Question about Vitenam vs. Iraq...

[phillybri]

Who said (paraphrasing): "We're fighting in Vietnam so we won't have to fight in San Francisco and Los Angeles..."

I ask this because I hear the "better in Iraq than New York" A LOT nowadays.

Thanks for the help!

[phillybri]

1. Anyone?

???

[leftofthedial]

2. Viet Nam was the exercise of the "Domino Principle"

If we didn't fight Communism in Viet Nam, all of Southeast and then South Asia would fall, one country at a time. Then Australia, then we'd be next. It was a patently absurd idea.

Iraq is different. We aren't even nominally preventing the takeover of a country. (In fact, we likely have escalated the eventual takeover of Iraq by forces in opposition to us.)

It is always a good idea when waging a war, especially an illegal and unpopular war, to play up the potential threat to the "homeland." People aren't too keen on dying for someone else's abstract "rights," so you have to make them feel like they are protecting their own.

[spanone]

10. Bush espoused the domino theory in Iraq

He said that democracy in Iraq would have a domino theory in the mid-east. He probably was referring to the pizza delivery business.

[diamond14]

13. bush regurgitates out of an old 'war-profiteer' textbook....Iraq is

'Vietnam in a microwave'...

many of the Vietnam-war-criminals were absorbed into shrub's staff to make this Iraqmire happen....

stay tuned...if young people don't get up off their couches soon...this Iraqmire WILL get much much much worse....

[diamond14]

3. the entire bush* propaganda and wars exactly copy Vietnam....

that's why so many 'older' people are protesting and actually mentally anguished...because we lived through it all once before, and with bush*, this whole mess WILL get worse...

the pentagoon screamed about 'communism'...that if we didn't fight in Vietnam, 'communism' was going to TAKE OVER THE WHOLE WORLD....that it was much better to fight 'communism' in Vietnam than on the streets of New York....

bush* garbage is just another broken record going around....it's the very same...that's why so many Vietnam Veterans are having flashbacks now...

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT 'YOUNG' PEOPLE DONT'T CARE AND DON'T TRY TO STOP THIS (a few on DU write but rarely DO anything, but I have seen very few young people at all the protests, or activists in any way, and many papers have written about this amazing lack of participation...While we 'flash mobbed' VA offices to demand Veterans get care (see photo below), today's young spend their time 'flash' mobbing Hallmark cards stores and saying mindless words....that's the BIG difference...and the main reason why bush* wars WILL continue........all it takes is 1 % of todays young people and YOU could change this...as it stands now, most college students actually support shrub...if they saw their own peers out there on the streets, they would quickly change...but time runs out...

if not YOU, who?....if not NOW, when?





Vietnam Veterans - the few that made it out and could still walk



New York protestors demanding medical treatment for OUR Veterans who were exposed to 'Agent Orange'...(bush* is exposing OUR troops to Depleted Uranium, but also, burning oil fires, bacteria/fungus never seen in America, pesticides, nitrosoamines, benzene, and much much more..)



Detroit, protest at Veterans Administration Hospital for better medical care



Chicago take-over of Veterans Administration Offices, demanding better care for OUR Veterans...a 1975 Flash Mob....



Cincinatti...just like bush*, government policies were deliberately designed to CREATE UNEMPLOYMENT, so more un-employed would 'volunteer' for Vietnam

[phillybri]

4. Wow...

Thanks for an incredible post...

[KharmaTrain]

15. We're Vietnam Circa 1966 right now

I'm just old enough to remember the phases of Vietnam...

If I'm not mistaken it was only Wayne Morse of Oregon (a Republican) who opposed the Gulf Of Tonkin resolution...similar to chimp's mandate for endless war we now have. Just like then, everyone thought it was the way to save our "way of life"...Terrorism is the new Communism.

Young people were torn with the obligation to serve...especially since most were the sons for WWII vets who fought a noble war and now it was their turn. I vivdly remember the early protests being very isolated (Berkley in specific) and it really didn't spread until the deferment program was changed in late '66.

The real snowball didn't happen until in late '67 and then on to '68...that's 3 years from the first landing of American troops in Na Drang and 4 from the Gulf Of Tonkin resolution. This one won't take as long to play out (we have more media), but there's still many who are stuck on the fence between their inner feelings of how this invasion is wrong and speaking or voting out in fear of being "unpatriotic"

Sadly, it took 500,000 in arms and nearly 30,000 dead before the media and general public began to seriously question the war and put LBJ on the spot about what we were doing there. I pray we don't come close to that scenario here.

[diamond14]

5. Join Vietnam Veterans Against the War...March 20, 2004 Protest

meet a great group of people...American Patriots...March with these HEROS through the streets of America...they'll tell you all about it...


Coming to cities all across America, March 20, 2004
(the ONE year anniversary of bush* Iraqmire)
http://www.vvaw.org/events/

[NewJeffCT]

6. Not sure if that was an exact quote

But, the domino theory was based on what somebody described above in that if we didn't take the fight to the Commies overseas, then we'd eventually have to fight them in SF and LA.

[NewJeffCT]

7. Try Dwight D Eisenhower

in a 1954 press conference...

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/domino.html

Not the exact quote, but he mentions all the Asian nations falling to Communism leading to Australia and New Zealand and then Japan (and then the consequences would be incalculable to the free world)

[diamond14]

12. thanks....posting the whole Eisenhower quote....here.....

Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.

The President.

You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things.

First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.

Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling \cf2 domino\cf0 " principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on.

Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't afford greater losses.

But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.

Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.

It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go -- that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.

So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.

[spindoctor]

8. It was the text of a navy propaganda poster

And I believe it said "Today you're fighting in Saigon so you won't have to fight in San Francisco".

[Damndifino]

9. But where do you hear it?

I hear the "better in Iraq than New York" A LOT nowadays.

Yes, and in the Middle East, more and more people are saying "better in New York than in Iraq (or Iran, or Syria, or Afghanistan)."

[ThomWV]

11. How Can They Say That

How can anyone say better in Iraq than in New York? New York has already been hit.

Thom

[G_j]

14. from Stan Goff

www.counterpunch.com/goff09152003.html

(Stan Goff is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.)


"It was the oil and it is like Vietnam"

<snip>
In Vietnam, there was a huge effort, once the US military was entrenched, to convince the American public that foreigners were the aggressors, and that the resistance to military occupation was not indigenous. But it was. The resistance in Iraqi is indigenous, too. Operations like the ones being conducted by Iraqi guerrillas can not happen without roots in the local populations.

In Vietnam, troop morale plummeted as the lies about the reasons for war became ever more apparent. The morale of the troops in Iraq began to fall as soon as the reality that they weren't liberating anything sank in. Most troops are prepared to face danger and hardship. They just don't like facing them for lies.
<snip>
-----

http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/what/latest.html#openletter031115

An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq, by Stan Goff

Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,

I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you—some more extreme than others—are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.
In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of s**t: s**t from the news media, s**t from movies, s**t about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and s**t from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this s**t was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
...more..
--------------------

[diamond14]

16. thanks Stan....someone had to say it...and I'm glad it was YOU....

thanks to Intervention Magazine
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=598