institute for Public Accuracy - Robert Buzzanco is professor of history at the University of Houston. He has written extensively about the Vietnam War, including the books Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era, and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. He also co-edited A Companion to the Vietnam War with Marilyn B. Young.
Robert Buzzanco -Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, America’s best known documentarians, are back with an 18-hour examination of the Vietnam War. Liberals and establishment media are praising it, with George Will calling it a ‘masterpiece’ and corporations like Bank of America as well as the Pentagon are promoting it. Burns and Novick promote an equivalency about Vietnam — both sides wanted war, both sides caused destruction, both sides are to blame.
Vietnam was a war of aggression caused by the United States. It created a ‘country’ below the 17th parallel, sent billions of dollars and weapons and hundreds of thousands of troops there, dropped over 6 million tons of bombs on an area the size of New Mexico, and led to the deaths of 2-3 million Vietnamese. Trying to rehabilitate the war with a false equivalency does a historical disservice and lets the U.S. government off the hook politically for what amounted to a huge war crime. As the U.S. government considers further military involvement in the Middle East and Korea, it is essential to understand the truth behind the war in Vietnam.
3 comments:
The long view is that the US in Korea and Nam defended China against Russian encirclement.
That's an ex-post facto justification of American crimes. There is nothing in the record that shows anything larger than hubris, ignorance, greed, ignorance, and vanity driving the brutal US policy on Vietnam - consistent from Truman to Nixon.
A French slave colony Vietnam was the perfect terrain to stage a war for warbucks reasons. There were no actual politics involved it was simply a staged preplanned 10 year boondoggle for Brown-Root, CIA drug runners and the MIC as phony as the gateway incident in which not patsy Oswald but others eliminated the person standing in the way. By 11/25/63 the Pentagon had plans implemented for a 10 year war with the estimated loss of 57,000 troops. They escalated without an exit plan until the ten years safely elapsed. It was a fake war to experiment with genocide and demonstrated that we could kill 3 or 4 million people and destroy Southeast Asia any time we want to. Much as Germany demonstrated in Europe before 1943.
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