seattle.politics

torresdD wrote:
> /nol/ ?threadID=7160&&&edition=1&ttl=20070822214113
>
> Bush Iraq speech:
>
> Your reaction President
> George W Bush has warned a
> US withdrawal from Iraq could
> trigger the kind of upheaval seen
> in South East Asia after US forces
> quit Vietnam.
>
> Do you agree?

No. This is Bush's insult of insults. He has twisted history beyond
recognition. It is another attempt to deceive the people. Don't fall for
it. He says:

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into
the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush told members of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

There isn't any debate about that, legitimate or not. There was this
"Domino Theory" that predicted all the nations of southeast Asia would
become communist if we didn't stop communism in Vietnam. France pulled
out of its colony in 1954, because they were defeated by a large
fraction of the Vietnamese people (an insurgency), most of whom were
communists led by Ho Chi Minh. The UN deal in 1954 divided Vietnam into
North and South at the 17th parallel. The communists got the north, and
the French-installed puppet government got the south. The deal called
for elections to be held in 1956 to unify the country. The US didn't
want the elections to happen, because it was clear the people would
choose the communists over the French puppet government. This was during
the McCarthy period in the US, so there was much wailing and gnashing of
teeth about Vietnam going communist.

And there were still a lot of people in the south who supported Ho Chi
Minh (imagine that), and they began agitating and recruiting new members
and generally trying to bring down the government of the south, which
was corrupt anyway. The US began supporting the government of the south
in 1955 with military aid. The 1956 elections never happened, because
the south, backed by the US, refused to participate.

Life for the average Vietnamese was becoming difficult on both sides of
the 17th parallel. Then in 1959, Ho Chi Minh effectively declared war to
reunite the north and south. The US then began sending "military
advisers" to South Vietnam. The government in the south became
increasingly oppressive, using torture and executions, and this violent
oppression drove even more south Vietnamese to support the communists of
the north. The situation was already doomed, but the US was in a state
of abject fear of the domino theory and communists, and so The Secretary
of Defense McNamara recommended to President Kennedy that he send
200,000 combat troops to Vietnam. Kennedy refused, but our non-combat
support of South Vietnam continued to increase, because it was already a
losing situation.

But even then, despite claims that we weren't involved in combat, our
pilots were actually involved in bombing missions. And the people were
already blaming the US for all this, but still we didn't pull out.
Buddhist monks were burning themselves alive in protest against
government oppression, which was severe. These self-immolations were
shown on TV in the US.

And get this. In 1963, the US ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge
sent a message to Washington stating "...there is no possibility, in my
view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration." Diem was the
president of South Vietnam at the time. Replace Diem with Nuri
al-Maliki, and if you still haven't seen the parallel with today's news,
you really are stoopid.

Then the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" occurs. You can read about yourself.
Suffice to say that it was used by the Johnson administration as the
basis to deceive the American people into supporting the invasion of
Vietnam, just like WMD in Iraq were used by the Bush administration to
deceive the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Bush is LYING again to save his blow monkey ass. Don't fall for it.