Liberal myths about the Vietnam War

Liberal myths about the Vietnam War

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/hutchison/090710

July 10, 2009
By Fred Hutchison

Columnist Bob Herbert has historical amnesia about the Vietnam war
but has total recall about the liberal myths of the anti-war
movement. The central theme of his essay of 6/08/09
[ After the War Was Over
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07herbert.html ]
was that it was the Vietnam war was unwinnable and therefore a
pointless waste of lives. It was not unwinnable but it lasted much
longer than it should have because of the Johnson ­ Mc Namera rules
of engagement and the micro-management of the war.

The Nixon-Kissinger team went China to give China what they wanted,
namely prestige and world celebrity. In return, China agreed to allow
America to bomb North Vietnam aggressively, with a Chinese promise
not to come into the war as they did in Korea.

Contrary to liberal myths, this bombing was very effective because it
brought the North Vietnamese to the Paris Peace Talks (1973). The
result was stalemate similar to the Korean War. In order to ensure
that North Vietnam did not renege on the agreement, it was necessary
to keep some American troops in Vietnam, give aid to South Vietnam
and to retain the option of bombing. This was a win in terms of our
goal to prevent the spread of Communism in South East Asia.

When Nixon was in Paris, enjoying the crowning triumph of his career,
The Watergate burglars were captured. In the process of his downfall,
the rage of the Democratic congress against Nixon reach a fever
pitch. In this environment, the angry democrats in Congress were
ready to swallow the all the myths of the antiwar movement. They cut
off funds for the war, pulled out the troops and banned bombing.

Historically, a blood purge follows the violent take-over of power by
Communists of the Marxist- Leninist brand. The blood purge in
Cambodia in involved in the murder of an estimated 2,000,000 people.
3,500,000 or one tenth of the men, women and children of South
Vietnam died from political violence after the war and one third of
these, or 1,250,000 were murdered. Bob Herbert puts the number at 2
or 3 million, not mentioning that most of these deaths were murders
of communist blood purge and not civilian casualties of American
military operations. As a lefty, he wants to cover up the communist
blood purge and make America look bad.

The Paris Peace talks should have saved the lives of all those blood
purge victims. The Democratic Congress who threw all those lives
away. They did it willfully even after they had been warned about
blood purges. None of the Democratic congressmen who pulled the
troops out and none of the anti-war leaders have ever apologized for
engineering American defeat or for facilitating the blood purge.

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