Things look like it is falling apart over there. Is it another Nam in the making?

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Half of a set :halo:

Catch22---As a 10% disabled vetern,I can tell you that there is NO
comparison!Among many things,the ruling regime has been changed.There will never be a Hussien(sp?)city as there is a Ho
Chi Min city(Siagon)Saddam is in jail & his sons are dead.The thing that pisses me off,is that we could have won VN if they left
things up to the soldiers instead of the politicians,& worrying about what everyone thought!Withall of the physically & mentally
disabled,people,not counting the dead,it was never even a war,it was a conflict,as was Korea.All the media reports is the bad news!
They don't tell you about the food,water,etc.As Rambo said in one
of the movies-"Do we get to win this time?"Sorry,a nerve has been hit! Irish
P.S.Those are called "expensive"politicians lies!

__________________
Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
(Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man)

Irish, I could not agree with you more!!!! What a disaster VN was. My father was a young serviceman near the end of the VN war and I hate what it did to him!!! Trust politicians to screw things up! War almost never solves problems!

As for the current war, yes things are going badly at the present. My personal opinion is that we should never have entered this war in the first place. Isn't is funny that we thought Sadam was 'the cats pajamas' when we were giving him arms to fight Iran and we just swept under the rug what he was doing to his own people then. It's all politics and oil, and people are dying (and becoming disabled) because of it!

When will the US learn that every dictator that we have supported has turned around and bit us in the butt????

Guess it's one of my nerves too, huh?

__________________
The subconscious is a state in which reality is just a visitor!

A smile can make your whole day.

"I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows, I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my cloths..." ~Pepper.

curveyredhead---I didn't think that we should have been in VN ,
EITHER,but I swore to do what the Govt. told me to do.I was just
17,when I volentered,& in my youth,I thought that the Govt.wouldn't lie.It's a shame,how many lives were screwed up,
but I'm also shocked at how many people have the attitude of,
Hooray for me & fuck everybody else! Irish
P.S.When you enlist at 17,you take the bad with the good!

__________________
Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
(Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man)

My husband is a Vietnam veteran too (2 tours as a U.S. Marine), and I have plenty of memories of that time in our history. Certainly there are some very significant differences between the two wars. I think what people are referring to when they say that this war in Iraq is becoming Bush's Vietnam is that now that we're in there is no easy way out. Not only is there no easy way out, it may be years before we do get out.
This is just my own personal opinion.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Benjamin Franklin
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My Stories:
Dream Date
Just Desserts
Internet Lovers Meet - Part 1
Internet Lovers Meet - Part 2
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SS---It all depends on politics!One side,says that everything is
negative.The other says that it's all positive.I just try to stay out
of the debate now & trust that the other members will figure it all
out. Irish
Some say the glass is 1/2 full.Some say that it's 1/2 empty.I just
know that the glass,is too damn big.My real name is Thomas J
Ahern.The PM of Ireland is Bertie Ahern.If the person wins that I
don't want,I can see my letter now-It starts"Hey Bertie,this is your cousin Tom from America!This guy will really screw things up!
Any openings?"

__________________
Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
(Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man)

why don't these ppl say it is Bushes WWII look how many year it was before we left Germany and Japan. Oh yea we are still there.

So any comparison betseen VN and Iraq is like apples and oranges.

a VNV

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We may still be in some of the countries we fought in WWII, but our presence there is part of the treaties that were signed that officially ended that war.

As you VNV's know, there was no honorable end to the war in Vietnam. Our government wouldn't let the military fight it the way it should have been fought. Vietnam was mismanaged from Washington. And if you can't do what has to be done, you can't win. But at least in Vietnam we were asked by the government of South Vietnam to be there. We didn't go in of our own accord.

But whether or not you feel this war in Iraq is right or wrong, we are going to have one helluva a time getting out. I believe we've dug ourselves into a hole we can't dig out of.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Benjamin Franklin
*******************
My Stories:
Dream Date
Just Desserts
Internet Lovers Meet - Part 1
Internet Lovers Meet - Part 2
Internet Lovers Meet - Part 3
RAVISHED!!
My Birthday - A Fantasy

I do not believe the Egyptians rulers, or any government since, told their people anything that was not beneficial to them selves.

I do not believe any just cause can survive fulfillment.

I do not believe the people that declare wars, fight wars.


This is what I do believe.

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It is true Nam was not the same. A landing in the North would have changed everything as it did in Korea. The only worry was China joining in as they did in Korea. I don't think they would have myself. China hates the place and has many times in its history attacked it themselves. With Iraq they need to close the borders. It is Arabs from other places that are making the trouble. Problem doesn't go back to ww2 it goes back to ww1 as far as the Middle East goes. Most of the borders there were drawn up in 1919 at the peace talks. After the fall of the Turkish empire.

__________________
Half of a set :halo:

Irish,

I do not find any fault with your service! In fact I think anyone who was involved in the 'war' in VN (or any other conflict) deserves our respect and admiration. You (and those who served with you) were ask to do something that no one should be asked to do. My father was a helicopter door gunner in the Army. He was forced to kill a young man (barely more than a boy) who was shooting at the troops he was trying to pick up. I will never know how that feels, nor will I ever know why such a young man would take up a gun and tried to shoot others, what I do know is that when we ask others to put themselves into that position we can never give them back what they loose. And that to me is very sad!

PF,
I agree that the numbers do not lie. Politicians lie, entire governments lie, but the numbers all have faces that do not lie. You might be interested in the link on my forum about permenant human values.

__________________
The subconscious is a state in which reality is just a visitor!

A smile can make your whole day.

"I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows, I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my cloths..." ~Pepper.

There is a similarity between Viet Nam and Iraq ...

In 1954, the French attempted to colonialize Viet Nam (objective: the rubber forests). The Vietamese would have nothing of it and gave them the boot (Dien Bien Phu). We tried the same thing (failing to learn from the French) and achieved the same result. We were defeated by the oldest known tactic in warfare: guerilla opposition.

While we were carpet bombing the Vietnamese countryside, we were summarily increasing the hostility of those surviving civilians to our presence. Enter the guerillas ... hit and run, blend into the population, disappear! To retaliate, we just mow down the entire crowd of people into which they assimilated themselves. That tactic has shown to unite the various factions of the opposition into a unified population with a unifying cause: to defeat the invading infidels.

Similarily, the British attempted to colonialize Iraq, attempted to establish a colonial government encompassing the three primary tribes of Iraq. They attempted to instill a western style democracy on a primarily Muslim populace with little regard to established customs and beliefs. That failed.

In both instances, we seem to have ignored the lessons of history.

Our activities in Southeast Asia were promulgated primarily on the belief put forth by Eisenhower: The fall of any one democratic nation in Asia will have a domino effect that will foster the growth of communism around the world. Well ... that was wrong too.

Then (Viet Nam) and now (Iraq), our activities in those countries were/are shrouded in lies and deceit by our government.

Lyndon Johnson hoodwinked the American press and the public into believing our march to war was was justified. We had been attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats. And again, as then, Bush and Company has fed the American public and press (and the world) a trough of lies to justify a highly questionable and poorly planned invasion and occupation of a soverign country.

The nightly news in 1968 showed images of B52s saturation bombing the Vietnamese countryside and reported on Viet Cong body counts. We rarely saw similiar images of the body bags coming home or the thousands of wounded in hospital at Subic Bay.

The policies in place then were gradually overturned by an upwelling of public opinion. Robert Macnamara, then Secretary of Defense, said as early as 1967 that we had failed to properly account for the differences in ethnicity, customs, and beliefs, that we had failed to empathize with the goals and objectives of the Vietnamese people and the country we were attempting to occupy and should consider withdrawing. That was 1967!! -- we continued on with our slaughter of each other for five more years. (And Macnamara was ostracized for his beliefs)

Our technically superior "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq has been replaced, again, by an inept attempt to colonialize and unify a country consisting mainly of disparate tribes with differing beliefs that have resisted such efforts for thousands of years. They are suspicious of one another, they don't trust one another, and have only one seemingly unifying direction at this point: They trust us less and they want less of us than their tribal rivals.

And we exacerbated the problem by attempting to put one of our puppets in place as the leader of the now almost defunct "Iraqi Governing Council".

"Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust." NY Times - April 13, 2004.

And again, in Iraq as in Viet Nam, we chose to invoke a unilateral action against a soverign country on false pretenses. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was based on a sham -- there were no torpedo attacks on the USS Maddox ...
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html

And it might be noted also that no nation with whom we were allied at that time chose to join us in Viet Nam.

And in 2003, another unilateral action against a soverign country, without allied support, without allied involvement. And there were no WMDs in Iraq, there were no nuclear weapons, and the leader of that country was off writing romance novels.

And again our major allies want no part of the killing of their sons and daughters on behalf of one of America's questionable conquests. We have squandered our good will around the world.

Again, Robert Macnamara: If the US is about to engage in such a sobering enterprise as the invasion of another country and cannot enlist the support of other nations and allies who maintain similar beliefs, ethics, and morals as our own, then perhaps we should rethink what we are about to do.

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If I came here to talk, I would have worn underwear.

A lesson learned only by soldiers, not politicians. -----^

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Australia was very much with the US in Nam. The saying at the time was 'All the way with LBJ.' We have also been fully with the US on Iraq. Alas, Wilson in 1919 didn't get what he hoped and both the British and French wanted to gain more for their Empires. Japan joined in and we know how that turned out.

__________________
Half of a set :halo:

I have,personally,never seen the damage done by WMDs,but I
have seen & talked with people that were raped or tortured.It's
something that you don't easily forget.It's already done & all that you can do is to Thank God(Allah,whatever)that it wasn't done to
a loved one of yours.This was my main concern.With Saddam &
sons gone,at least that won't be done anymore.I,personally.never
believed politicians anyway.I haven't seen many campaign promises fulfilled! Irish

__________________
Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
(Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man)