Two interesting articles from TIA Daily. In Kerry’s Deepest Loyalty: Can an Opponent of American Military Force Honestly Run for Commander-in-Chief?:, Jack Wakeland presents an excellent analysis of why America failed in Vietnam and how Kerry and the Anti-American Left capitalized upon “the war strategy originated by the Johnson administration”:
President Lyndon Johnson and his administration had not wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam into a direct confrontation with China, as had happened in Korea. China had the atomic bomb, and Mao was in the midst of a totalitarian killing spree he called “The Cultural Revolution.” So the Johnson Administration attempted to fight the Vietcong insurgents and the North Vietnamese Army only where they operated south of the DMZ–making a sanctuary of the North and of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The Johnson Administration soon found that the scale of the limited war they had planned wasn’t very limited after all. American forces fought in a heavily vegetated country of 60 million people against an enemy who dispersed its forces and tunneled to escape American firepower, did not observe any laws of war, and was supplied with a never-ending stream of Soviet and Chinese material….
Doesn’t this sound similar to the insurgents in Iraq who shoot at Americans and then flee to the safety and sanctuary of Mosques and the terrorists who enter from and flee to Iran?
…Americans fought and died, while their leaders carefully avoided actions that would end the enemy’s capacity to continue the fight. American bodies were being shipped back to the United States at a rates approaching 600 per week. Nixon played out Johnson’s no-win scenario, week after bloody week. Did John Kerry and the New Left’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War choose to denounce, as the moral corruption of America’s war effort, a defeated White House and a never-ending stream of body bags? No. They chose to denounce a package deal.
From 1971 forward, resistance to Communist aggression was equated with the senseless sacrifice of American lives. This conformed to the New Left’s idea that it was morally wrong to impose America’s “colonial” designs for a capitalist world on “indigenous” peoples who actually wanted Communism, the true moral social system. And if it was wrong to oppose popular aspirations for Communism in the Third World, any such effort had to also be impractical, futile, doomed to failure…
Doesn’t this sound like today’s multilateralists who claim that if the majority of people in Iraq want to establish a U.N. approved theocratic dictatorship in Iraq on the Iraniam model who is the U.S. to disapprove of the will of the majority?
…John Kerry was the public face of a movement that converted broad based, rational public support for ending what had become the purposeless loss of American life–into a campaign to undermine the defense of liberty against Communism throughout the world.
Gene Barth’s sums up Kerry’s nature in an excellent piece on Kerry’s Real Vietnam Record:
Kerry’s record as a Vietnam War protester is not history; it is consistent with his record and policies in the more than three decades since. As commander-in-chief of the US in its war against militant Islam, President Kerry would exert himself fully against what he has always believed is the greatest evil threatening the world–a self-confident United States, triumphant in its freedom and prosperity, reaching out to aggressively engage and strike down its mortal enemies. [Kerry’s Real Vietnam Record: Kerry Has Spread False Fears of American Military Assertiveness, TIA Daily]