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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (2386)	5/10/2006 11:29:00 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224704

"On that basically harmless country which was not threatening us whatsoever." Dope, are you really that clueless about why we got involved in Vietnam? Our ally - a democratic state until LBJ had the president killed - was being attacked by foreign and domestic communist forces. We came to their aid just as we did for South Korea. As for Nixon and "dirty warfare", the "Pheonix Program" was a covert intel operation aimed at the Viet Cong, and begun unofficially in 1965 and officially sanctioned by the government of South Vietnam in July 1968. Both those dates, my temporally challenged friend, fall under LBJ. BTW, the VC, in case you forgot, was responsible for thousands of terrorist attacks against civilians (6,000 dead and 15,000 wounded in 1969 alone) as well as assassinations of village and hamlet level chiefs and officials. The program, though abused by some in the South Vietnamese government, was by design legitimate warfare. And I hate to burst your Saint John fantasies, bubble brain, but it was on JFK's watch - 1962 - that Operation Ranch Hand began, using "Agent Orange" and other defoliants to destroy jungle cover for the VC and its suppliers. Saint John, not Tricky Dick, dope. Oh, and re your attempt to pin atrocities against civilians on Nixon, your going to have to be more specific than your regurgitation of John F'ing Kerry's vague (and unsubstantiated) list of allegations - "napalm, the free-fire zones, the burning of villages, the torture." But the bottom line is still, in spite of how much you squirm and flail about, that Nixon ended US involvement in Vietnam in his first term in office and began pulling US troops from Vietnam in his first six months in office. I'm sorry you can't handle those simple facts. Nixon had his shortcomings, but being a warmonger or dirty warrior were not among them. Re Vietnam, he did what he said he was going to do. He got us out of a mess created by his predecessors.