I believe it can be argued that ISIS and the event surrounding that organization has an effect on the US economy – through the price of oil if for no other reason. Also, if a huge war in the Mideast progresses to nuclear weapons, the US economy won’t be in very good shape at all. So there is my reasoning for this link to an article on ISIS.
*** Israeli think tank: Don’t destroy ISIS; it’s a “useful tool” against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria ***
Since Obama has done virtually nothing to harm ISIS – except to slap it around a little when it takes off and attacks the wrong targets – it seems a safe assumption that President Hillary will follow the same path.
What Israel wants is for Syria to be destroyed, then chopped into little pieces so it can’t make a comeback. The US has been encouraging the Kurds to carve out their own chunk of Syria, and now Turkey has invaded from the north with it’s own goals. From the standpoint of the Israel-Firsters, the whole mess can be summed up by a catch-phrase of the actor George Peppard – “I love it when a plan comes together.”
ISIS is almost militarily dead. Saying nothing has been done is a stupid post and ignorant. They will continue to exist as a “marketing model” like Bin Laden’s group, but they are at the point of change.
While reading this this morning … http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/germanys-drag/?_r=1 … I got the idea that a practical way to break up the Euro might be for everybody else to hang on to the Euro but to kick German out (put Germany back on the Mark). That might hold off all the crazy complications of everybody else (or anybody else) getting out of the Euro — while successfuly separating everybody else from Germany’s obsession with everybody else’s hysteria.
I’m reminded of 1958 NY Giant coach Tom Landry’s tactic to defend against Colt HB Lenny Moore — he designed a defense to shut down everything else but Lenny More.
Okay; it’s just a science-fiction economics idea. 🙂
Israel feels the need to zap Syria? Umm. Need 9,000 NATO quality tanks and elite trained crews to invade against Israel’s 3,000. Where do we find such? ??? NATO in the middle of Europe in the middle ’80s: 3,600 German tanks, 3,000 US, 1,000 each France and Britain, 500 Canadian and Benelux. Then, there’s Israel’s 8 boomer subs with at least 10 1,000 mile range nuke missiles each, ICBMs (yes), nuke artillery and old fashioned gravity nukes.
In 1982, Israel v. Syria air war — score: Israel (US made fighters) 90 — Syria (USSR made) 0.
* * * * * * “destroying the VC” in Tet had on the nationalist movement in Indochina
Think battle of Hue: 3,000 civilians and POWs killed and 2,000 more disappeared. According to best book I know Tet succeeded in making the people in the cities hate the Vietcong as much as the people in the country side — allowing the South government to draft twice as many into the army.
All the while the South government armed millions in local defense forces in the countryside. Doesn’t sound like the countryside was rebelling against the government.
Vietnam — North or South — did not win. 3 million killed; maybe twice that many wounded. “Uncle Ho” was no Che Guevara.
40 years after wrecking the North and South to impose communism (read: repressive police state and self-destructive economic mal-system) today’s rulers are still not interested in free elections.
After winning those elections in the North Ho had 50,000 peasants shot and 100,000 interred in the camps — land reform. You were deemed a capitalist exploiter according to some formula about how many pigs you owned, etc. 98% of the peasants in the North owned the land that they tilled (70% in the South) but communists must have their reform.
Ho’s own home province rebelled a year after those elections — put down by an army division, killing 6,000 peasants and wounding who knows. No vote for peasants over whether Ho could take their land away for cooperatives or teach their school children to turn in their parents if they spoke against the government.
When the communists won the South they shot 130,000 — put more in the camps. Two million fled (10% of population) — one million by boat alone. Voting with their feet — reminds of East Berlin before the wall.
Today, 40 years of crackpot communist rule later, progress includes every one light bulb in every hot — as free South East Asia left the wrecked country in their economic dust.
By all means, lets rehash the VN war all over again… maybe we should start with wtf the US was doing there in the first place,… just a suggestion. Or maybe we can start with the Lenin’s concepts, or Mao’s or European colonial rule in South East Asia (French Indo-China), or even why Japan decided to try to take over China and South East Asia, much less the rest of the Pacific, which is how the French colonials were pushed out in the first place.
P.S. The North Vietnamese communists kicked out the capital owners controlled gov’t of South Vietnam….. they won. Sounds like some still have a hard time swallowing a US defeat.
If you start with the separation of Vietnam to North & South after their civil war (and French loss in May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, AFTER they had agreed to complete withdrawel) then ….
The Agreements [Geneva Conference, 1954] mandated unification [North & South Vietnam] on the basis of internationally supervised free elections to be held in July 1956.
It was at this conference [in 1954] that France relinquished any claim to territory in the Indochinese peninsula. The United States and South Vietnam rejected the Geneva Accords and never signed. South Vietnamese leader Diem rejected the idea of nationwide election as proposed in the agreement, saying that a free election was impossible in the communist North and that his government was not bound by the Geneva Accords. France did withdraw, turning the north over to the Communists while the Bao Dai regime, with American support, kept control of the South.
Let me go back a bit… right after the onset of US troops entering Korean War, June 30, 1950.
The French had been attempting to militarily reoccupy and reestablish their colonial rule in French Indo-China since after the Japanese were defeated in 1945. Colonialism wasn’t dead yet.
July 26, 1950 – Truman authorizes $15 million in military aid to the French in Vietnam. Of course military “advisors” accompany the flow of tanks, planes, artillery, etc. to the French in Vietnam.
Sept 27, 1950 – Truman establishes the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon to aid the French Army.
Jan 20, 1953 – Eisenhower inaugurated president of US. He increased military aid and “advisors” to the French by huge amounts, citing “falling dominoes” as justification on Apr 7, 1954 for funding from congress.
May 7, 1954 – French surrender at Dien Bien Phu and begin withdrawel of all French forces from Vietnam. The US forces remain.
Meanwhile by the French defeat in 1954 the US has spent $3 billion on supplies for the French, constituting 80% of all French military equipment and supplies.
Basically this was a US war (the US MAAG ran it) against the North Vietnamese, for purposes of reestablishing the French colonial rule there, with French forces paid to fight it, while the US forces were in Korea.
You see Thieu (etc.) as John Adams, he was more like Pinochet with US bombers propping him.
While the folks in the north and their allies who avoided the strategic hamlets (modeled on the Brits’ use in the Boer War which Nazis and Stalinists used) would have voted for unification, they put their vote to practice for 21 years and got it.
Longtooth,
Let me upgrade your history a little bit. Vietnam (North and South) was no longer a French colony as of 1949. A 343 page (or something like that) treaty included not trying French nationals in Vietnamese courts. The latter lasted two years.
The treaty was just a political sop for the political home front — sort of like the independence of Ireland continuing Ireland as part of the British Commonwealth was). By 1954, both sides were abrogating the treaty: the Vietnamese because the French had de-linked the Vietnamese Piaster from the French Franc — the French because the Vietnamese were not sharing the port of entry tariffs with Laos and Cambodia (if I remember correctly).
The French army was defending the government of Vietnam from communist guerilla warfare insurgency.
Ilsm,
The folks in the North didn’t escape (Lenin and Mao style) collectivization of their previously privately owned (by them) land. 21 years and 10 million dead or wounded out of a total population of 33 million and they got collectivization and a repressive police state too.
“Ending the U.S. experiment with mass incarceration requires us to focus on state policy because individual states are the most active incarcerating bodies in the nation:”
Just look at the first slide of this PDF (cannot seem to find anything that shows year to year prison population growth in numbers instead of graphs) and tell me again how our mass incarceration problem is solely due to the DNC and/or the Clinton admin.
Ilsm,
You know I just thought of something: I don’t remember seeing any reports of forced collectivization of peasant land in the South — think Anthony Bourdaine episodes just for a for instance.
Maybe after 21 years of war the people of the South were too exhausted to tolerate forced collectivization. If so, it was all for nothing! Millions killed to impose communist ideology — then never imposed anyway.
EMIchael,
I don’t have a link but recently it was going around that incarceration exploded more because prosecutors doubled the number of felony prosecutions for the same arrests than because of the war drugs (bad enough itself). FWIW.
Strangely enough(considering you entire post), the mass incarceration seems to start with the end of the Vietnam War.
“The Bureau of Justice Statistics began tracking the number of incarcerated veterans after the Vietnam War. In 1978, about 24 percent of prisoners were veterans.”
But the actual truth is that there are a lot of reasons for this mass incarceration, and people that want to plat it firmly on one or two bills; one or two congresses; or one Potus (and his wife) are just cherry picking incidents that, while a part, were certainly not even the main reason for mass incarceration.
Denis Drew,
You’re referring to the Bao Dia accords (e.g. Independent Vietnam March 8, 1949). As you know, I’m sure, though this was politically expediency French “puppet” gov’t. This was just an extension of France’s 1946 establishment of the French controlled “Republic of Chochinchina” south of the 18th Parallel? to counter the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. (the independent state of Vietnam declared by Ho Chi Min in 1945).
France was hell bent for leather to re-establish their colonial rule and control in the entirety of VN, though less directly as a colonialist — which had become a pejorative term by that time. So of course they were fighting the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s Vietminh Army — how could they re-establish their virtual colonial rule otherwise?
The VN wars (beginning from ouster of Japan’s occupational control after their defeat in 1945) weren’t about ideologies… they were purely about economic control (as they always are in fact) … either the Vietnamese themselves would control it as an independent state, or the French by re-establishing their control, since Chang Kai-shek didn’t want it. Ho Chi Minh was just the then most powerful force with the Vietminh army because the British, French, and US had supplied him with arms and support during the war to harass the Japanese occupation. The northern Vietnam famine (up to 2 million starved) of ’44/’45 vastly increased the size of the Vietminh and Ho’s influence among the Vietnamese..
Denis Drew — just btw, while I was a member of AFROTC in 1965 I wrote a paper on all this stuff for an AFROTC class (US Military Campaigns was the subject topic….we could pick any as our paper’s topic)… though I’ve had to refresh my memory some. I was well aware of the US involvement in VN (and also btw in Cambodia, illegal involvement) by 1963 — when the US public was virtually totally unaware — by design of the administration. In late ’62 or early ’63 a major portion of the US Army’s helicopter battalion in Fliegerhorst, Germany was suddenly uprooted and sent to Vietnam, via Georgia. I knew many of the officers who were shipped out. A neighbor of mine in Hanau who graduated HS (in 1962) two years before I did had joined the Army (or CIA?) and was killed in action in Cambodia in late 1963 … I knew this because his father was a full bird Colonel who lived in the apt below ours — we knew the family and the kid was a friend of mine. Besides that though there were often reports in the Stars & Stripes newspaper about VN and state-side military deployments to VN. Oh, and my cousin was in the CB’s and did several tours there from early on..
When I returned to the US in mid-’64 I was shocked that nobody had heard of Vietnam in any context of our increasingly military presence there…. some students at Cal Berkeley were making noises (SDS) but that was still way under the radar at the time.
BTW, you might be interested to note that I received an F on my AFROTC paper — it was termed “propaganda” by the light colonel commander of our AFROTC unit, and I was kicked out of AFROTC because of it. I was later reinstated with a A+ on the paper and two promotions by the involvement of an S2 Intelligence officers in Hanau who found out about my “F” and being kicked out of AFROTC from my Dad (a DOD civilian teacher) who was still in Europe.
My point is that most of the peripheral US military in the US and certainly the public in the US were not being kept very informed of what had been going on in Vietnam with US support — 80% of it was US funds and equipment supplied to the French.
Denis Drew,
In 1964 I wrote my AFROTC paper from public information available in the library and from Stars and Stripe’s newspaper articles I’d recalled while I lived in Germany. Most of that library information were books written by French and Vietnamese who had studied and lived in France (and translated to English for English language publications). Some French books (not in English) were also available at that time and I could then read and write French (4 years HS French plus time spent in France) and I used those sources of information as well. But there was damned little (maybe one or two chapters in a couple of books as I recall) that were written by US authors at that time.
Some of those sources of information I used ended up as “references” published in “The Pentagon Papers” years later.
Of course the synopsis of VN is simply that the US fully financed and fought the Vietnamese from 1945 continuously for 25 years until 1972’s withdrawal and ended up having accomplished nothing … we now trade heavily with communist China and Vietnam, with US capital investments that in the end support the communist gov’ts and systems there.
I believe it can be argued that ISIS and the event surrounding that organization has an effect on the US economy – through the price of oil if for no other reason. Also, if a huge war in the Mideast progresses to nuclear weapons, the US economy won’t be in very good shape at all. So there is my reasoning for this link to an article on ISIS.
*** Israeli think tank: Don’t destroy ISIS; it’s a “useful tool” against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria ***
Since Obama has done virtually nothing to harm ISIS – except to slap it around a little when it takes off and attacks the wrong targets – it seems a safe assumption that President Hillary will follow the same path.
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/23/israeli-think-tank-dont-destroy-isis-its-a-useful-tool-against-iran-hezbollah-syria/
What Israel wants is for Syria to be destroyed, then chopped into little pieces so it can’t make a comeback. The US has been encouraging the Kurds to carve out their own chunk of Syria, and now Turkey has invaded from the north with it’s own goals. From the standpoint of the Israel-Firsters, the whole mess can be summed up by a catch-phrase of the actor George Peppard – “I love it when a plan comes together.”
ISIS is almost militarily dead. Saying nothing has been done is a stupid post and ignorant. They will continue to exist as a “marketing model” like Bin Laden’s group, but they are at the point of change.
*** Saying nothing has been done is a stupid post and ignorant. ***
I agree that anybody who said that would be making a stupid post, and they’d likely be ignorant as well.
“Since Obama has done virtually nothing to harm ISIS ”
So your claim is that by adding the word ‘virtually’ you have proven NOT to be stupid and ignorant?
You are making that one word work like a rented mule.
*** Israeli think tank: Don’t destroy ISIS; it’s a “useful tool” against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria ***
Destroying or otherwise toying with ISIS is irrelevant. ISIS is one of hundreds of al Qaida/Sunni off shoots, it will be replaced.
Think what effect “destroying the VC” in Tet had on the nationalist movement in Indochina!
The Israeli quote is precise: Israel sees Iran and Shi’a the main threat. They see Sunni extremism as the ‘enemy of the bigger enemy’.
Regime change in Syria is a tool to keep the Golan Heights and buy Israeli ‘security’ with huge amount of suffering by Muslims.
US operations against ISIS are profitable, make exciting film at 6:30 and are even more meaningless than Vietnam bombing.
While reading this this morning … http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/germanys-drag/?_r=1 … I got the idea that a practical way to break up the Euro might be for everybody else to hang on to the Euro but to kick German out (put Germany back on the Mark). That might hold off all the crazy complications of everybody else (or anybody else) getting out of the Euro — while successfuly separating everybody else from Germany’s obsession with everybody else’s hysteria.
I’m reminded of 1958 NY Giant coach Tom Landry’s tactic to defend against Colt HB Lenny Moore — he designed a defense to shut down everything else but Lenny More.
Okay; it’s just a science-fiction economics idea. 🙂
“israeli think tank”
some new wunderwaffen?
Israel feels the need to zap Syria? Umm. Need 9,000 NATO quality tanks and elite trained crews to invade against Israel’s 3,000. Where do we find such? ??? NATO in the middle of Europe in the middle ’80s: 3,600 German tanks, 3,000 US, 1,000 each France and Britain, 500 Canadian and Benelux. Then, there’s Israel’s 8 boomer subs with at least 10 1,000 mile range nuke missiles each, ICBMs (yes), nuke artillery and old fashioned gravity nukes.
In 1982, Israel v. Syria air war — score: Israel (US made fighters) 90 — Syria (USSR made) 0.
* * * * * *
“destroying the VC” in Tet had on the nationalist movement in Indochina
Think battle of Hue: 3,000 civilians and POWs killed and 2,000 more disappeared. According to best book I know Tet succeeded in making the people in the cities hate the Vietcong as much as the people in the country side — allowing the South government to draft twice as many into the army.
All the while the South government armed millions in local defense forces in the countryside. Doesn’t sound like the countryside was rebelling against the government.
*** Israel feels the need to zap Syria? ***
Not just Syria. I believe it’s called The Yinon Plan.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/The%20Zionist%20Plan%20for%20the%20Middle%20East.pdf
Having the heavy lifting done by somebody else is always nice.
Donald Trump’s medical letter has so many things wrong with it
Jennifer Gunter, MD | Physician | August 25, 2016
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2016/08/donald-trumps-medical-letter-many-things-wrong.html
*** Donald Trump’s medical letter has so many things wrong with it ***
It’s even worse than your link says. The fellow admits to just dashing it off.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/27/the-strange-tale-of-donald-trumps-doctor-letter-just-got-stranger/
Both candidates ought to submit to a full physical exam, with the important results made public.
As if anybody needs more evidence Obama is not any kind of ‘progressive’, here is a headline I just read.
*** Fox, Meet Henhouse: FDA Says Food Makers Can Decide Which Food Additives Are Safe ***
This is his FDA same as it was his State Department when Hillary was running amok there. He is the same POTUS who is desperate to pass the vile TPP.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nancyhuehnergarth/2016/08/15/fox-meet-henhouse-fda-says-food-makers-can-decide-which-food-additives-are-safe/print/
Denis,
I don’t know what you read, I do know who won. It was the less crooked side.
While reports of VC atrocities exist, US bombing cause enough collateral damage in both sectors.
The root is US refused elections for the whole country as established in Geneva.
My observation from reading dissenters and a fellow who did 2 tours “advising” US was sponsoring the much less popular front.
The official reporting was skewed to show success and keep the funds rolling in.
All those arms went black market to drug cartels in Burma, skim to the RVN.
RVN conscripts!
Vietnam — North or South — did not win. 3 million killed; maybe twice that many wounded. “Uncle Ho” was no Che Guevara.
40 years after wrecking the North and South to impose communism (read: repressive police state and self-destructive economic mal-system) today’s rulers are still not interested in free elections.
After winning those elections in the North Ho had 50,000 peasants shot and 100,000 interred in the camps — land reform. You were deemed a capitalist exploiter according to some formula about how many pigs you owned, etc. 98% of the peasants in the North owned the land that they tilled (70% in the South) but communists must have their reform.
Ho’s own home province rebelled a year after those elections — put down by an army division, killing 6,000 peasants and wounding who knows. No vote for peasants over whether Ho could take their land away for cooperatives or teach their school children to turn in their parents if they spoke against the government.
When the communists won the South they shot 130,000 — put more in the camps. Two million fled (10% of population) — one million by boat alone. Voting with their feet — reminds of East Berlin before the wall.
Today, 40 years of crackpot communist rule later, progress includes every one light bulb in every hot — as free South East Asia left the wrecked country in their economic dust.
PS. Millions were killed in Korea too.
By all means, lets rehash the VN war all over again… maybe we should start with wtf the US was doing there in the first place,… just a suggestion. Or maybe we can start with the Lenin’s concepts, or Mao’s or European colonial rule in South East Asia (French Indo-China), or even why Japan decided to try to take over China and South East Asia, much less the rest of the Pacific, which is how the French colonials were pushed out in the first place.
P.S. The North Vietnamese communists kicked out the capital owners controlled gov’t of South Vietnam….. they won. Sounds like some still have a hard time swallowing a US defeat.
If you start with the separation of Vietnam to North & South after their civil war (and French loss in May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, AFTER they had agreed to complete withdrawel) then ….
The Agreements [Geneva Conference, 1954] mandated unification [North & South Vietnam] on the basis of internationally supervised free elections to be held in July 1956.
It was at this conference [in 1954] that France relinquished any claim to territory in the Indochinese peninsula. The United States and South Vietnam rejected the Geneva Accords and never signed. South Vietnamese leader Diem rejected the idea of nationwide election as proposed in the agreement, saying that a free election was impossible in the communist North and that his government was not bound by the Geneva Accords. France did withdraw, turning the north over to the Communists while the Bao Dai regime, with American support, kept control of the South.
Let me go back a bit… right after the onset of US troops entering Korean War, June 30, 1950.
The French had been attempting to militarily reoccupy and reestablish their colonial rule in French Indo-China since after the Japanese were defeated in 1945. Colonialism wasn’t dead yet.
July 26, 1950 – Truman authorizes $15 million in military aid to the French in Vietnam. Of course military “advisors” accompany the flow of tanks, planes, artillery, etc. to the French in Vietnam.
Sept 27, 1950 – Truman establishes the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon to aid the French Army.
Jan 20, 1953 – Eisenhower inaugurated president of US. He increased military aid and “advisors” to the French by huge amounts, citing “falling dominoes” as justification on Apr 7, 1954 for funding from congress.
May 7, 1954 – French surrender at Dien Bien Phu and begin withdrawel of all French forces from Vietnam. The US forces remain.
Meanwhile by the French defeat in 1954 the US has spent $3 billion on supplies for the French, constituting 80% of all French military equipment and supplies.
Basically this was a US war (the US MAAG ran it) against the North Vietnamese, for purposes of reestablishing the French colonial rule there, with French forces paid to fight it, while the US forces were in Korea.
Ref: http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1945.html
Denis,
You see Thieu (etc.) as John Adams, he was more like Pinochet with US bombers propping him.
While the folks in the north and their allies who avoided the strategic hamlets (modeled on the Brits’ use in the Boer War which Nazis and Stalinists used) would have voted for unification, they put their vote to practice for 21 years and got it.
Longtooth,
Let me upgrade your history a little bit. Vietnam (North and South) was no longer a French colony as of 1949. A 343 page (or something like that) treaty included not trying French nationals in Vietnamese courts. The latter lasted two years.
The treaty was just a political sop for the political home front — sort of like the independence of Ireland continuing Ireland as part of the British Commonwealth was). By 1954, both sides were abrogating the treaty: the Vietnamese because the French had de-linked the Vietnamese Piaster from the French Franc — the French because the Vietnamese were not sharing the port of entry tariffs with Laos and Cambodia (if I remember correctly).
The French army was defending the government of Vietnam from communist guerilla warfare insurgency.
Ilsm,
The folks in the North didn’t escape (Lenin and Mao style) collectivization of their previously privately owned (by them) land. 21 years and 10 million dead or wounded out of a total population of 33 million and they got collectivization and a repressive police state too.
“Ending the U.S. experiment with mass incarceration requires us to focus on state policy because individual states are the most active incarcerating bodies in the nation:”
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/overtime.html#driverdata
Just look at the first slide of this PDF (cannot seem to find anything that shows year to year prison population growth in numbers instead of graphs) and tell me again how our mass incarceration problem is solely due to the DNC and/or the Clinton admin.
http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf
Ilsm,
You know I just thought of something: I don’t remember seeing any reports of forced collectivization of peasant land in the South — think Anthony Bourdaine episodes just for a for instance.
Maybe after 21 years of war the people of the South were too exhausted to tolerate forced collectivization. If so, it was all for nothing! Millions killed to impose communist ideology — then never imposed anyway.
EMIchael,
I don’t have a link but recently it was going around that incarceration exploded more because prosecutors doubled the number of felony prosecutions for the same arrests than because of the war drugs (bad enough itself). FWIW.
Strangely enough(considering you entire post), the mass incarceration seems to start with the end of the Vietnam War.
“The Bureau of Justice Statistics began tracking the number of incarcerated veterans after the Vietnam War. In 1978, about 24 percent of prisoners were veterans.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/07/458501774/defying-stereotypes-number-of-incarcerated-veterans-in-u-s-drops
But the actual truth is that there are a lot of reasons for this mass incarceration, and people that want to plat it firmly on one or two bills; one or two congresses; or one Potus (and his wife) are just cherry picking incidents that, while a part, were certainly not even the main reason for mass incarceration.
We were not well liked. Not spit on; but, we were not liked. No one moved a muscle for Vietnam Vets until much later.
Denis Drew,
You’re referring to the Bao Dia accords (e.g. Independent Vietnam March 8, 1949). As you know, I’m sure, though this was politically expediency French “puppet” gov’t. This was just an extension of France’s 1946 establishment of the French controlled “Republic of Chochinchina” south of the 18th Parallel? to counter the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. (the independent state of Vietnam declared by Ho Chi Min in 1945).
France was hell bent for leather to re-establish their colonial rule and control in the entirety of VN, though less directly as a colonialist — which had become a pejorative term by that time. So of course they were fighting the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s Vietminh Army — how could they re-establish their virtual colonial rule otherwise?
The VN wars (beginning from ouster of Japan’s occupational control after their defeat in 1945) weren’t about ideologies… they were purely about economic control (as they always are in fact) … either the Vietnamese themselves would control it as an independent state, or the French by re-establishing their control, since Chang Kai-shek didn’t want it. Ho Chi Minh was just the then most powerful force with the Vietminh army because the British, French, and US had supplied him with arms and support during the war to harass the Japanese occupation. The northern Vietnam famine (up to 2 million starved) of ’44/’45 vastly increased the size of the Vietminh and Ho’s influence among the Vietnamese..
Denis Drew — just btw, while I was a member of AFROTC in 1965 I wrote a paper on all this stuff for an AFROTC class (US Military Campaigns was the subject topic….we could pick any as our paper’s topic)… though I’ve had to refresh my memory some. I was well aware of the US involvement in VN (and also btw in Cambodia, illegal involvement) by 1963 — when the US public was virtually totally unaware — by design of the administration. In late ’62 or early ’63 a major portion of the US Army’s helicopter battalion in Fliegerhorst, Germany was suddenly uprooted and sent to Vietnam, via Georgia. I knew many of the officers who were shipped out. A neighbor of mine in Hanau who graduated HS (in 1962) two years before I did had joined the Army (or CIA?) and was killed in action in Cambodia in late 1963 … I knew this because his father was a full bird Colonel who lived in the apt below ours — we knew the family and the kid was a friend of mine. Besides that though there were often reports in the Stars & Stripes newspaper about VN and state-side military deployments to VN. Oh, and my cousin was in the CB’s and did several tours there from early on..
When I returned to the US in mid-’64 I was shocked that nobody had heard of Vietnam in any context of our increasingly military presence there…. some students at Cal Berkeley were making noises (SDS) but that was still way under the radar at the time.
BTW, you might be interested to note that I received an F on my AFROTC paper — it was termed “propaganda” by the light colonel commander of our AFROTC unit, and I was kicked out of AFROTC because of it. I was later reinstated with a A+ on the paper and two promotions by the involvement of an S2 Intelligence officers in Hanau who found out about my “F” and being kicked out of AFROTC from my Dad (a DOD civilian teacher) who was still in Europe.
My point is that most of the peripheral US military in the US and certainly the public in the US were not being kept very informed of what had been going on in Vietnam with US support — 80% of it was US funds and equipment supplied to the French.
Planes would have been better than two nukes from Dulles.
Denis Drew,
In 1964 I wrote my AFROTC paper from public information available in the library and from Stars and Stripe’s newspaper articles I’d recalled while I lived in Germany. Most of that library information were books written by French and Vietnamese who had studied and lived in France (and translated to English for English language publications). Some French books (not in English) were also available at that time and I could then read and write French (4 years HS French plus time spent in France) and I used those sources of information as well. But there was damned little (maybe one or two chapters in a couple of books as I recall) that were written by US authors at that time.
Some of those sources of information I used ended up as “references” published in “The Pentagon Papers” years later.
Of course the synopsis of VN is simply that the US fully financed and fought the Vietnamese from 1945 continuously for 25 years until 1972’s withdrawal and ended up having accomplished nothing … we now trade heavily with communist China and Vietnam, with US capital investments that in the end support the communist gov’ts and systems there.
Reminds me of Iraq war.
Denis,
Millions killed in Indochina went mostly by US bombing and free fire zones in the 4 countries.
US taught Israel how to weasel word collateral damage for the good of the targets.
Longtooth,
read Once Upon a Distant War by Wm Prochnau. John Paul Vann etc.
I got my copy from a SF officer USMC class of 63 who did two advisor tours.
US was on the wrong side from where he observed.