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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (143889)	8/24/2004 9:51:42 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Necon, On bill's no dissent thread i received the ire of some posters when i said that mai lai didnt happen in a vacuum and that i assumed that there must have been more atrocities committed by US troops, "albeit smaller in scale" and of course by VC and NVA. I was told that i was insulting all vets. The point of reference of my post was kerrys testimony which is most fairly seen in its entirety and not in swift boat cut and paste mode. I am wondering if you think i crossed a line there by making that assumption publicly. Mike

To: Neocon who wrote (143889)	8/24/2004 10:04:03 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good grief. One million soldiers and two million north Vietnamese are the estimates of the Government of Vietnam as having been KILLED in the north (another 2 million KILLED in the south), not having died from heart failure as the bombs dropped someplace else. If you cannot come to grips with the enormity of the killing in which we engaged that is your problem. But you asked for numbers and the numbers range in the millions, with the official Vietnamese estimate of ALL people KILLED at 5 million dead -- when that many people die you end up with estimates rather than exact counts -- and most of them were civilians. When you firebomb a village, chances are you do not want to go in and count the children.

To: Neocon who wrote (143889)	8/24/2004 10:28:53 AM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

<We are probably responsible for less than a million overall, and certainly for less than a million civilian deaths........> Three million is the official estimate given by the Vietnamese Government and used widely as the number killed in the north -- this is the number AND THE SOURCE that Macnamara is reported to have accepted as a valid estimate. Of that 3 million, 2 million are estimated to have been civilians. If 2 million civilians died in the north, along with 1 million soldiers, then chances are we had something to do with most if not all of those deaths. If you include the estimate of 2 million from the south, the number is of course far higher. In the end the point is the same whether we killed two million, three million, four million or five million -- we killed millions of people in Vietnam -- the majority of them civilians. Kerry was right to oppose the war in Vietnam. For Kerry to both serve in and then oppose this horrible war was courageous and honorable.