Criticizing Bush on Iraq, Kerry draws comparisons with Vietnam ( and my view IMHO )

[MORTARDUDE]

This my opinion only, IMHO, ( please.. no flame attacks ).. as a student of the South-East Asian-debacle, and a very un-willing participant, I have read a ton of books, watched all the movies I could find, and talked to many thousands of fellow participants, and those who were directly affected ( and not in the military ) buy a war -- ( run and cynically-extendedby using "a bewildering-array-of-politically-motivated- "rules-of-engagement" for big-business-interests ( a ruthless-Democratic Party President..lest we forget - LBJ - who murdered JFK, who had signed, a few days before his death, a Presidental Executive Order to withdraw our forces from Vietnam, and the rest of South East Asia....PM me for more info if you are interested... $$$$ )... on both sides, Asian and Caucasian as it were.....I am much more bewildered by it all than when I started..... I am convinced now that unless you were born in the region ( i.e. a bona-fide Asian ), a person from our side of the world will never be able to fully comprehend the struggle..I still enjoy the study though...as anyone with a cursory interest knows..the war proper is generally acepted as being from 1945 - 1975, or the 10,000 Day War..( even this analysis conveniently overlooks the large-scale-industrial-strength-carnage ( for the small period of time, it is every bit as brutal and astounding as anything done in Europe and Asia from 1930 -1946 )...but which, for the most part, has been ignored-large-scale by the liberal-news-media-elite ( who were in LBJ's corner at the beginning in 1964... and also many of which held high-level positions in his corrupt administration..i.e. Bill Moyers, Pierre Salinger, etc. ) that ensued in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1975 - to the present day ( 2003...ask the Montanyards, and all the other indigenous tribes in Vietnam as they are slowly-exterminated... ).. in point of fact..if the long view is used, it has actually been going on continuously for well over 2,500+ years...but that is a whole 'nother story.. there were also the ensuing border skirmishes and invasions by Red China, Vietnam ( unified ), Cambodia, and Laos from 1976 -1992 (Mayaquez incident ).....etc..

short-story long :

For someone who was on the ground there ( Kerry ), highly decorated, and who was a leader in the "anti-war" movement, when he got back to the States, to draw any conclusions in a war that the USA has been involved in cobat with the grunts ( 100+ hours in 1991 and 4 months in 2003 ) on the ground only a very short time even counting 1991 and 2003 together, and in a country ( Iraq ) who was our ally ( and received many multi-billions of dollars in economic and military aid from the self same "military-industrial" complex, (that General and President Eisenhower so eloquently warned us about..) against Iran ( remember the 1979 American Embassy and horribly-bungled-"rescue-operation" by Jimmy Carter ?? ) up until the late 1980s...is patently-absurd, stupid, short-sighted, and a cynical self-serving-political-maneuver, and which also,i n the short-run, will cause our troops even more grief, and yes, horrible-deaths, as the drip-drip-drip- of the "low-intensity-conflict continues...driven by the leftist-global-news-media's-insatiable desire to see the USA fail miserably in everything it does, everday... and encouraging the criminal-rebel element in Iraq to continue.....

IMHO

Larry

DEO VINDICE




http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/...raq/index.html
Criticizing Bush on Iraq, Kerry draws comparisons with Vietnam
Massachusetts Democrat served in Vietnam
By John Mercurio
CNN Political Unit
Monday, July 21, 2003 Posted: 4:43 PM EDT (2043 GMT)

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Drawing comparisons with the Vietnam war, Sen. John Kerry said Monday the Bush administration is letting "false pride" cloud its judgment in Iraq and interfere with efforts to seek international help rebuilding the war-torn country.

The Massachusetts Democrat, a presidential candidate and Vietnam war hero who has voiced increasing skepticism over Bush's leadership on post-war Iraq, said his "blood boiled over" when he read reports over the weekend that administration officials suggested they would be "humiliated" to return to the United Nations for help in post-war Iraq.

"You don't make a decision about protecting your own troops and winning your objectives based on false pride," Kerry said during a conference call with reporters, scheduled shortly before he boarded a plane from San Francisco to Washington.

"Half the names on the Vietnam Wall date from the time that that type of pride began to cloud the decisions in Vietnam. I refuse to believe that the morale and safety of the troops is helped by inserting hubris in this process now."

Democrats have started to aggressively criticize Bush's leadership in Iraq following White House acknowledgments that some of its pre-war intelligence was flawed.

But Kerry, noting that the search for weapons of mass destruction still could yield results "as early as tomorrow," focused on minimizing additional U.S. deaths and rebuilding post-war Iraq by "internationalizing" the process.

The four-term senator urged the administration to put aside "hubris" and form an international coalition to rebuild Iraq. He said the United States should rely more heavily on Pakistan and other Muslim nations that enjoy more credibility than U.S. troops on the streets of Baghdad.

"I feel this passionately. I feel this very strongly. You can't look a mother or father in the eye when their son or daughter is lost, and tell them you did everything possible to protect them unless you're taking those kinds of steps," Kerry said.

"There are 147,00 American troops in Iraq, compared to about 13,000 non-American troops," Kerry said. "The whole world has an interest in a peaceful Middle East, and the whole world has a stake in our winning the peace."

"This administration did not have a sufficient plan -- they didn't have any plan -- for how to secure nuclear facilities, for how to secure Baghdad, for how to wind up winning the peace," Kerry said.

"I regret that we have to be chiming in from the sidelines to get the administration to do what's right. But lives are at stake. We need to internationalize this. We need to do it now, and we need to do it openly and we need to do it in order to defuse the sense of occupation and protect the troops."