George W. Bush Latest Fairy Tale.

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August 26, 2007

SouthAmerica: The enclosed article forgot to mention the other books that these historians are also working on such as:

In the new rewrite of history Adolf Hitler is the winner of World War II.
I guess Adolf Hitler would love the new revisionist history which maintains that Germany did not lose the war, but the will to win.

I can’t wait for what these historians have to say about World War I.

The other project that these historians are also working on it will be a blockbuster – on the new version Napoleon defeats the Duke of Wellington in Waterloo.

The French are going to love that.

Anyway in fantasyland anything it is possible – no wonder Hollywood is so successful with its Fairy Tales.

Sorry, not Hollywood, I mean Washington D.C.



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From The Sunday Times - UK
August 26, 2007
“Vietnam historians give Bush reason to stay in Iraq”
Sarah Baxter, Washington

WHEN President George W Bush invoked the memory of Vietnam to justify staying in Iraq, he was drawing on a new wave of revisionist history which maintains that America did not lose the war, but the will to win.

“Three decades later there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam war and how we left,” Bush said in a speech to army veterans last week. White House insiders admitted it was a risky topic which had previously been left to the antiwar movement. Americans generally prefer to forget Indochina and remember who won the cold war.

Yet as the prospect of victory in Iraq has receded, the lessons of Vietnam have provoked intense discussion among historians and in current affairs magazines such as the neo-conservative Weekly Standard.
Bush has been quietly paying attention and had been thinking for months about the right moment to bring Vietnam into the debate, according to a White House official.

In Triumph Forsaken, published last year, the historian Mark Moyar claimed that South Vietnam could have survived had the Americans not acquiesced in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, plunging the country into an “extended period of instability and weakness”.

Moyar is now working on a book about the second half of the war, in which he argues: “In the offensive of 1975, the North Vietnamese are moving around huge conventional forces that would have been pulverised by our air power.” By then, however, Hanoi was well aware that America was turning against the war and doubted that the US military would be able to act decisively.

Supporters of the Iraq war have also been delving into Lewis Sorley’s book, A Better War, which was rereleased in paperback this year. The war, Sorley wrote, “was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and the US Congress”.

The North Vietnamese have given this argument a boost over the years. In an interview after his retirement, Bui Tin, who received the South Vietnamese army’s unconditional surrender in 1975, recalled that visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda, church ministers and other antiwar protesters “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses . . . through dissent and protest [America] lost the ability to mobilise a will to win”.

James Q Wilson, a social scientist who is revered by conservatives, argued in The Wall Street Journal last year:

“Whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle . . . among the people who determine what we read and watch. We are in danger of losing in Iraq . . . in the newspapers, magazines and tele-vision programmes we enjoy.”

Antiwar historians have hit back at Bush’s invocation of Vietnam. “What is Bush saying?” asked Robert Dallek, the biographer of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. “That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense.”

The debate is not just academic for Senator John Warner, former chairman of the Senate armed services committee, who called last week for Bush to begin pulling out 5,000 troops from Iraq by Christmas. The 80-year-old Republican is still haunted by the memory of Vietnam.

“The army generals would come in [and say], ‘Just send in another 5,000 or 10,000’,” Warner recalled. “You know, month after month. Another 10,000 or 15,000. They thought we could win it. We kept surging in those years. It didn’t work . . . You don’t forget something like that.”

Senior generals, including Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and George Casey, the army chief of staff, are believed to support reducing the number of US troops in Iraq to below 100,000 by the end of next year.

Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is also thought to favour the idea of drawing down 3,500 soldiers every other month or so and accelerating the pace after April, when troop shortages will make the surge impossible to sustain at current levels.

However, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is likely to demand more time for the surge to work when he reports to Congress on the progress of the war next month.

Last year, in his previous job as head of the army college at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he made a point of examining the “lessons learnt” from the Vietnam war.

One lesson was that it takes time to “clear and hold” communities and build a political settlement. Major-General Rick Lynch, who is based south of Baghdad, said on Friday that pulling out American troops would allow Sunni and Shi’ite fighters to regroup within 48 hours.

The enemy would start “building the bombs again . . . and we would take a giant step backwards”, he said.

Ultimately, Iraq could experience the maelstrom that overtook Vietnam and Cambodia. “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam,” Bush warned last week, “is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields’.”

A humanitarian disaster on this scale would cast a pall over Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. It may be some comfort to him to imagine that, 30 years on, intellectuals may launch a revisionist movement that would look more kindly on his war record.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2327806.ece


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Omg.

All of this bullcrap, IGNORING the singular fact of the moratorium, on attacking enemy forces in neighbouring countries, re vietnam.

ho chi minh trail, for example....CHINA for example.Russia, even.....
Bush is clutching at straws, as usual, i wonder if this move is actually a "flip the bird" from Rove, giving bad advice just because he didnt get his way, and he knew the bush admin would lap it up as a parting favour from their boy wonder.

 

Hitler did not loose the World War. The main goal was to create the Israel and that was archived.

 

Pfft.. the main goal was the same as for all wars.. to make the international bankers even richer

 

Bush, until the end of his days, will continue to do whatever it takes with his limited intellect to rationalize HIS decision to invade Iraq.

Psychologically, he can't admit to himself that it was a mistake to invade. So he'll do or say anything simply to pass the problem along to the next administration.

The rationale for invading Iraq had no more basis in reality that did Kissinger's "domino" theory for Vietnam.

Had Bush actually served in Vietnam instead of partying his way through the war on his daddy's coattails, he may have learned some valuable lessons that kept us out of Iraq. But he didn't, so history has simply repeated itself.

In both cases, our greatest military and political minds decided to "shoot first, and aim later."

A very, very sad but true picture of the state of our national leadership, and the public that put them in power.

And the very thought that we didn't demonstrate a "will to win" in Vietnam is complete bullshit. I invite anyone to stand in front of the Vietnam memorial in D.C. and tell that to the 50,000 plus dead Americans.

The public was supportive for years of the Vietnam war, and gave the defense establishment cart blanche to bomb the hell out of the place, which it proceeded to do with great enthusiasm.

The result of the war - our clear defeat - had simply to do with the fact that we should not have been there in the first place, and nothing to do with our lack of will to win.

And precisely the same can be said for Iraq, and in the end we will see the same result.

 

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August 26, 2007

SouthAmerica: If you think that the United States was the winner of the Vietnam War then read the following thread:

What the U. S. government does not want Americans to know about the Vietnam War.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=89500


PS: There are two images that I remember very well about the Vietnam War as follows:

First, that picture of a Vietnamese man on his knees and someone takes a gun and put a bullet on the back of the man’s head.

Second, that TV News coverage showing the final American helicopter leaving the rooftop of the American Embassy in Vietnam. (By the way, that was not an exit of a country that just won a war, and since that time that image became the symbol of the United States defeat in Vietnam.)


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