in a brand new bottle...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Insurgency_Revolution/America_Vietnam_IAR.htmlexcerpted from the book
Intervention and Revolution
The United States in the Third World
by Richard J. Barnet
World Publishing, 1968, paperback editionp205
In Vietnam the U.S. intervention steadily deepened in the 1950s as U.S. officials tried to protect their earlier investments. These investments included not only the vast sums of prior years but also their personal reputations. Men had begun to build careers on a series of claims. Academic advisers had written in journals about the success of the Land Reform or the Education Projects. The volunteer propagandists had gone far out on several limbs in predicting the coming triumph of Diem's democracy.
The military had filled the pages of the military journals with extravagant promises of the successes of "counterinsurgency." Thus they pressed continually for more effort, more commitment, to make these promises come true. They kept demanding just a few more men, just a few more months, in order to postpone the accounting which would measure performance against promise. excerpts from the book
War Made Easy
How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death
by Norman Solomon
John Wiley and Sons, 2005, paper
p39
On April 25, 1972, the White House taping recorded this noontime dialogue among President Nixon, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, and Henry Kissinger
President: "How many did we kill in Laos?"
Ziegler: "Maybe ten thousand-fifteen?"
Kissinger: "In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen. . .
President: "See, the attack in the North that we have in mind... power plants, whatever's left-POL , the docks .... And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?"
Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."
President: "No, no, no... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have ' you got that, Henry?"
Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."
President: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."
Nine days later, while conferring with Kissinger, Al Haig, and John Connally, the president said:
"I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly. I'll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam .... For once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country ... against this shit-ass little country: to win the war...http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Norman_Solomon/War_Made_Easy.html