alt.politics.republicans

And then Bush says: "Whatever your position in that debate (sic), one
unmistakable legacy of Vietnam 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,' 're-education camps' and
'killing fields'."

Don't fall for this crap. Bush is deliberately not telling you the
thruth. The killing fields happened in Cambodia as a direct, blow-back
result of the US invasion of Cambodia. I still remember the speech Nixon
gave one Tuesday night, in which that evil weasel stood there and
declared we were not attacking Cambodia, even as our troops were
invading Cambodia and our B-52s were carpet bombing Cambodia's rice
paddies out of existence. Prior to our invasion of Cambodia, Cambodia
was governed by a monarchy, led by Prince Sihanouk, who steadfastly
refused to let the US bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran through Laos
and Cambodia. He knew his people would not support allowing US
intervention. So what did the US do? We overthrew Sihanouk and installed
a puppet, Lon Nol, who immediately said we could invade his country. At
that time, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was a small, insignificant
crackpot group. After the bombing and invasion, the survivors became the
fanatical Khmer Rouge. The killing fields was a direct blow-back of our
policy. Furthermore, the CIA estimates that about 400,00o people
actually died in the killing fields. Most of the other deaths were
caused by starvation and disease, again a predictable result of our
total destruction of Cambodia's rice-growing capability. Prior to the US
bombing, Cambodia was a rice exporter. After the bombing, Cambodia was a
rice importer, but they didn't have enough.

There were boat people because there was no aid going to Vietnam after
the communists took control. Gee, just like Cuban boat people who left
because we put an economic blockade around Cuba, which, thankfully, the
EU has now broken.

And re-education camps, well, yes. there were re-education camps. But
note: We were so afraid that if Vietnam fell to the communists, the
other countries would fall to communism like dominos. Guess what. Not a
single country fell. Not a single country became communist. Guess what
else. The Vietnamese communists were the ones who threw out Pol Pot in
Cambodia. The Vietnamese communists were the ones who stopped the
killing fields. Not the US. And now look at what has happened. After we
pulled out, Vietnam got its act together and became a respectable nation
state, moving increasingly toward the west politically and economically.
The doomsday predictions didn't happen.

Bush is trying to twist the truth again. Don't fall for it this time.

dangerman wrote:
> 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.