The President lied to start war

The President lied to start war.

The elements are all there

Something that never existed used as an excuse to go to war a willing press and congress and not least a people as one American quoted here says : "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."



30-Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."

But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam -- no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.

A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 -- and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers -- in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.

"The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964."

On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf -- a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.

But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.

Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat."

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

But Johnson's deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed the New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities."

An exhaustive new book, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam, begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' -- when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North."

Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" -- as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on 'national security issues.'"

Daniel Hallin's classic book The "Uncensored War" observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats."

What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time."

In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam -- sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

The rest is tragic history.

Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident."

Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public."

And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."





Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and the authors of Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits (Common Courage Press).

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html

 

This is but the tip of the iceberg though Balbus. The full littany of willful and intended lies that characterised the entirety of our tenure in the Vietnam War was duly revealed in 1971 in the Pentagon Papers thanks to the patriotic whistle blowing of Daniel Ellsberg.

Now there is a man who should be raised to leadership at the heart of the Wahington power structure. Maybe then the veil that cloaks ongoing corruption amongst the elite MIC interests of the nation might be lifted once and for all and the real traitors to our founding principles be jailed for life.

 

*sigh*


yes..because the US government has been and is the only government on the planet that lies and does terrible things to further agenda and gain control.

*rolls eyes until they hurt*


Now we are bringing up Vietnam...guess what dorkuses...the US wasnt the only country involved in that...and we didnt win anyways...the US alone lost 50k soldiers.we had our asses served to us on rice patties.

perhaps we should start making threads about all the shitty things England has done and I'm sure Belgium would like us all to forget that pesky Congo thing right?

 

Using the argument that others have done something is profoundly childish otter. We are not others, and must answer for our own actions. The fact that we entered Vietnam and continued it based on a fully intentional and extensively calculated conspiracy of lies which is documented and spelled out to the last in the Pentagon Papers cannot be simply excused away because others fought in Vietnam prior to ourselves.

The more crucial importance of the Pentagon Papers is its detailed expose of the very MIC doctrines we have seen used to justify our interventionism in every conflict since Vietnam as well (including Iraq and Afghanistan). A fact the American public should become reaquainted with in detail that it might see through the machinations of our corrupt establishment and MIC driven status quo and put and end to it.

Otherwise we will be returned repeatedly to unjustified use of our armed forces for further corporate profiteering again and again into the foreseeable future just as we have every decade over the past half century.

(And as for Belgium and the Congo, I suggest you address such matters to a Belgian, I'm a US ex-pat and concerned about my own country's foreign policy duplicities).

 

Well done Otter you got the point.

Yes the US and its elite are not very different than those of any other power in history. They lie and cheat to get what they want, money, power or whatever. But as I was trying to point out many Americans still, to one degree or another, haven’t caught on to this fact, they believe the propaganda and fall for the lies.

As to British history every once and awhile someone (usually of the right) comes along praising the ‘glorious’ history of the British empire and every time it is pointed out just how unglorious, if not down right nasty it was. But there was a time when many British people were misinformed and ignorant and believed the propaganda and fell for the lies. They thought the starvation’s in Ireland and India were all down to the natives laziness, not English economic policy, they believed that all those Boer women and children that died in the British concentration camps were rebels and insurgents that deserved what they got. The other thing is that for most of the history of our empire most people didn’t have the vote, all men not until the 1880’s and women not until 1918.

In Britain the Labour party has been losing members in fact the membership is at an all time low, "the lowest figure since Labour started compiling individual membership statistics in 1928"(The Daily Telegraph). From what I’ve heard Republican membership has hardly wavered, over here most people don’t believe or are deeply sceptical of the governments story over Iraq, in the US I’m told that 40% of Americans still believe that Iraq was involved with 9/11.

There are Americans that seem to believe every story the Bush admin tells them and then defend it. Those of us here who said the US/UK governments evidence on WMD was not very strong were told that we were mad to doubt it in any way since US intelligence was the best in the world and what Bush and co had seen was very conclusive and unambiguous. They told us that we only had to wait and see, well we saw and it then turned out the ‘evidence’ was very inconclusive and extremely ambiguous. But that hasn’t shaken their belief that this isn’t some imperial adventure no they go along with the new story about ridding the world of ‘evil’ or making it safe for democracy and that we are just mad to doubt it and that we only need to wait and see.

Otter you get it, but why aren’t others just why are so many other Americans so naive or so wilfully ignorant, this is the question whose answer still remains elusive?



**

As to Vietnam what is your point in saying that the US wasn’t the only country involved? The US promised their backing in getting Vietnamese independence from the French (many of whom collaborated) in return for helping them fight the Japanese (which they did valiantly). But after the war they broke the promise and backed the French reoccupation. The Vietnamese fought back and then in a peace treaty, full elections were set, the US stopped the elections when they discovered that Ho would have won. Basically this was a classic 20th century war of independence similar to what happened in such places as Malaya and British East Africa (the British forces ‘won’ those wars but only by allowing independence).

**

 

I'm never going to get used to the distortions and misleading history you slip into posts like these. You speak of Americans not "catching on" yet posts like this are simply history viewed through the lens of anti-americanism, where everything is interpreted in a way least favorable to the US and all inconvenient complications are discarded.

How many people in this forum think the US created the Taliban, Iraq was mostly armed by the US and Saddam bought WMDs from America? None of these are correct yet the majority of people here have absolute faith that they are true. We will never ever see you wringing your hands about this ignorance of key facts.

Neither the US nor the two Vietnams had signed the election clause in the peace accord, and were thus not bound to honor it. And what do you think would have been the results from the elections proposed by Ho Chi Minh in totalitarian communist North Vietnam? Maybe 100% for Ho Chi Minh? This was a country which was already busy executing tens of thousands to implement a disasterous land reform and sending countless others to re-education camps. Nearly a million refugees had fled for South Vietnam by this point. Yet you want to casually present to us that the US had been responsible for subverting a democratic solution.

 

by looking at the title of this thread it seems like the fact just hit you. like a stink on the wind.

 

Umm... we DID sell chemical weapons to saddam along with Supercomuters and other helpful ways of developing biological nuclear and chemical WMDs.
And we did support the taliban since the russian invasion of afghanistan, in fact in the summer of 2001 we gave them 43,000,000 dollars U.S. to help the with their drug fighting.

I can cite sources if you wish....

 

Believe me, I've been through this a million times and seen your sources, they are always the same. The US never sold chemical weapons to Iraq. You can provide an avalanche of links showing that the US sold precursor chemicals, computers, lab coats, test tubes, clipboards, and other handy things, but you cannot show that the US sold chemical weapons because they never did. Supercomputers are not chemical weapons. NOBODY sold chemical weapons to Saddam, he developed them himself.

And I have also heard exactly what you are telling me about the Taliban. The Taliban didn't drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Mujahadeen did. The Taliban arrived years after the Russian had left, and after the US had long since (and shamefully) abandoned the country, and got most of their help from Pakistan's ISI.

Finally, the "US aid to the Taliban" story is a myth which I have pointed out on more occasions than I can count, yet it lives on in the forum, mostly because it fits so well with what people want to hear. The fact is the US has never given any aid to the Taliban, but they have given aid to humanitarian organisations operating in Afghanistan. In some cases this aid was tied to anti-drug programs by the Taliban, but the fact remains the aid was given only to and distributed only by international humanitarian organisations. There is a certain tragic irony in the fact that the US was the largest donor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan at a time the country faced drought and famine, while Al Queda was being given sanctuary to plot terrorist attacks against the US, and to make it worse years later anti-war activists are critisizing the US for giving aid to a starving country.

Sorry but you have fallen for exactly the myths I was talking about.

 

"He Lied...
They Died"

 

you miss the point of democracy.

unlike england and belgium, the u.s. government is accountable to it's citizens.

it's not allowed to be like the other governments, and it is people like lickherish and balbus and skip who continually hold politcians accountable to their bosses,you and me.

with the United States of America there is a higher standard.

 

Point

US policy (s) created the conditions that lead to the emergence of the taliban and it is possible if US governments had taken more interest in helping Afghanistan after the soviet withdrawal they might have prevented it. Even know the US could be doing more to help that country. Conditions since the warlords were aloud to return and become entrenched all with US assistance have not got much better than they were under the taliban, and some NGO’s and womens groups say things are worse.

Iraq got much support from the US and allowed for the procurement of arms and those things that could of helped in the building of WMDs.

**

 

Once again, you are not taking the perspective of "where did the Taliban come from" but "ignoring all other factors, in which ways is the US guilty for the rise of the Taliban?" This is your tried and true method for ensuring that debate only involves the degree of US guilt rather than an understanding of the historical event itself.

Which is why you can say that "US policy (s) created the conditions that lead to the emergence of the taliban". Didn't the USSR create the conditions by invading Afghanistan? Isn't Pakistan's direct support of the Taliban more important? No, because you always want to leave us with two points (the US and something bad) and ask us to draw a line. Well where else can the line go?

The original post ("we did support the taliban since the russian invasion of afghanistan") makes it clear that there are some pretty huge misunderstandings of the history of the region, I only wish you were more interested in correcting these errors even at the risk of saying something favorable towards the US.

Similarly, 99% of Iraq's arms came from countries other than the US. That's tens of billions of dollars of arms. You don't want to talk about the 99%, because you don't want the debate to be "who armed Iraq", you want it to be "in what ways is the US to blame for Iraq getting armed", which is the only way to frame the debate to keep it focussed on US guilt.

 

Once again PB you yourself make assertions that you do not back up with any concrete evidence whatsoever, yet have the continual gall to attack others as conspiracy theorists or to call demonstrably superior analysis "rubbish" simply because it challenges your bandwagon mentality.

You're simply a neo-con denial artist who flames and dodges rather than debates or substantiates.

No credibility at all!

 

"…the next stop is Viet-nam …"

Neither the US nor the two Vietnams had signed the election clause in the peace accord, and were thus not bound to honor it.

Most websites and many books on the subject mention the election issue in passing for example –

"Elections scheduled for 1956 in South Vietnam for the reunification of Vietnam were cancelled by President Ngo Dinh Diem"

http://www.vietnamwar.com/WarHistory.htm

In 1955, Diem, with US support, rejected the Geneva Accords because it is clear that Ho Chi Minh would win a democratic election

http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=614

To avoid permanent partition, the accords called for national elections to reunify the country to be held in 1956. When the South Vietnamese refused to hold the elections because Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh was favored to win, the North Vietnamese began to seek the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761569374/Cold_War.html#p32



But intrigued by your point I dug a bit deeper and it seems you could be right as Stanley Karnow comments in ‘Vietnam: a history’, the accord has often been misunderstood and that in reality the only documents signed were pertaining to the cease-fire.

As this very familiar quote from a website says -

"Neither the US nor the two Vietnams had signed the election clause in the accord, and were thus not bound to honor it."

http://www.vietnam-war.info/history

(word for word who would of guessed?)

**

So let us look at this because it has a significance that is not at first apparent

However it seems that those countries sponsoring the accords (Britain, France, China, Canada, India, USSR) seem to have thought that elections were possible with British and French diplomats being particularly hopeful.



Also according to many, including Fredrik Logevall (The Origins of the Vietnam war) the Hanoi government was tentatively in support of the elections. However the south and the US were not and it was Diem that ruled out all possibility by not even considering any discussion on the possibility of having the election. Their reason is usually given that Ho would have come out the winner. He seems to have been very poplar and was seen by many Vietnamese as a national war hero.

As made clear by Karnow and others without those elections conflict was almost inevitable.

So the US government was supporting an unpopular government that was encouraged by them becoming increasingly involved in ‘anti-Communist’ witch-hunts and ballot rigging.

Many impartial analysts seem to have believed that the North was militarily stronger than the south.

So the US policy of support for the south was a blank cheque that more than likely would mean increasing US financial and military support.

**

And what do you think would have been the results from the elections proposed by Ho Chi Minh in totalitarian communist North Vietnam? Maybe 100% for Ho Chi Minh?

The think is Ho seems to have being genuinely popular some argue that this was due to his fame fighting the Japanese and for Vietnamese independence other have even put it down to his land reforms.

"Ho Chi Minh will have a significant support in the north, basically because they implemented a massive agrarian reform that result in poor peasants gaining ownerships of the land, reform that the south did not implement, losing key peasant support".

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/v/vi/vietnam.html

As to your implication of electoral fraud there may be evidence of it at the time in the south

"In October, 1955, the South Vietnamese people were asked to choose between Bo Dai, the former Emperor of Vietnam, and Ngo Dinh Diem for the leadership of the country. Lansdale suggested that Diem should provide two ballot papers, red for Diem and green for Bao Dai. Lansdale hoped that the Vietnamese belief that red signified good luck whilst green indicated bad fortune, would help influence the result.

When the voters arrived at the polling stations they found Diem's supporters in attendance. One voter complained afterwards: "They told us to put the red ballot into envelopes and to throw the green ones into the wastebasket. A few people, faithful to Bao Dai, disobeyed. As soon as they left, the agents went after them, and roughed them up... They beat one of my relatives to pulp."

After the election Ngo Dinh Diem informed his American advisers that he had achieved 98.2 per cent of the vote. Lansdale warned him that these figures would not be believed and suggested that he published a figure of around 70 per cent. Diem refused and as the Americans predicted, the election undermined his authority."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDlansdale.htm

**

This was a country which was already busy executing tens of thousands to implement a disasterous land reform and sending countless others to re-education camps.

I’m still making enquires but from what I can tell the numbers involved are disputed. There was a lot of black propaganda going on at the time. Also the land reforms did cause major disruption and quiet a number of deaths it was also seen by many as successful in its aim (in that it was popular). That is not to say I agree with the methods or the deaths but land reform can have a beneficial effect

in South Korea, successful land reform following a radical agrarian uprising altered the class structures of the country. The land reform program dispossessed large land owners and thereby destroyed the political dominance of this class. The destruction of the old great landlord class also led to the creation of basic rural structure of small, owner-operated farms thereby eliminating significant sources of political instability in the rural areas. Economic development and industrialization, thus, flourished in a climate of extremely weakened agrarian and industrial classes which, in turn, gave rise to a highly fluid and egalitarian society in South Korea

poverty.worldbank.org/library/view/6810

That if I remember rightly had the support of the US.

But land reform and redistribution is often contentious and can often lead to violence. Even when such things are done in a reasonable manor for example in Guatemala where the government paid compensation for the land. The US company involved was able to claim the government was ‘communist’ and it ended with a US backed coup and thousands of deaths. I deplore that actions as well as I do the violent removal of land from native Americans to white settlers.

Also according to Logevall the Hanoi government admitted its mistake and corrected some of the mistakes. That doesn’t let them off the hook in my opinion but it was at least something.

**

Nearly a million refugees had fled for South Vietnam by this point. Yet you want to casually present to us that the US had been responsible for subverting a democratic solution.

As to the refugees as Logevall puts it "The real story was more complex". It involved the Catholic hierarchy and US advisers lead by Colonel Edward Lansdale. It seems priest were telling parishioners that "Christ has gone south" and warning of persecutions that seem to have had little basis in fact. The US believing a ‘exodus’ would be a propaganda coup tried in any way to inflate the numbers with US ships used to move people and many being lured by the promise of "five acres of land and a water buffalo".



**

 

What are you, a stalker? You post says nothing. I didn't call Balbus a conspiracy theorist or his analysis "rubbish", because he isn't a member of your flat-earth society and his analysis puts yours to shame.

I don't get all super-linky with Balbus because we rarely disagree on facts, and i think there is enough mutual trust that we don't need to document everything. Neither does he have your track record of lies and mistakes.

If for some bizarre reason you need a link showing that the USSR invaded Afghanistan I'm happy to provide it, but so far your contribution to the debate has been zero.

 

My basic argument was

That the US didn’t support Vietnamese independence from the French

This seems to be generally accepted

Ho Chi Minh admired the US and spoke of it as a revolutionary model for it, too, had to fight to gets it independence. In September, 1945, he declared the independence of Vietnam. He wrote to President Harry Truman asking for help. The Truman administration ignored him. The French returned to Indochina in an effort to res-establish colonial rule. Ho Chi Minh began fighting them.

The United States did not recognize the independence of Vietnam for several reasons. France was an ally and the US had been trying to bolster its fortunes after its defeat in WWII. The area seemed strategically vital to the defense of Japan and Philippines. Ho Ch Minh was a Communist and the US, during the Cold War, lumped all Communist together. This fear of Asian Communism increased in 1949, Mao Zedong led the Communist to victory in China, driving Chiang Kai-shek, whom the US favored, to the island of Taiwan. In 1950, the US recognized the French puppet government of Emperor Bao Dai. The US sent weapons, and ultimately, military advisors. From 1950 to 1954, the US pumped over $2 billion in aid.

http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=614

The US supported the government in the south in its refused in any way to have elections even when the other parties seemed to have been willing to discuss the possibility at the very least.

This seems to be generally accepted

The US and the SVG did this because they believed Ho would win the majority of votes in the country including the south.

This seems to be generally accepted

**

You speak of Americans not "catching on" yet posts like this are simply history viewed through the lens of anti-Americanism, where everything is interpreted in a way least favourable to the US and all inconvenient complications are discarded.

The thing is that the political forums here are nearly exclusively an full of American posters, it is the very reason I come here in an effort to understand the American outlook. For that reason the things discussed here are more often as not viewed through an American prism. You accuse me of being anti-American but a friend half jokingly calls me anti-British (I’ve been called a francophile but French friends have called me critical of France I mean I’m a green what do you think I think of them blowing up atolls and the rainbow warrior?)

If you wish me to discuss British mistakes or the dire policies of the present UK government I can and on occasions do.

**

To gain understanding you often need to confront another’s viewpoint and defend your own. You accuse me of being overly anti-American but have you looked at it from another angle? Could it be that my views are closer to being a realistic appraisal of things and that yours are overly pro-American?

 

I wonder if this is mostly an attempt to take advantage of my short attention span. But nonetheless.

Anyone could do a similar critique of governments in Taiwan and South Korea to what you have done to South Vietnam, but we can see where their corrupt regimes ended up compared to China and North Korea. The difference quite literally translates to millions dead. Should Taiwan and South Korea have let communists into their governments?

Ho Chi Minh would have won the election because he ran a totalitarian state that liquidated its opponents or sent them to re-education camps. Why are you trying to sugar coat it? I mean really, the lighter side of land reform? Is there ANYTHING you won't defend just to create sympathy for enemies of the US? It is inconceivable that such a regime could participate in democratic elections. The fact that South Vietnam democracy was so limited only weakens the argument that elections would have been a reasonable solution.

Your history is absurd. You are telling us that Ho Chi Minh would have won because he was "perceived as a war hero". Well not by the nearly one million people who fled North Vietnam for the South after he took power. These were people voting with their feet - the only vote they were going to get. Mysteriously, few people wanted to travel in the other direction. Maybe they didn't see the lighter side of land reform and collectivisation which you do? Maybe they weren't fond of a one party state which was systematically eliminating all opposition?

It is simply ridiculous to criticise the US for supporting an "unpopular" government in South Vietnam. Do you think that totalitarian communist governments are "popular"? Was Stalin popular? He was a war hero too. Was North Korea's government more "popular" than South Korea's in 1950?Compared to countries which actually allowed people to oppose their governments, they could be said to be very popular. Essentially, you are holding against South Vietnam that they weren't a totalitarian state supressing all dissent.

And I think the idea that 900,000 people were "tricked" by those sneaky Americans into migrating south is borderline insulting. Why weren't they tricked into migrating north to join all the land reform fun? The joy of collectivisation? Considering that EXACTLY the same thing happened in 1975, perhaps you think the boat people were "tricked" in to fleeing to escape non-existent persecution?

For North Vietnam, subjugation of the south was the only objective. War was inevitable. Just as Ho Chi Minh and Diap had killed off or imprisoned all non-communist opposition in the North, they were going to do the same in the south. And if they couldn't do it by sham elections, they would invade. And the result would have been no more just than if we had let North Korea conquer South Korea unopposed.

 

its COMMON knowledge that the US disrupted the vietnamese democratic process when they figured out ho chi minh would have won DEMOCRATICALLY... and no not by 100%, this isnt iraq... every history teacher I have had has told me this... it is one of hte main reasons people protested the war... we went in there to restore "peace" and "democracy" by disrupting what the people really wanted... and no, its not communist propaganda. this is being taught in schools all over the united states by american teachers..

 

Who said that? was that on this thread?