Bits and Pieces

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Lubbock Left

"Wow!
I never thought I would live to see the day when more Lubbockites participated in the Democratic Primary than in the Republican Primary in the second most conservative city in the USA. Let’s hope the trend continues through election day (where, for once, the Democratic precinct conventions will get the nice big rooms in the voting locations!).
This is an exciting time to be a Democrat!"

Tom Hayden returns to Vietnam

As I walked through the busy Christmas streets, however, I was gripped by the question of why the Vietnam War was necessary in the first place. Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the country's still-undefeated Communist Party? The whole wretched American rationale for the war, that Vietnam was a dangerous domino, a pawn in the cold war, seemed so painfully wrong. Was there any connection between destroying so much life and causing the Vietnamese to go Christmas shopping? Would the same outcome--a one-party socialist government leading a market economy--have occurred in any event, without the destruction? Now that US naval ships were paying peaceful visits to Da Nang, this question nagged at me: is it possible that Marxism and nationalism won the war but capitalism and nationalism have won the peace?

Just Another day in Iraq

5 US Troops Killed;
25 Dead, 70 Wounded in Violence;
Turkey Bombs Iraq

Bush's Vietnam Field trip

Olbermann's special comment on Bush's trip to Vietnam:

Full Article

EXCERPTS:

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again. And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns. But most importantly — important beyond measure — his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.
“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.
Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq. Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

The primary one — which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy — is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep. The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”
Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush — which somebody should’ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq — is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

(...)

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you. “We’ll succeed unless we quit.”
No, sir.
We will succeed against terrorism, for our country’s needs, toward binding up the nation’s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.
And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow. And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

Full Article

Crooks and Liars has the video up

Other Vietnam-related Insights: Kissinger says Military Victory Not possible

Vietnam Parallels Revisited

from ABC news: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2583579

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2006 — President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
"He could be right," the president said.

The new Neocon Talking Point is now along the lines of : "Okay, we admit it- Yes, Iraq is like Vietnam. But you see, the Tet Offensive wasn't as bad as the Media made it out to be back then..." Now they are framing the Tet Offensive as some kind of missed oppurtunity. It's the old "We could have won in Vietnam, you know, uh if we would have stayed the course" argument. Which is absolute horseshit. We killed a million people, 58,000 Americans lost their lives and the American people said enough! and we left Vietnam.

And guess what? 30 years later we do business with their communist country just fine. In fact, probably a little too much business with them, as their cheap labor and manufacturing is now being used by U.S. Corporations instead of American labor. Yay Corporate Profits! The Economy is Booming! uh. not.

So, I don't know what kind of Vietnamese-American Utopia those "stay-the-coursers" desire... I mean if we had stayed to kill 2 million Vietnamese and let another 50,000 U.S. troops die in order to defeat North Vietnam would it be our 51st state now? What the hell do they imagine is worth all those lives?

And yes, I realize that Vietnam went to hell even worse when we left and a lot of people lost their lives. But at least it wasn't our troops killing them anymore. We were no longer dropping chemical weapons and carpetbombing the countryside. When we left the Vietnamese to run their own country, free of our "help" - they survived. And Hey! 30 years later- they don't hate us anymore. Even with heartbreaking stories like this as a result of our use of Agent Orange...
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060724roco03

Once again, they try to sell the idea that the continued occupation of Iraq is worth something substantial. They tell us that more dead and maimed US soldiers are just a speedbump to stability. They tell us that more deaths of Iraqis at the hands of American troops is just collateral damage that Iraqis don't care about, because they are used to the violence.

They say if we leave then Iraq will become a hotbed of sectarian violence and fundamentalist sentiment. Well, it has already become that while we are there. Our presence has not prevented that from occurring. So, we are moving into a Tet Offensive stage, our troops are slowly picked off while they police a population that increasingly NOT ONLY HATES THEM- But that OUR TROOPS HATE as well.

The Iraqis will stand up when we leave. The Iraqi ministers are already talking about selling the oil contracts to countries OTHER than America- hence the talk that Bush will simply dismantle the "democracy" that he wrought and render Al-Maliki even more impotent than he currently is.. (Is that Possible?)

It is time to withdraw ALL U.S. Presence out of Iraq. It was a failure. All we can hope for now is that in years to come, with smart diplomacy and economic reparations to Iraq, they can forgive us for what we did to their country.

(as Vietnam has).