Do you remember Vietnam on TV?

That's just it, we won even though the convoluted LBJ rules almost guaranteed that we would lose. How many Vietnamese died as a result of Cronkite's lies that caused the US to abandon the struggle just when it seemed we would win it?
What did we "win?"

After the "War to End All Wars" Smedley Butler, a retired USMC general, wrote a warning about the clouds he saw gathering in Europe and the cost of our "victory" in WWI:

"The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some
$52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child.
And we haven’t paid the debt yet.

"We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our
children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war."

The generation that fought and died in Vietnam paid off the debts to investment bankers generated by Butler's war.

We are "winning" our childrens' slavery.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf


Butler was living proof that good generals don't necessarily make good political analysts. The funny thing is that the media ran away from Truman's war in Korea and called it the "forgotten war". They couldn't criticize it even though it was badly run because both Truman and MacArthur were icons. Because of the aging (possibly mentally defective) general's ego the war that should have ended in victory in less than a year dragged on for three years and ended in an embarrassing truce that was dictated by the NK. We are still living with that legacy. Bill Clinton's DOD decided that the number of American Troops who died during the conflict was too high (55,000) so they revised it down to around 35,000 to 38,000. Unlike every other conflict in history the defense dept decided to include only combat deaths and throw out accidents and other deaths.
Here's something else that's been forgotten about our Korean War, if it ever entered our official History at all: (Correct answer is highlighted)

"In August 1945 defeated Japanese forces formally turned over authority in Korea to the broad-based Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, led by Lyuh Woon-hyung, which in September proclaimed the Korean People’s Republic (KPR). When U.S. forces under Gen. Reed Hodge arrived in Inchon to accept the Japanese surrender, they

a. ordered all Japanese officials to remain in their posts, refused to recognize Lyuh as national leader, and soon banned all public reference to the KPR

b. recognized Lyuh as the legitimate head of state

c. negotiated with Lyuh to facilitate swift attainment of independence of a united Korea"

To this day, Lyuh is still revered as a political leader on both sides of the 38th parallel.
Had the Koreans and Vietnamese been allowed to determine their own fates at the polls after WWII, neither the Korean nor Vietnam wars would have been necessary.

A Pop Quiz on Korea » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
 
Believe it or not the only news available to Americans during the Vietnam war was filtered through the liberal media. Before Fox and talk radio there was no news other than left leaning liberal news. Cronkite was king and he managed to spin the news in such a way that the victory of Tet which all but eliminated the NVA was considered to be part of a continuing stalemate and it caused the freaking coward in the White House to throw in the towel and give the VC a new lease on life. Democrats tried the same thing in Iraq calling the US commander "betray-us" and the democrat senate majority leader addressed Americans (and the Troops) and actually said "the war is lost" just before the Troop Surge.

!!!!!!!

I was in Nam and came home and joined the anti war movement, the Media at that time was heavly influenced by the CIA

Media assets would eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD

CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at CNN - Report on CNN Broadcast - July 2, 1998.

Tailwind? Oh for god sakes:rolleyes:
 

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