Iraq/Vietnam/Antiwar Movement Contributed by Bill Faith
R J Del Vecchio emails:
This lady was kind enough to say that she got some ideas for this column (which I think is just GREAT) from reading Whitewash/Blackwash. Now that makes me happy!
Janet Levy
Contrary to media reports and the perception of a majority of Americans, the United States was winning the war in Vietnam following the successful watershed battle known as the Tet Offensive. Sadly, the Vietnam War was not lost on the battlefield. The carnage and repressive regimes that followed the U.S. exit may have been avoided had the truth been known by the American public. The United States was defeated by a carefully conceived, multi-pronged propaganda campaign that set the stage for America’s eventual failure in the region.
The ingredients for the U.S. defeat consisted of the funding and encouragement of the anti-war movement by Hanoi and Communist splinter groups, enlistment of “useful idiots” in Hollywood to publicize and popularize the movement, media complicity with negative portrayals of the war, anti-American proselytizing by professors and students on American university campuses, denigration and demonizing of the military and, ultimately, withdrawal of support and appropriations by the U.S. Congress. All these factors led to the perceptual reframing of the Vietnam War as an ignoble imperialistic atrocity, a far cry from its launch as a fight to extinguish communism in Southeast Asia.
Today, many of these same elements have reappeared as the United States struggles to defeat Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and to apprehend a fifth column of jihadists at home.
Inherited from the Vietnam experience, they are now evident within the new conflict. This time, the risks to our country’s future are even greater should they succeed.
Anti-War Groups
As was true during the Vietnam War, today’s anti-war groups hide their anti-Americanism behind the politics of peace. Recruiting others on a platform of “peace,” they ally themselves with radical Islamists, glorify the enemy’s goals and identify themselves as “freedom fighters,” battling an imperialistic world power.
In the lead up to the war against Iraq, anti-war activists effectively mobilized some of the largest protests and demonstrations since the Vietnam War. They attacked the war effort abroad and security measures at home, sympathized with Saddam Hussein as a victim of American war-mongering and even served as strategically-placed human shields.
Although Operation Iraqi Freedom was welcomed by the vast majority of Iraqis and succeeded in liberating 25 million people from the ravages of a murderous despot, anti-war protestors decried the U.S. “occupation” of Iraq and the alleged subjugation of the Iraqi people. Their steadfast position was that any use of American military power was an attempt to establish American hegemony in the region and exploit Iraq’s oil resources. The discovery of Saddam’s mass graves and torture chambers were ignored by the anti-war movement in the service of demonizing the actions of the evil, American empire. ...
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Contributed by Bill Faith on March 12, 2007 at 05:28 AM in , , , |
Comments
Posted by: John Harlan
The Anti-War movement creates the concept that this is a "Bush" war and all components are, created, manipulated by him, his staff, and cohorts. The forgetfulness of these anti Bush, anti-war fanatics forgets 9-11, US Intelligence, UN Sanctions, 9 years of non action to terrorist attacks by the previous administration and the continued US troop levels in Bosnia, Korea, Germany, Japan, and this intrinsic forget me not of the pull out of Johnson's Vietnam War that created an implosion and murder of millions of innocent people which has seemed to be now levied at Nixon by the acts of a corrupt Democratic Congress. How history repeats itself is a mystery to those who make the money and cry fowl.