While Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have touted the "clean" weapons used in Iraq, the fact is that aerial cluster bombs and free-fire zones have continued to be part of present day military operations. Villages throughout Iraq, from Hilla to Fallujah, have borne and are bearing US attacks that take a heavy civilian toll. Occasionally, criticisms of the type of ordnance used in Iraq found its way into the mainstream press, especially when left-over cluster bomblets looking like yellow food packages blow up in children's hands or depleted uranium weapons are dropped inadvertently on British soldiers. However, questions about the immorality of "shock and awe" bombing strategy have been buried deeper than any of the cluster bomblets.

In Vietnam, a primary ground war tactic was the "search and destroy" mission with its over-inflated body counts. As Christian Appy forcefully demonstrated in Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, such tactics were guaranteed to produce atrocities. Any revealing personal account of the war in Vietnam, such as Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, underscores how those atrocities took their toll on civilians and US soldiers, like Kovic. Of course, certain high-profile atrocities, such as My Lai, achieved prominent media coverage (almost, however, a year after the incident.) Nonetheless, My Lai was seen either as an aberration and not part of murderous campaigns such as the Phoenix program with its thousands of assassinations or a result of a few bad apples, like a Lt. Calley, who nonetheless received minor punishment for his command of the massacre of hundreds of women and children. Moreover, as reported in Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture, "65% of Americans claimed not to be upset by the massacre" (224). Is it, therefore, not surprising that Noam Chomsky asserted during this period that the US had to undergo some sort of de- nazification in order to regain some moral sensitivity to what US war policy had produced in Vietnam



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[leftchick]

5. thank you G j

great articles! :hi:

[G_j]

6. thanks.. you know, I was wondering

how will we ever get today's war crimes acknowledged when we still won't acknowledge those from the Vietnam war. Talk about "rewriting history"!

[leftchick]

7. we probably won't...

:(

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

8. Killing for "stability", "democracy", and "peace".

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

"We are fighting for freedom."

Why is it that nobody ever says, "We are killing for freedom."? Or, "We are killing for our country."?

I prefer Gandhi.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy.” - Gandhi

[G_j]

9. a great quote

from Gandhi! sadly, all too true

[Faygo Kid]

10. Bush is "haunted" by nothing, except his pulse rate.

To think he could comprehend the subtleties expressed here is really pushing it. He had no clue then; he has none now.

[democrank]

12. Folks who weren`t around during

the Vietnam War might not fully understand the extent to which the "haves" were saved and the "have-nots" were sacrificed. It was no accident that Junior Bush was kept safe because of his father`s nod.

I can not even put into words the disgust I feel whenever I see Bush playing fake soldier hero. He`s an AWOL POS whose connections to the powerful kept his name off The Wall, unlike several friends of mine whose last name meant only one thing....cannon fodder.

[callady]

14. how Many Died In Iraq? In Viet Nam

Iraq-Including 13 Years worth of sanctions? 2 million easily.
Viet Nam- 2 to 3 million. Rice Fields still contaminated with agents white and blue






 In 1945, Vietnam was still a colony of the French. Laurence Rockefeller, it appears, had given the extensive store of weapons to Ho Chi Minh with the hope that Vietnam would drive out the French so that Standard Oil would be able to take over the as yet undeveloped offshore fields. In 1954, Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and drove out the French at Dien Bien Phu with weaponry provided by the U.S. However, Ho Chi Minh reneged on the deal since he could read too, and he was well aware of the Hoover resource report and knew there was a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast.

"In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was perfected which used small explosions deep in the water and then recorded the sound echoes bouncing off the various layers of rock below. The surveyor could then determine the exact location of the arched salt domes which hold the accumulated oil beneath them. But if this method were used off the Vietnam coast on property Standard didn't own or have the rights to, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and probably even the French would quickly run to the United Nations and complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would shut down the operation.

"In 1964, after Vietnam was divided into North and South, and the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several U.S. aircraft carriers were stationed offshore of Vietnam and the 'war' was started. Every day jet planes would take off from the carriers, bomb locations in North and South Vietnam, and then using normal military procedure when returning would dump their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing back on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for this purpose away from the carriers.

"Even close-up observers would only notice many small explosions occurring daily in the waters of the South China Sea and thought it was only part of the 'war.' The U.S. Navy carriers had begun Operation Linebacker One, and Standard Oil had begun its ten year oil survey of the seabed off of Vietnam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody else around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the U.S. taxpayers paid for it."

Marshall Douglas Smith. (2001). Black Gold Hot Gold, Ch. 3

http://www.new-enlightenment.com/impintro1.htm