Quote:
Originally posted by shamrock_uk:
quote:
Originally posted by Felix The Assassin:
When we gave up on Vietnam, we gave all hope of freedom away.
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Forgive me, but did the American's not enter Vietnam to support the French in keeping the Vietnamese subjugated as a colony, namely Indochina?
Perhaps I'm not seeing the wood for the trees, but I can't quite see how that was setting them free. [/QUOTE]
Shamrock, if you lean, I will not falter. If you push, I will stand. If you stand, then I also will stand. I will offer my bloodline runs deep, too deep at times/in fact, but I have battle blood in my veins from the 17th Infantry, KY cicra battle of 1812, through too myself, GW1 and GWOT. Thou a loose cannon I may be, I do not let loose my cannon freely.
http://www.iaw.on.ca/~jsek/us17inf.htm
From my personal collection:
"But there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered that war incrementally, in a series of steps between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North."
"President John F. Kennedy rounded another turning point in early 1961, when he secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces-trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were more than 16,000 U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had been killed. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States most fully to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional (not actual) declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson authorized the sustained bombing, by U.S. aircraft, of targets north of the 17th parallel, and on 8 March dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Legal declaration or no, the United States was now at war."
"The multiple starting dates for the war complicate efforts to describe the causes of U.S. entry. The United States became involved in the war for a number of reasons, and these evolved and shifted over time. Primarily, every American president regarded the enemy in Vietnam--the Vietminh; its 1960s successor, the National Liberation Front (NLF); and the government of North Vietnam, led by *Ho Chi Minh--as agents of global communism. U.S. policymakers, and most Americans, regarded communism as the antithesis of all they held dear. Communists scorned democracy, violated human rights, pursued military aggression, and created closed state economies that barely traded with capitalist countries. Americans compared communism to a contagious disease. If it took hold in one nation, U.S. policymakers expected contiguous nations to fall to communism, too, as if nations were dominoes lined up on end. In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in China, Washington feared that Vietnam would become the next Asian domino. That was one reason for Truman's 1950 decision to give aid to the French who were fighting the Vietminh."
"As the United States went to war in 1965, a few voices were raised in dissent. Within the Johnson administration, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that the South Vietnamese government was a functional nonentity and simply could not be sustained by the United States, even with a major effort. Antiwar protest groups formed on many of the nation's campuses; in June, the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society decided to make the war its principal target. But major dissent would not begin until 1966 or later. By and large in 1965, Americans supported the administration's claim that it was fighting to stop communism in Southeast Asia, or people simply shrugged and went about their daily lives, unaware that this gradually escalating war would tear American society apart."
So, in a nutshell, we were in support of the colony, in order to prevent the spread of communism, which as we all know, did spread.
[quote]Originally posted by Felix The Assassin:
Here you go Pardner, if it fits wear it. If it doesn't, nobody is forcing it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Liberalism
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[qb]There's nothing particularly undesirable in that definition as an intellectual position to take.
If a person is annoying or a bleeding-heart then just call them that! The fact they are Liberal is incidental to the annoyance they cause us. Many Conservatives can be annoying too.
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I posted that for a simpleton reason. Not all liberals are of the American liberal society, and it is mainly the American Liberal press to the free world that evokes annoyance to the rest of society.