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.
The long view is that the US in Korea and Nam defended China against Russian encirclement.
ReplyDeleteThat'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.
DeleteA 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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