Was the Vietnam War was wrongly fought?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U&feature=player_embedded

The above is a link to Martin Luther King’s speech condemning the Vietnam War, you can link on it and listen as you read if you like.

So what is your contention?  That the Vietnam War was wrongly fought?  That we should have never intervened?   Or was MLK was made a tool of the North Viennese’s strategy, a strategy not of defeating our forces on the battlfield, rather a strategy killing the will of the American People to support the war.

Do you have a clue as to why we got involved in the Vietnam conflict to start with?  Vietnam was a hot flash in the cold war we were having with the Communists governments of the world most notable the USSR.  After WWII Vietnam, which had been a French Colony before the war and occupied by the Japanese during the war, had become a front in the war to stop or extend communism as the controlling force of the world.  When Japanese forces surrendered in Vietnam, they allowed the Viet Minh and other nationalist groups to take over public buildings without resistance,  They also kept Vichy French officials and military officers imprisoned for a month after the surrender.

The French gave up certain rights in China, the Viet Minh agreed to the return of the French in exchange for promises of independence within the French Union, and the Chinese agreed to leave. Negotiations between the French and Viet Minh broke down quickly.  After the French took control of Vietnam the Viet Minh launched a rebellion against the French authority governing the colonies of French Indochina. This was called the First Indochina War and was fought December 19, 1946, until August 1, 1954.  The Viet Minh was supplied by the Soviet Union and the French by the USA.  The newly Communist People’s Republic of China gave the Viet Minh both sheltered bases and heavy weapons with which to fight the French. China became Communist in 1949 after USSR backed Maoist forces defeated the US backed Nationalist regime of Chaing Kai Shek. The humiliation of that event added fuel to the US cause of containing communism.

This was a very unpopular war in France and the lack of support from the French people led to the French capitulation after their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.  The French began negotiations to leave Vietnam. As a result of peace accords worked out at the Geneva Conference Vietnam was divided into North and South at the 17^th Parallel as a temporary measure until unifying election would take place in 1956. Transfer of civil control of North Vietnam to the Việt Minh was given on October 11, 1954. Ho Chí Minh was appointed Prime Minster North Vietnam, which would be run as a socialist state. Ngo Dinh Diem, who was previously appointed Prime Minister of South Vietnam by Emperor  Bảo Đại eventually assumed control of South Vietnam.

In the words of U.S. President Eisenhower: “It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Hồ Chí Minh would have been elected Premier. Unhappily, the situation was exacerbated by the almost total lack of leadership displayed by the Vietnamese Chief of State, Bảo Đại, who, while nominally the head of that nation, chose to spend the bulk of his time in the spas of Europe rather than in his own land leading his armies against those of Communism.”

South Vietnam and its chief supporter, the United States, were not signatories to the 1954 agreement but did agree to respect its conditions. However, South Vietnam, with the backing of the United States, refused to hold unifying elections, claiming that Hồ Chí Minh could not be trusted due to his affiliation with Communism. 

The Eisenhower administration, which started the policy of containment, had recognized that the popularity of the Diem regime could not stand up to the popularity of the Viet Minh and their leader Ho Chi Minh. Eisenhower had feared that Ho Chi Minh would win as much as 80 percent of the vote. This was one of those elections that communists could have won, and people in Washington were not about to surrender to exceptions.  The Cold War was still on. People in the U.S. believed that Communist aggression had to be deterred and contained.

Even following the retreat of the French from Vietnam, the United States had not sent any combat troops to Vietnam. For the Communist North Korea had invaded South Korea bringing about the onset of the Korean’s War.  The aggressions of Chinese backed North Korea to unite the Korean peninsula under communism was viewed as proof to the domino theory, and thus set the context of valid USA concerns in Vietnam. This theory influenced virtually all of the Cold War, starting with the Truman Doctrine. This document casts the Soviets into an expansionist light, and promoted a strategy of containment. However, Reagan, who strove to dissolve USSR, rather than contain them, vaporized this containment strategy. An example of the domino theory is the Eastern Bloc. After the Soviets obtained tight control over East Germany, they then mentored the rapid rise to power of totalitarian Communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. A totalitarian Communist regime also arose in Albania under Envar Hoxha, but without explicit Soviet aid.

Only after the National Liberation Front, also known as the Viet Cong, began a guerilla war with South Vietnam did the United States begin to send personnel to Vietnam. Under the period of escalation, U.S. began with the deployment of non-combatant military advisors to the South Vietnamese army, to use of special forces for commando-style operations, to introduction of regular troops whose purpose was to be defensive only, to using regular troops in offensive combat.

President Kennedy pledges to “pay any price, bear any Burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to insure the survival and the success of liberty.” begun sending more advisers to Vietnam to help the Diem regime, increasing their number to 800 in 1961. Kennedy allowed U.S. pilots to fly combat missions while pretending to be instructors, and he supported counter-insurgency to overthrow the communists in the North.  Now remember that The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred about now and provided another context to the situation inVietnam. The USSR sends nuclear weapons to a missile base in Cuba further proved the aggressive nature of Communism.

After JFK was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson took office. One week after he was inaugurated, he reached a “fork in the road.” In a memo to the President, Defense Secretary McNamara stated that the US was not making any progress in Vietnam, and that we must either withdraw or escalate. After sending 44 battalions (125,000 men), Johnson began Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965. This operation consisted of the Navy and Air Force running a frequently interrupted bombing campaign designed to show Ho Chi Minh the power of the US. Johnson and his advisors thought that this would warn Minh that if he did not stop trying to conquer South Vietnam, the violence would escalate.

http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t3w30vietnamwar.htm

As this was building up the Communism from Soviet Union and Red China (you never hear the term Red China anymore, but it still is) was working in the US on a conspiracy to undermine public support behind the Vietnam War.  In 1945 the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties merged with the Marxist inspired National Negro Congress to form the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). The CRC was led by an open black Communist lawyer by the name of William L. Patterson who defended minority hoodlums and left wing radicals.  They spawned such groups as the Young Communist League, Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Yippies (Youth Internationalist).  These groups and others were going about the land originating demonstrate and protest against the uss involvement in Vietnam.  They organized draft card burnings, and supported any draft dodger that refused to be called up.

Martin Luther King was also under this influence as  U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy on Oct. 10, 1963 had King‘s office and hotel rooms bugged. Evidence obtained in this surveillance proved that King was under the direct orders of Soviet spies and financed by the Communist Party.  A number of communists who left the party have reported they were ordered to do all within their power to support King's activities. A black woman, Julia Brown, was a Communist in Cleveland for nine years. She said:

"We were told to promote King, to unite Negroes and Whites behind him, and to turn him into a sort of national hero. We were to look to King as the leader in this struggle, the Communists said, because he was on our side. While in the party I learned that King attended a communist training school, that several of his aides were communists and that he received funds from Communists and took directions from them. He was one of their biggest heroes."

The U. S. Congressional Record of March 30, 1965 quotes Karl Prussian, an FBI counterspy inside the Communist Party as swearing: "At all of these (Communist Party) meetings Rev. Martin Luther King was always set forth as the individual to whom Communists should rally around... King has either been a member of, or willingly accepted support from over 60 Communist fronts... King accepted support from communist fronts, individuals and organizations which espouse communist causes."

This attack on the support of the American People’s support for the Vietnam War was the main front in the war.  The Communist knew that they could not stand up to the might of the American Armed Forces, and only had to hold out long enough for the front in America to do its job.

Then came the Tet Offensive!  The Americans were taken by surprise.  General Westmorland had been deceived into thinking that Ho Chí Minh’s forces were on their last leg.  The Vietnamese had failed to win a single major engagement and told President Lyndon Johnson that the end of the war was in sight.  He was wrong.  He had fallen into exactly what the Viet Cong wanted him to do.  In late 1967, Viet Cong forced to begin striking US bases across the country. Responding in force, Westmoreland won a series of fights, but in engaging the Viet Cong in the battles that they had picked he drew his forces from the south to the north, setting the stage for the Tet Offensive in late January 1968. Striking all across the country, the Viet Cong, with support from the North Vietnamese army, launched major attacks on South Vietnamese cities.

Because of what Westmorland told Johnson and the complete surprise and early successes of the Tet Offensive the antiwar press in the US, all the Television News Services painted the US as losing a hopeless fight.  A fight that we should not be in at all, after all it was only a civil war between the North and South Vietnam.  When should we spend blood and treasure on such a trivial matter?

The truth of what happen in the Tet Offensive was never presented to the American public.  The truth was that the Viet Cong was completely destroyed as a fighting force, not decimated but destroyed.  Decimated means that you have lost 1/10 of your forces, this comes from the Roman’s believe that any army that had lost 1/10 of its personnel had also lost its ability to campaign effectively.  The Viet Cong did not lose a tenth, they lost over 90 percent of their force. 

Their role was ending in the Vietnam War, but the show they had put on, that's all it was, a show, fueled the likes of Peter Jennings and other fellow travelers to whip up the antiwar sentiments in the US and leading to our withdrawal from Vietnam.  This withdrawal was not without consequences.  All of our supporters in South Vietnam that were not imminently put to death were put in force labor camps.

Cambodia fell to the Communist under the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forcing city dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in a “Year Zero“. The combined effects of slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million people, approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.

Our conflicts with the Communist are not over, regardless of what you may believe.  They still want to control the world, and are working hard at it.  And if your stat looks something like this it will look like this:

A Single Seed Grows Many Branches: ACORN’s Web of Connections in North Carolina

Francis De Luca | January 7, 2010

A Single Seed Grows Many Branches: ACORN’s Web of Connections in North Carolina

The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) has woven itself into the fabric of the left in North Carolina. Listed below are short explanations of the ties between the groups illustrated on the above chart. For more detailed information on ACORN NC see Capitol-Monitor.org.

Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN)
ACORN NC – ACORN’s North Carolina arm – has offices in Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte. ACORN NC is a member of Blueprint NCand partners with NC Housing Coalition, NC Policy Watch and the NC Justice Center, among others.

Blueprint North Carolina
Blueprint NC was organized and funded by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. It is a partnership of over 40 progressive (liberal) state-level nonprofits housed at the NC Justice Center. Blueprint NC’s partner organizations are:

·       Phillip Randolph Institute

·       Action for Children

·       American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina (ACLU)

·       Carolina Justice Policy Center

·       Center for Community Self-Help/Center for Responsible Lending

·       Center for Death Penalty Litigation

·       Common Cause

·       Community Reinvestment Association of NC- CRANC

·       Conservation Council of NC Foundation

·       Conservation Trust of NC

·       Covenant with North Carolina’s Children, Inc.

·       Democracy NC

·       Disability Rights NC

·       El Pueblo

·       Environment NC

·       Equality NC

·       Fair Trial Initiative

·       Institute for Southern Studies

·       Ipas

·       League of Women Voters - Charlotte

·       Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation

·       NARAL Pro-Choice NC

·       NC ACORN

·       NC Against Gun Violence

·       NC Alliance of Black Elected Officials

·       NC Association of CDCs

·       NC Center for Voter Education

·       NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence

·       NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence

·       NC Coalition Against Sexual Assault

·       NC Coalition to End Homelessness

·       NC Community Development Initiative

·       NC Conservation Network

·       NC Environmental Defense

·       NC Fair Share

·       NC Housing Coalition, Inc.

·       NC Institute of Minority Economic Development

·       NC John Muir Foundation (Sierra Club)

·       NC Justice Center

·       NC Latino Coalition, Inc.

·       NC Minority Support Center

·       NC NAACP

·       NC Policy Watch

·       People of Faith Against the Death Penalty

·       Planned Parenthood Health Systems

·       Planned Parenthood of Central NC

·       Southern Alliance for Clean Energy

·       Southern Coalition of Social Justice

·       Traction

·       Working Families Win

Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation funds progressive groups. Among them are El Pueblo Inc., North Carolina Housing Coalition, NC Justice Center and Project Vote.

NC Housing Coalition

The Campaign for Housing Carolina is a collaborative effort led by the NC Housing Coalition joined by NC Justice Center, A.J. Fletcher Foundation and ACORN NC.

Project Vote

Project Vote is ACORN’s voter mobilization arm and has provided legal support, including supporting litigation, for ACORN in a number of states. Project Vote registered more than 1.3 million individuals to vote; many of who were deceased, under the voting age or were fabricated registrants.

A.J. Fletcher Foundation

The A.J. Fletcher Foundation, whose mission is to support progressive nonprofits, gave $205,000 to the NC Justice Center and over $66,000 to the NC Housing Coalition in 2007.

Tides Foundation
Tides Foundation received a $25,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, part of which was used to create gettraction.org. The Tides Foundation has given grants to the Center for Community Change as well as over $1 million to Project Vote.

Center for Community Change

The Center for Community Change received money from the Tides Foundation and is partners with the NC Justice Center.

Traction

Traction and their blog, gettraction.org, define themselves as the “future of the progressive movement.” Traction was created through the Tides Foundation from a Z. Smith Reynolds grant.

NC Policy Watch

NC Policy Watch is a project of the Justice Center and located there. NC Policy Watch affiliates with El Pueblo Inc, works with ACORN NC on projects and is a member of Blueprint NC.

El Pueblo Inc.

El Pueblo, an advocacy organization for the Latino community, is a member of Blueprint NC and affiliates with NC Policy Watch. They also received a $107,500 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

AFL-CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations is a federation of 57 international labor unions. In North Carolina, AFL-CIO shares a building with ACORN NC and is on the North Carolina chapter of Health Care for America Now.

Bank of America
Bank of America has donated millions of dollars to ACORN for “neighborhood preservation.” They also financially support the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA).

North Carolina Coalition of Health Care for America Now
NC HCAN is the North Carolina arm of a grassroots organization that pushed for passage of the national health-care bill. NC HCAN has a 16-member steering committee, whose organizations include ACORN NC, AFL-CIO and SEIU. SEANC is one of NC HCAN’s coalition partners.

State Employees Association – North Carolina
SEANC is the largest state employees’ association in the South with over 55,000 members. SEANC became legally affiliated with SEIU in 2008 and is now SEIU Local 2008

Service Employees International Union
SEIU has donated over $3.6 million to ACORN over the last six years. SEIU Local 100 was co-founded by ACORN founder Wade Rathke. In 2008, SEIU gave $1.1 million to the NC Democratic Party.

Wade Rathke
Wade Rathke is co-founder of ACORN as well as SEIU Local 100. He served as ACORN’s chief organizer until stepping down in 2008 after his brother Dale Rathke’s embezzled over $1 million dollars from ACORN and it became public. Wade Rathke is also the former director of the Tides Foundation.

State of North Carolina
Over $640,000 of North Carolina taxpayer money wasawarded to the NC Justice Center in 2006. Continuing payments have likely exceeded $1 million. The state also granted $1 million to NACA.

Click here to download a printable PDF of this document
Click here to download the ACORN N.C. Map