A wounded animal can be very dangerous, and the regime is a very wounded animal. It would like to wreak havoc with oil prices, for example, knowing it will hurt the West and the Gulf States, although it will also hurt some of its previous benefactors. It would like to let its people know “we can still torture and kill you if you oppose us,” and so it has performed a public hanging:

Like a trapped animal, Iran is lashing out, executing teenagers in public for “waging war against God” to terrify its restive people, and bombing its neighbors to convince them to push the United States and Israel to end the war.

These are not the actions of a sane, confident government; it’s yet more proof of its utter desperation.

Torturing, then publicly hanging, Saleh Mohammadi, a 19-year-old wrestling champ, and executing two others is how the regime is now resorting to open savagery to retain power, should any brave Iranian civilians consider taking to the streets.

In addition, Iran has struck at a combined US/British base (Diego Garcia) located over two thousand miles away, demonstrating not only its destructive nature but that it was working on the capability to strike at a great distance, thus further justifying (not that further justification was needed) the US/Israeli attack on the Iranian regime and its weaponry:

Iran fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, according to multiple U.S. officials. One of the missiles failed in flight, and a U.S. warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other, according to two of the people. It couldn’t be determined if an interception was made, according to one of the officials.

Nothing was damaged, but the intent was there, and the distance was impressive.

I am fairly certain that all of this has the goal not only of engendering fear that the war is going badly and the regime is firmly in control, but also of giving fodder to the MSM in the US and other countries to report that the war is a mess, endless, impossible to win, a mistake, and Trump’s folly. The MSM (and Democrats) have been only too happy to oblige, right from the start.

It makes me think somewhat of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was a failure for the North militarily but which the MSM reported as a victory for them. I’ve written about that several times, for example in this post (some of the links there are dead) and this one, so I won’t revisit it in any detail now.

The mullahs and their confederates would actually prefer to wreak havoc in the world. It’s not just that they don’t mind it, it’s that it conforms to their end-times Twelver philosophy:

… [M]any Shi’ites are convinced that only a world conflagration will prompt the return of the Hidden Imam. For this reason, many Shi’ites embrace war, conflict and turmoil as they believe such events will hasten the return of the Mahdi. Shi’ite eschatology believes that when the situation is bleakest and almost all hope is lost, the Twelfth Imam, Mohammed Al-Mahdi will return. He will miraculously defeat God’s enemies and usher in a new era of peace. In fact, this branch of Islam reveres martyrdom and believes the worse conditions become, the more likely the Mahdi is to return.

I was thinking today of George W. Bush’s phrase “the axis of evil.” I recalled that two of the countries he mentioned were Iraq and North Korea. Was the third Iran? I couldn’t recall – but indeed it was.

The post The Iran regime seems intent on proving just how evil it is appeared first on The New Neo.

Large, cheerful crowds of flag-waving people had been gathering in central Ho Chi Minh City since early Wednesday morning, many of them having camped here overnight.

The city became a sea of red – the color of Vietnam’s national flag. …

“It’s a grand celebration and I see in the Vietnamese a tremendous pride. They are proud to have defeated the French, the Americans and the Chinese,” said Jim Laurie, a veteran American journalist, who witnessed the fall of Saigon and who has returned to Vietnam many times over the years. …

“It’s a celebration of what they, the Vietnamese, have become and not what they were,” he said.

Fifty years is a long time. Most of the Vietnamese weren’t around back then, and to them it’s ancient history and the Communist Party and its “socialist-oriented market economy” is all they know. The bloodbaths are over.

To me, and I assume to most older Vietnamese who came to this country after the fall, and their descendants – it’s a sad reminder of an ignominious end to a long struggle against Communism. I’ve written about Vietnam many many times on this blog – in fact, it’s an entire category of posts numbering over a hundred, some of them personal including parts of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. Here’s one of those posts.

The post Unhappy anniversary: 50 years since the fall of Saigon appeared first on The New Neo.

(1) The US parties have switched sides since Vietnam days. At the end of the Vietnam War, it was the GOP – some members of the GOP, anyway, such as President Ford – who wanted to continue war aid for the ARVN. It was the Democrats who had originally escalated our military involvement there during the 1960s, but it was Democrats who led the drive to reduce the funding in the 1970s to the point where North Vietnam knew it could easily win. Many Republicans joined that effort, as well. You can read some of the history of the endgame in Vietnam here, but I’ll excerpt a small bit:

In January of 1973, President Richard Nixon approved the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Henry Kissinger, which implemented an immediate cease-fire in Vietnam and called for the complete withdrawal of American troops within sixty days. Two months later, Nixon met with South Vietnamese President Thieu and secretly promised him a “severe retaliation” against North Vietnam should they break the cease-fire. Around the same time, Congress began to express outrage at the secret illegal bombings of Cambodia carried out at Nixon’s behest. Accordingly, on June 19, 1973 Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, which called for a halt to all military activities in Southeast Asia by August 15, thereby ending twelve years of direct U.S. military involvement in the region.

In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974: “The Americans have withdrawn…this is what marks the opportune moment.”

The NVA drew up a two-year plan for the “liberation” of South Vietnam. Owing to South Vietnam’s weakened state, this would only take fifty-five days. The drastic reduction of American aid to South Vietnam caused a sharp decline in morale, as well as an increase in governmental corruption and a crackdown on domestic political dissent. The South Vietnamese army was severely under-funded, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the support of the American allies with whom they were accustomed to fighting.

The NVA began its final assault in March of 1975 in the Central Highlands. … The war officially concluded on April 30, as Saigon fell to North Vietnam and the last American personnel were evacuated.

(2) In both cases, war supporters subscribe to a domino theory – with Vietnam it involved the Far East, with Ukraine it involves the Eastern European countries that had formerly been part of the USSR, and even perhaps some portions of Western Europe. Zelensky indicated in his talk with Trump and Vance that his own domino theory involves Putin coming to US shores.

(3) One huge difference – in Vietnam, the US had expended not just US treasure but US blood. Quite a lot of it.

(4) The Vietnam hot war had gone on much longer than three years. Of course, that’s true of Russia and Ukraine, too, but until the Russian invasion in 2022 it had gone on at a much lower level.

(5) Unlike Ukraine and Russia, the Vietnam War involved parties that were not so lopsided in terms of population – unless you count the backing of China. And you should count the backing of China.

(6) Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War we’re still arguing about whether the South could have won if we had continued with a larger amount of aid. A similar argument goes on with Ukraine now and it goes like this: does Ukraine have any chance of winning in the sense of regaining its lost territory, with US aid? Those who want to cut off military aid say no; many of those who want to continue it say yes.

(7) The Vietnam War so wearied the US that it subsequently caused many Americans to be very very wary of our own troops fighting someone else’s war, especially if that war lasts a long time. The Gulf War was short; the Iraq and Afghan wars were long, and ended with our disastrous withdrawals. The left campaigned against those last two wars from the start by comparing them to Vietnam.

(8) The Ukraine War seems to have coincided with a growing US reluctance to fund foreign wars. There’s a relatively small faction on the right among those who want to pull the plug on Ukraine who also would dearly love to do the same to Israel. Otherwise it’s the left, for the most part, who have turned on Israel.

The post Ukraine War, Vietnam War appeared first on The New Neo.

But there’s plenty of coverage all over the place – for example, this, this, this, this, this, and this. You can talk about any of it – or anything about the convention – in this thread.

A lot of people have been reminiscing about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, marked by violence in the streets, the crackdown by police, and the demonstrators’ chant of “the whole world is watching.” I recall being one of those people watching, too. I also remember what a strange year it was, because Lyndon Johnson had said he wasn’t running, and that left the field open for Hubert Humphrey to be nominated.

And I was distracted by stress in my personal life, although that stress was caused by the political. I had just been on the west coast saying goodbye to my boyfriend, who was being shipped out to Vietnam (I’ve written about that at length in this post). I had stayed out west for a big wedding, and by the time of the Democratic Convention I’d only been back home for a few days. So the whole time was sad and frightening for me for a host of reasons.

The post The Democratic National Convention began today appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve written several previous posts about My Lai: for example, this as well as this. The latter contains some quotes based on an article that no longer can be found at the URL in that post; here’s a reference to the article but not the article itself. (If anyone can find the actual article, please give the URL in the comments).

But here are some quotes from the original article, taken from my 2005 post about the article. I think you’ll see why I think it is extremely relevant to present-day events – specifically, the activities of Hamas and other Islamic terror groups – as well as shedding light on what happened in My Lai:

The Viet Cong conducted a guerrilla war that can best be described as “clutching the people to their breast.” They disguised themselves as civilians, hid amongst civilians, often fortified villages (with noncombatants being the vast majority of the population), and even used civilians of all ages and both sexes (little children, women, and old men, included) for logistical support, intelligence, and to plant mines and booby traps. There was widespread belief among American soldiers that the Viet Cong would use the type of civilians mentioned above to throw grenades. An expert on the Vietnamese army remarked that “the Vietnamese communists erased entirely the line between military and civilian by ruling out the notion of noncombatant.” …

A member of the Viet Cong would later confirm that: “Children were trained to throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. Then the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals.” It was not rare for small children to wave an American patrol into a booby trap or minefield. Additionally, the Viet Cong would use women and children as lethal ploys or ruses to lead Americans into deadly ambushes. Female Viet Congs were just as effective as their male counterparts, especially in sniper fire. In other words, the civilians were not exactly sitting out the war. American servicemen soon grew wary and suspicious of all Vietnamese. …

… C Co.’s first casualty comes from a booby trap on 28 January 1968. The following month, on 25 February 1968, C Co. walked into a minefield. CPT Medina kept his head and, after three died and twelve suffered serious injuries, managed to lead his soldiers out. The soldiers of C Co. blamed the Vietnamese villagers nearby who failed to warn them of the minefield and booby traps.

1LT Calley, who had just returned from leave, saw the helicopters transporting the dead and wounded. 1LT Calley also noticed that, from that point on, the attitude of his soldiers toward Vietnamese children had changed — they no longer gave them candy, and kicked them away. According to one account, 1LT Calley could hardly restrain his satisfaction when he said “Well, I told you so.” Prior to the minefield incident, Task Force Barker had failed on two separate attempts to trap the 48th LF Bn in the Quang Ngai Province. During the second attempt, A Co. came under heavy automatic and mortar fire coming from My Lai 4., the second time in a month that Task Force Barker had encountered resistance from around the hamlet of My Lai. Its company commander is among the fifteen wounded, five other soldiers died.

After the minefield incident, C Co.’s esprit de cops and morale sagged and eventually vanished. They went down to 105 soldiers. To make matters even worse, on 14 March 1968, SGT George Cox, an NCO well liked and respected by the soldiers of C Co., an NCO with a reputation for looking after his soldiers, was killed by a booby trap while on patrol. Since arriving in Vietnam three months earlier, C Co. had suffered twenty-eight casualties, including five killed. All the casualties were caused by mines, booby traps, and snipers.

None of this information is meant to excuse anything that happened in My Lai at the hands of the American soldiers. But it gives the background events leading up to the massacre.

The post Calley and My Lai appeared first on The New Neo.

I don’t think Hamas ever had what you’d call a ‘strategy’, unless there were co-ordinate campaigns planned which Iran and Hezbollah never implemented. It’s what Martin Peretz described 40 years ago in a review of a play, “A crazed Arab to be sure, but crazed in the particular ways of his culture. He is intoxicated by language, cannot discern fantasy from reality, and assuages himself with a momentarily satisfying but ultimately ineffectual act of bloodlust”.

I also wonder whether there was a larger plan to simultaneously include Hezbollah and Iran, and perhaps the West Bank as well. In a surprise attack this multi-pronged approach might have been even more devastating to Israel. But either it was considered too much and likely to turn the world against the Palestinians and their ally Iran, or the attackers got their signals crossed, or it was never planned that way in the first place.

But I disagree that there was no strategy in the October 7 attack. There was plenty of strategy. The Palestinians have known for many many decades that it is to their advantage to provoke retaliation from Israel though terrorism and then emphasize their own suffering – with numbers – in order to turn world opinion even further from support of Israel. There are so many propaganda advantages, and this is above all else a propaganda war.

Back in November, even the Wapo was acknowledging this [emphasis mine]:

The evidence, described by more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries, reveals an intention by Hamas planners to strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response. … After breaching the Israeli border in some 30 places, Hamas militants staged a mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians in at least 22 Israeli villages, towns and military outposts and then drew Israeli defenders into gun battles that continued for more than a day.

… Some militants carried enough food, ammunition and equipment to last several days, officials said, and bore instructions to continue deeper into Israel if the first wave of attacks succeeded, potentially striking larger Israeli cities.

The assault teams managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, an Israeli town about 15 miles from the Gaza Strip and about half the distance between the enclave and the West Bank. One unit carried reconnaissance information and maps suggesting an intention to continue the assault up to the border of the West Bank, according to two senior Middle Eastern intelligence officials and one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of the evidence. Hamas had been increasing its outreach to West Bank militants in recent months, although the group says it did not notify its West Bank allies of its Oct. 7 plans in advance. …

Hamas meticulously planned and prepared for a massacre of Israeli civilians on a scale that was highly likely to provoke Israel’s government into sending troops into Gaza, analysts said. Indeed, Hamas leaders have publicly expressed a willingness to accept heavy losses — potentially including the deaths of many Gazan civilians living under Hamas rule.

“Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, told Beirut’s LCBI television in an interview aired on Oct. 24. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

And to even exaggerate the numbers and publicize them to the Western MSM, which will spread the propaganda around to great effect.

“They were very clear-eyed as to what would happen to Gaza on the day after,” said a senior Israeli military official with access to sensitive intelligence, including interrogations with Hamas fighters and intercepted communications. “They wanted to buy their place in history — a place in the history of jihad — at the expense of the lives of many people in Gaza.” …

…“They planned a second phase, including in major Israeli cities and military bases,” said a senior Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence. …

“Hamas knew Israel would strike back hard. That was the point,” Katz said. “To Hamas, Palestinian suffering is a critical component in bringing about the instability and global outrage it seeks to exploit.”

Even if its current leadership is effectively destroyed, she said, Hamas and its followers will continue to regard Oct. 7 as a victory. That’s partly because the group unquestionably succeeded in focusing the world’s attention on the Palestinian conflict, she said.

“It’s the first time I can remember that Hamas has become so prominent on a global scale,” Katz said. “So many people have already forgotten Oct. 7 because Hamas immediately changed the discussion. It put the focus on Israel, not themselves. And that’s exactly what they wanted.”

It wouldn’t have mattered that Hamas “changed the discussion” if so many in the West didn’t cooperate in that endeavor. But all of that was not an accident; it was Hamas’ strategy all along. The only question is whether Israel will give up in the face of all of the opprobrium. I don’t think they will, for the simple reason that their survival is at stake and now just about everyone in Israel knows it.

None of this is new, and none of it is specific to Hamas only. It was the strategy of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War (written by John McCain in 2013):

Giap was a master of logistics, but his reputation rests on more than that. His victories were achieved by a patient strategy that he and Ho Chi Minh were convinced would succeed—an unwavering resolve to suffer immense casualties and the near total destruction of their country to defeat any adversary, no matter how powerful. “You will kill 10 of us, we will kill one of you,” Ho told the French, “but in the end, you will tire of it first.”

Giap executed that strategy with an unbending will.

Plus this from Bui Tin, who had been a colonel on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army:

[The American antiwar movement] was essential to our strategy. Support for 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. …

The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.

It wasn’t just American opinion, either. Much of the West turned against that war, and the MSM certainly did so as well.

The post Does Hamas have a strategy? appeared first on The New Neo.

I won’t attempt to do that. Most readers here probably know quite a bit about the policies he advocated and implemented: detente, Realpolitik, rapprochement with China. He was a titanic figure in the middle part of the 20th Century, and his influence has been enormous. He was also more well-known than most people who have occupied his position, hated by many and admired by some.

Here are some interesting facts I hadn’t known before about Kissinger:

(1) His undergraduate thesis at Harvard was so long – over 400 pages – that it caused the school to set a length limit in the future.

(2) He originally thought very little of Nixon, but later they became quite close.

(3) After the fall of Saigon, he tried to return the Nobel Peace Prize he’d been given.

(4) At the age of 58 he had bypass surgery. And yet he lived to 100. The latter fact probably was related to his parents’ longevity: his mother lived to around 97 and his father to 95.

(5) Many people think Kissinger was the model for Dr. Strangelove, but he was not:

The [Dr. Strangelove] character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany’s rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), and Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb”. It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said: “Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger — that’s a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun.” Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that at the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was a little-known academic.

(6) Kissinger seems to have been alert and in possession of his mental faculties to the end. For example:

In response to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel and outbreak of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Kissinger said that the goals of Hamas “can only be to mobilize the Arab world against Israel and to get off the track of peaceful negotiations,” and issued a statement denouncing Muslim immigration into Germany in response to celebrations of the attack by some Arabs in Germany. “It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that,” Kissinger declared.

As for my own opinion on Kissinger, I think I take a middle position that pretty much agrees with this:

Ferguson states that accusing Kissinger alone of war crimes “requires a double standard” because “nearly all the secretaries of state … and nearly all the presidents” have taken similar actions. … He made life-­and-death decisions that affected millions, entailing many messy moral compromises. Had it not been for the tough decisions Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger made, the United States might not have withstood the damage caused by [Jimmy] Carter’s bouts of moralistic ineptitude; nor would Ronald Reagan have had the luxury of his successfully executed Wilsonianism. Henry Kissinger’s classical realism — as expressed in both his books and his statecraft — is emotionally unsatisfying but analytically timeless.”

RIP.

The post Henry Kissinger dead at 100: RIP appeared first on The New Neo.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.

Pretty much all reporting from that area depends heavily on Palestinian stringers. This has been going on for a long long time. For example, the al Durah hoax (2000) was spread to Europe by a Palestinian stringer cameraman named Talal Abu Rahma, whom the French journalist in charge, Charles Enderlin, trusted implicitly. Enderlin should have known better – and maybe he did, so perhaps he was a mere fool rather than a knave and a fool.

So I have no trouble believing these more recent photographers were tipped off by Hamas and embedded with them, and kept quiet about it. More:

Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza. …

Ali Mahmud and Hatem Ali were positioned to get pictures of the horrific abductions of Israelis into Gaza.

Mahmud captured the pickup truck carrying the body of German-Israeli Shani Louk and Ali got several shots of abductees being kidnapped into the Strip. …

Is it conceivable to assume that “journalists” just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?

Even if they didn’t know the exact details of what was going to happen, once it unfolded did they not realize they were breaching a border? And if so, did they notify the news agencies? Some sort of communication was undoubtedly necessary — before, after or during the attack — in order to get the photos published.

To go back even further in time, perhaps you remember this – when during a discussion of a Vietnam-like situation, Mike Wallace replied the following to a question about what he would do if he was embedded with the enemy and learned of an impending ambush of American soldiers:

Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t [he and] Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

I really suggest you read the whole thing. This occurred during a 1987 panel discussion that aired on television, and Jennings first disagreed but then ended up agreeing with Wallace. And they weren’t even stringers; they were highly respected reporters at the time.

During the Vietnam War itself, there was also the case of Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent:

During the Vietnam War, Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon, including American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the CIA’s William Colby, and the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale—not to mention the most influential members of the South Vietnamese government and army. None of them ever guessed that he was also providing strategic intelligence to Hanoi, smuggling invisible ink messages into the jungle inside egg rolls. His early reports were so accurate that General Giap joked, “We are now in the U.S. war room.”

So there’s a long tradition of this sort of thing.

The post Stringers and collaborators: Hamas and elsewhere appeared first on The New Neo.

But did you ever wonder why you believe that was a hoax, besides the fact that it’s something “everybody knows” was a hoax? It’s based on the Pentagon Papers, right?

Did you ever read the Pentagon Papers? The actual Pentagon Papers? I discussed that topic long ago (in 2006), but I think it’s time for a repeat of some of it (unfortunately, the first link in the quote is dead):

A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM–both then and now–was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:

“Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

“In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.”

In writing this post, I went back and read a few of the comments to my earlier Vietnam essays. I happened across this one, that deals with the very subject at hand: media coverage of the Pentagon Papers:

“The NYT and WaPo reporters (Neil Sheehan, et al) who provided a highly abridged (paraphrased and quoted) version [of the Pentagon Papers] to the public of that era (’71) distorted the originals in sundry and fundamental ways in order to imply or more directly state that Pres. Johnson and others employed deceptions at critical junctures in the conflict when in fact (as stated in the original document as well as the scaled down version) they did not. A specific example (and a critical one in that era) taken from Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War:

“The June 14, ’71 NYT edition of their edited version of the Pentagon Papers indicates Pres. Johnson had virtually concluded his decision to initiate a bombing campaign against the North by Nov. 3, 1964. (If true this would have made Johnson out to be deceitful toward the American public at an early and critical stage in the conflict.) However the Pentagon Papers itself states: “… the President was not ready to approve a program of air strikes against North Vietnam, at least until the available alternatives could be carefully and thoroughly re-examined.” That quote, reflecting November, 1964 circumstances, can be located via a search in this section of the Pentagon Papers.

“This single distortion may not appear to be dramatic in and of itself, but there were other overt and more subtle distortions in the NYT’s and WaPo’s paraphrased versions of this document. In sum they always and consistently distorted the picture in a manner which eroded Pres. Johnson’s (and others) reputation, broadly characterizing him as being willfully deceitful; that general mischaracterization is what proved to be critical at the time rather than any single aspect of the paraphrased report.”

Some of what we think we know, or are even sure we know, are things that are false – or at least have a good chance of being false. It’s pretty easy to ascertain what the Pentagon Papers actually said – just read them. Problem is, they’re long, and most people haven’t read them (and that includes me). Most people base their point of view on the summaries provided by the MSM.

The post The Gulf of Tonkin hoax: or was it? appeared first on The New Neo.

But for the most part we turned our backs on the suffering there. It’s not just that we weren’t intervening any more, it’s that most people simply weren’t aware of what was happening and of the role our abandonment played in it.

The left was rather happy about that because it got them off the hook, and they learned that they could repeat the process when they caused us to exit any war. In fact, none other that President Biden is reported to have explicitly cited this in 2010 when he wanted to get out of Afghanistan and the Obama administration wasn’t doing his bidding:

Holbrooke, who was the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010, asked Biden whether the US had a moral obligation to remain in Afghanistan to protect people like that little girl.

“F— that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it,” Biden replied, according to Holbrooke’s diary, as cited by the Atlantic.

I would argue that it wasn’t Nixon and Kissinger; it was the Democrat-controlled Congress (with some Republicans voting along with them) that pulled the plug on the South Vietnamese. The Democrats didn’t pay any price for that, either. Au contraire. Carter was elected in 1976 and the Democrats continued to have huge Congressional majorities.

So it was not difficult to predict that, once the nasty and actually disastrous pullout occurred in Afghanistan, coverage would fade and we would not learn the details of what was happening in that country as a result. Perhaps a few stories here and there, but whatever horrors are presently being perpetrated there are not going to get major coverage from an MSM dedicated to supporting everything Democrat – although you know that there would be wall-to-wall coverage of atrocities if the pullout had happened with Trump at the helm.

As far as I can tell, only the right is reporting on things like this:

As the Taliban consolidates its hold on power, reports of executions and mass killings are coming in from all across Afghanistan. The Islamist militia beheaded two boys aged 9 and 10, the media reports on Wednesday said.

Taliban fighters are hunting down former Afghan government officials and security personnel. Besides targeting people connected to the deposed government, the Taliban death squads are murdering their family members — including minors, Jean Marie Thrower, a former U.S. Army officer working on getting stranded Americans out of Afghanistan, told the National Review.

The National Review reported the gruesome beheadings, citing Afghan Rescue Crew‘s (ARC) Jean Marie Thrower:

Even retired members of the Afghan army are marked for death by the Taliban. “We’ve got people who retired, ten, 15 years ago. They killed the Taliban, and the Taliban don’t forget,” Thrower says. “We have one guy who was just working on cars. He said, ‘I haven’t done this, I haven’t been in the resistance for 15 years, but they have my name and they’re calling me.’”

Thrower disputes the U.S. State Department’s characterization of about 100 Americans being left on the ground; she said that as of a few days ago, the figure her group had was closer to 1,000 — although she noted that every group making a rescue effort has its own list, potentially leading to overlap with one another in certain cases. The 1,000 figure may include U.S. green-card holders, too, which the State Department is putting in a separate category. (…)

She describes the case of an American child whose Afghan uncle was recently killed by the Taliban. “We have had people shot, beheaded. They’re taking the kids. If you’re on the run, and they find your family, they’ll hurt your family and put the word out in the neighborhood that ‘we’ve got your brother or son or daughter.’ They cut off the heads of two boys that were nine and ten.”

You might ask why we should care at this point; after all, awful things happen all over the world with great regularity. And while that is the case, it is also the case that these things were not happening in Afghanistan when we were there, and they are happening now as a direct result of our leaving in the obscenely stupid and/or purposely destructive manner in which we departed, and it’s happening to people who had helped us and whom we had promised to rescue if it ever came to that.

Biden and the rest knew it would happen and they did what they did anyway, and shrugged at it. And the Democrats and the MSM not only shrug right along, but praise the administration and Biden himself for what they did.

I’ve been thinking about this letter written during the time we were washing our hands of both Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s, and I’ve been trying to decide in what context to quote it. It may as well be here, although I may have occasion to quote it again:

The epitaph for the U.S. involvement in Indochina had been given earlier that month before the fall of Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. Just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation.

“I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

“But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.”

The post What’s happening in Afghanistan? appeared first on The New Neo.