Vietnam Déjà Vu
http://lewrockwell.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6ad24f4cd1574f1f7b8a0a03a&id=d9d4fa4736&e=ac767b1a94

Much of America, including yours truly, has been watching the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, ‘Vietnam.’ Instead of clarifying that confusing conflict, the series has ignited fiery controversy and a lot of long-repressed anger by soft-soaping Washington’s motives.

This march to folly in Vietnam is particularly painful for me since I enlisted in the US army at the height of the war. Gripped by youthful patriotism, I strongly supported the war. In fact, the TV series even showed a pro-war march down New York’s Fifth Avenue that I had joined. Talk about déjà vu.

At the time, 1967, the Cold War was at full force. We really believed that if the US did not make a stand in Vietnam the Soviets and Chinese would overrun all of South Asia.

No one in Washington seemed to know that China and the Soviet Union had split and become bitter enemies. As ever, our foreign human intelligence was lousy. We didn’t understand that Vietnam deserved independence after a century of French colonialism. Or that what happened in Vietnam was of little importance to the rest of the world.
Three American presidents blundered into this war or prolonged it, then could not back out lest they lose face and risk humiliation. I don’t for a moment believe that the ‘saintly’ President John Kennedy planned to end the war but was assassinated by dark, rightwing forces, as is claimed. This is a charming legend. Richard Nixon, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all feared that a withdrawal from Vietnam would lose them the next election. Republicans were still snarling over ‘who lost China’.

The current 17-year old US war in Afghanistan has uncanny resemblances to the Vietnam War. In Kabul and Saigon, the US installed puppet governments that command no loyalty except from minority groups. They were steeped in drugs and corruption, and kept in power by intensive use of American air power. As in Vietnam, the US military and civilian effort in Afghanistan is led by a toxic mixture of deep ignorance and imperial arrogance.

The US military understands it has long ago lost the Afghan War but cannot bear the humiliation of admitting it was defeated by lightly-armed mountain tribesmen fighting for their independence. In Vietnam, Washington could not admit that young Vietnamese guerillas and regulars had bested the US armed forces thanks to their indomitable courage and intelligent tactics. No one outside Vietnam cared about the 2-3 million civilians killed in the conflict.

Unfortunately, the PBS program fails to convey this imperial arrogance and the ignorance that impelled Washington into the war – the same foolhardy behavior that sent US forces into Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps may do so in a second Korean War. The imperial spirit still burns hot in Washington among those who don’t know or understand the outside world. The lessons of all these past conflicts have been forgotten: Washington’s collective memory is only three years long.

Vietnam was not a ‘tragedy,’ as the PBS series asserts, but the product of imperial geopolitics. The same holds true for today’s Mideast wars. To paraphrase a famous slogan from Vietnam, we destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to make them safe for ‘freedom.’

One of the craziest things about the Vietnam War has rarely been acknowledged: even at peak deployment, the 550,000 US soldiers in Vietnam were outnumbered by North Vietnamese fighting units.

That’s because the huge US military had only about 50,000 real combat troops in the field. The other half million were support troops performing logistical and administrative functions behind the lines: a vast army of typists, cooks, truck drivers, psychologists, and pizza-makers.

Too much tail to teeth, as the army calls it. For Thanksgiving, everyone got turkey dinner with cranberry sauce, choppered into the remotest outposts. But there were simply not enough riflemen to take on the Viet Cong and tough North Vietnamese Army whose Soviet M1954 130mm howitzer with a 27 km range were far superior to the US Army’s outdated WWII artillery.

Poor generalship, mediocre officers, and lack of discipline ensured that the US war effort in Vietnam would become and remain a mess. Stupid, pointless attacks against heavily defended hills inflicted huge casualties on US troops and eroded morale.

The monumentally stupid war mismanagement of Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, a know-it-all who knew nothing, turned the war into a macabre joke. This was the dumbest command decision since Louis XV put his girlfriend Madame de Pompadour in charge of his armies.

We soldiers, both in Vietnam and Stateside, scorned the war and mocked our officers. It didn’t help that much of the US force in ‘Nam’ were often stoned and rebellious.

The January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive put the kibosh on US plans to pursue the war – and even take it into south-west China. Tet was a military victory of sorts for the US (and why not, with thousands of warplanes and B-52 heavy bombers) but a huge political/psychological victory for the Communists in spite of their heavy losses.

I vividly recall standing with a group of GI’s reading a typed report on our company barracks advising that the Special Forces camp in the Central Highlands to which many of our company had been assigned for immediate duty had been overrun at Tet, and all its defenders killed. After that, the US Army’s motto was ‘stay alive, avoid combat, and smoke another reefer.’

The war became aimless and often surreal. We soldiers all knew our senior officers and political leaders were lying. Many soldiers were at the edge of mutiny, like the French Army in 1917. Back in those ancient days, we had expected our political leaders to be men of rectitude who told us the truth. Thanks to Vietnam, the politicians were exposed as liars and heartless cynics with no honor.

This same dark cloud hangs over our political landscape today. We have destroyed large parts of the Mideast, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan without a second thought – yet wonder why peoples from these ravaged nations hate us. Now, North Korea seems next.

Showing defiance to Washington brought B-52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange defoliants and endless storms of napalm and white phosphorus that would burn through one’s body until it hit bone.

In spite of all, our imperial impulse till throbs. The nightmare Vietnam War in which over 58,000 American soldiers died for nothing has been largely forgotten. So we can now repeat the same fatal errors again without shame, remorse or understanding.

The Best of Eric Margolis

Obama was just another stooge that Big Money but in office:

Who is behind the establishment of a world government, what they call; their New World Order.

I post this because it covers the CFR in total. I hope others will copy and save for future reference.
Every one that cares, and wants to know what America is up against; should copy, save, and share with others:
URL for Roster of CFR/Trilateral Commission Members: Source: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/cfrall1.htm#d
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/roundtable/CFRA-Elist.html - Initial List of Council on Foreign Relations Members

Hillary Clinton spills the beans at the inauguration of the new office for Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. Some have said it was simply a slip of the tongue but whatever the perception is Clinton frankly revealed who's running the show in these United States:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2T-5Pd3oYY
Zionist control of CFR: http://www.rense.com/general48/captiv.htm

Some Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Facts
The 3,000 seats of the CFR quickly filled with members of America's elite. Today, CFR members occupy key positions in government, the mass media, financial institutions, multinational corporations, the military, and the national security apparatus.
Since its inception, the CFR has served as an intermediary between high finance, big oil, corporate elitists and the U.S. government. The executive branch changes hands between Republican and Democratic administrations, but cabinet seats are always held by CFR members. It has been said by political commentators on the left and on the right that if you want to know what U.S. foreign policy will be next year, you should read Foreign Affairs this year.
The CFR's claim that "The Council has no affiliation with the U.S. government" is laughable. The justification for that statement is that funding comes from member dues, subscriptions to its Corporate Program, foundation grants, and so forth. All this really means is that the U.S. government does not exert any control over the CFR via the purse strings.
Since 1940, every U.S. secretary of state (except for Gov. James Byrnes of South Carolina, the sole exception) has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and/or its younger brother, the Trilateral Commission. Also since 1940, every secretary of war and every secretary of defense has been a CFR member. During most of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency has been headed by CFR members, beginning with CFR founding member Allen Dulles. Virtually every key U.S. national security and foreign policy adviser has been a CFR member for the past seventy years.
Almost all White House cabinet positions are occupied by CFR members. President Clinton, himself a member of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, employs almost one hundred CFR members in his administration. Presidents come and go, but the CFR's power--and agenda--always remains.
The CFR's Shroud of Secrecy - On its web page, the CFR boasts that its magazine, Foreign Affairs, "is acclaimed for its analysis of recent international developments and for its forecasts of emerging trends." It's not much of a challenge to do so, though, when you play a part in determining what those emerging trends will be.
So are they predicting trends or creating them? The answer is fairly obvious to anyone who has earnestly reflected on the matter.
The CFR fancies itself to represent a diverse range cultural and political interests, but its members are predominantly wealthy males, and their policies reflect their elitist biases. The CFR attempts to maintain the charade of diversity via its Non-Attribution Rule, which allows members to engage in "a free, frank, and open exchange of ideas" without fear of having any of their statements attributed in public. The flip side of this, obviously, is a dark cloud of secrecy which envelopes the CFR's activities.
CFR meetings are usually held in secret and are restricted to members and very select guests. All members are free to express themselves at meetings unrestrained, because the Non-Attribution Rule guarantees that "others will not attribute or characterize their statements in public media forums or knowingly transmit them to persons who will," according to the Council on Foreign Relations' 1992 Annual Report.
The report goes on to forbid any meeting participant "to publish a speaker's statement in attributed form in any newspaper; to repeat it on television or radio, or on a speaker's platform, or in a classroom; or to go beyond a memo of limited circulation."
The end result is that the only information the public has on the CFR is the information they release for public consumption, which should send up red flags for anyone who understands the immense effect that CFR directives have on America's foreign policy. The public knows what the CFR wants the public to know about the CFR, and nothing more. There is one hole in the fog of secrecy, however: a book entitled Tragedy and Hope, written by an "insider" named Dr. Carroll Quigley, mentor of Bill Clinton.
Google: “Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral, Commission, Bilderberg Group”

I didn't know about that series cuz I never watch T.V. but for years I've said a woman should be commander in chief (NOT killary that thing is not a woman or even quite human) because a woman's attitudes toward conflict are different. Try diplomacy, try compromise, but if you have your back to the wall and MUST fight OBLITERATE THEM. Don't dork around with "limited strikes" or "police actions" go in with whatever it takes, get her done, and get out, with the least death and destruction on both sides. I wonder if any of the other ladies on OPP feel the same?

I had a LOT of respect and Admiration for Margaret Thatcher. And I think Sarah Palin is TOUGH ENOUGH to GET THE JOB DONE!! But she did not run this time!! She may YET, later!! But I also like TRUMP for the job!! I think he is doing a great job, and he needs all of our support. When the Swamp is drained enough, you will see things getting done. And SWIFTLY. And he IS draining the Swamp!!! It may not look like it sometimes, but he IS!!! Patience!!! It took YEARS to destroy, and he has been in LESS than a year to fix it!!!

I agree with your, Get in, get it done, get out. THAT is the BEST way, definitely!!!