Originally Posted by nynor (Post 4095881)

we got our a$$es kicked by the koreans and vietnamese, pure and simple

Originally Posted by nostatic (Post 4096313)

How does the brutal extermination of a country "threaten our way of life, system of government, our values"? If that is the case there are quite a few places we should be fighting...

I'm not downplaying the atrocities that took place in SE Asia, and I never said they didn't happen. Just noting the selective agendas that get followed under the guise of "protecting America." And if you don't think the US govt has done some nasty things in foreign countries, then you might be enjoying a nice rosy picture as well...

Many of those that opposed the war believed they were in fact "protecting America." And what is interesting is that if you read what Giap said, he talks about how democracy is in fact what lost the war. We have a country where there is public discourse and people are allowed to dissent. That dissent influenced policy. We lost a war because of it (so some would say), but that is part of a democracy. Totalitarian regimes are usually pretty good at fighting wars in foreign lands...

Originally Posted by nynor (Post 4096073)

whoops, i guess the giap argument goes down in flames.

but back to the original post, does anyone REALLY believe that barack is the ACTUAL antichrist?

Originally Posted by sammyg2 (Post 4096391)

We didn't want to fight another war but we couldn't sit back and watch as country after country was attacked, pillaged, and raped.

Originally Posted by BeyGon (Post 4095323)

Yes, I AM THE ONE.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1217605171.jpg

Originally Posted by sammyg2 (Post 4096391)

You simply do not have a clue about what you are talking about and are making things up that are not true at all.
Lets talk about Vietnam first.
Here's a direct quote from the memoirs of General Nguyen Vo Giap, commanding general of the North Vietnamese army. He was 2nd in charge of North Vietnam answering only to Ho Chi Minn. He was the top military commander of the NVA during the entire war.
Lets see what he had to say:

Quote:
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender. It was the same at the battle of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it. We thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice that your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefield. We were ready to surrender. You had won."



You would think that the head of the entire north Vietnamese military and second in charge of the country would know what was going on, but apparently some yahoo in the United States (you) who might have overheard a conversation once or accidentally caught a glimpse of it on the history channel before he could find the remote knows more about what was going on over there than General Giap.

Now onto Korea:
Most folks don't know that the Korean war actually started before the end of WWII. Japan had annexed Korea just after the turn of the century and had occupied the country until Russia invaded in August 1945.

The US was busy fighting the Japanese and the Soviets were still in very bad shape after fighting the Germans, so they both agreed not to start another fight. later than year, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to administer the country under the U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission, as termed by the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers. It was agreed that Korea would govern itself independently after four years of international oversight with both the U.S. and the USSR approved Korean-led governments in their respective halves, the north favoring communism and the south a democratic government.

In 1950 the United States said that Korea was not their problem and asked the UN to take over. This was the weakness the soviets and Stalin were waiting for.


(wiki)
In June 1950 they attacked.
South Korea had about 150,000 soldiers and a handful of tanks. North Korea, alongside Chinese soldiers armed with soviet weapons and with soviet airplanes, attacked with almost 1/2 a million soldiers.
While the politicians were arguing at the UN, south Korea was falling to the communists.
At the time it was also known that the communists intended to keep going, invading Taiwan as soon as South Korea fell and then onto Vietnam, Laos, etc.

We didn't want to fight another war but we couldn't sit back and watch as country after country was attacked, pillaged, and raped.

We sent in troops, but too small of a group to have a chance.
They got spanked and the US commanding general was taken prisoner.
The soviets had stolen 90% of the country.
That's when we got pissed. We started bombing the north, we started cutting off their supply lines from China and from the USSR, and we sent in enough troops to get the job done.
We started kicking butt and taking names and drove the bad guys way up past the 38th parallel, almost all the way to the Chinese border.
China was worried that we wouldn't stop as they knew that we knew they were doing in Korea, so they called up the people volunteer army, and sent in an additional 300k or so soldiers. No one knows exactly how many Chinese soldiers we were fighting but most people say we were outnumbered at least 3 to 1. but we were still holding our own.
Eventually the call for peace talks brought both sides to the table. They finally agreed to re-establish the demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel, right where it was. The entire communist block attacked us, and they gained absolutely nothing. it was a stalemate. They gained nothing and we stopped them from taking south-east Asia by force.

But you say we got our butts kicked.
Try not to type things that aren't true. We will call you on it every time and you'll end up looking foolish.

Originally Posted by dd74 (Post 4096848)

Dottore - actually, depending on who you speak with, we were cleaning up for the French after they high-tailed it out of there in the late 1950s. They're who started the colonizing. N. Vietnamese start making socialist/communist rhetoric, and we freaked out about the whole region turning red, and as a consequence, let the bombs fly.

As for Iraq=Vietnam. History will bear that out as well.

Originally Posted by Dottore (Post 4096859)

And still there are nutters on this board who claim you could have won, but for John and Jane.

Unbelievable.

Originally Posted by Danny_Ocean (Post 4096878)

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Originally Posted by dd74 (Post 4096879)

Re. "Nutters." Eh! Don't take them too seriously. Increasingly few in our country even listen to accusations like Jane and Peter Fonda "lost the war." Look, when the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who designed the war, began to doubt its abilities, then one can attest that the war was truly in a losing state:

Although he was a prime architect of the Vietnam War and repeatedly overruled the JCS on strategic matters, McNamara gradually became skeptical about whether the war could be won by deploying more troops to South Vietnam and intensifying the bombing of North Vietnam, a claim he would publish in a book years later. He also stated later that his support of the Vietnam war was given out of loyalty to administration policy. He traveled to Vietnam many times to study the situation firsthand and became increasingly reluctant to approve the large force increments requested by the military commanders.

Originally Posted by dd74 (Post 4096895)

True. McNamara, at least, didn't fall as hard from grace as our last Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, who lacked conscious in spades, and had to his very last day, no regrets about Iraq: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20061109/ai_n16849882

But Point #2 about the "Nutters." Those who blame H'wood actors for the fall of Vietnam seem to forget that President Nixon (Republican), was the true driving force in getting us out of Vietnam. Of course, he was out of office when most of the troops left, which happened under Ford, Nixon's successor, and also a Republican.

So, in a sense, if one wants to blame Vietnam's fall on two iconic individuals, those should be Nixon and Ford. IMO, both men did the right thing toward ending our part in the conflict.

Originally Posted by m21sniper (Post 4096131)

Who said china was our friend?

Excerpt of interview of Bui Tin, Colonel NVA General Staff:

"Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us."

"Q: What about the results?
A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was."

http://www.viet-myths.net/BuiTin.htm

Originally Posted by dd74 (Post 4096879)

Originally Posted by Dottore (Post 4096835)

I think that all you guys who keep talking about "winning" in Vietnam are nuts. Truly nuts.

What would winning in Vietnam have looked like? A US vassel state? Another Hawaii? It's like Iraq - you go in ham-fisted without the remotest idea what the peace could possibly look like.

The point you keep missing is that the North Vietnamese were fighting an anti-colonial war. They had history and the moral high ground on their side. You guys were the colonial invaders, trying to prop up the remnants of a colonial regime that had long since lost any relevance in the context of the larger historical forces that were in play.

I'll say it again: You deserved to lose. You had no business being there in the first place. The right side won. History has borne that out.

And you blame the fact that you lost on Kerry and Fonda?

Delusional Nutters!

Peace and goodnight.