Blogger asks College GOP why they do not enlist for Iraq

[Seakony]

But it was mostly a democrat war.. right?

[Just Lucky]

Originally Posted by Seakony

But it was mostly a democrat war.. right?

Nope.

[birdman]

Originally Posted by Seakony

But it was mostly a democrat war.. right?

Right up to the point Nixon got us out, then it was his fault thousands of our allies were put to death as the last choppers left the roof tops.
I guess you can have it both ways.
History has a way of repeating itself, I wonder whos fault it will be when there are thousands of Iraqis laying dead in the streets the day after we leave.
At least one Democrat has figured this scenerio out. The rest have tucked their heads tightly under their wings (or into their _$$e$) & are hoping nobody notices.

[Just Lucky]

Originally Posted by birdman

Right up to the point Nixon got us out, then it was his fault thousands of our allies were put to death as the last choppers left the roof tops.
I guess you can have it both ways.
History has a way of repeating itself, I wonder whos fault it will be when there are thousands of Iraqis laying dead in the streets the day after we leave.
At least one Democrat has figured this scenerio out. The rest have tucked their heads tightly under their wings (or into their _$$e$) & are hoping nobody notices.

So when Nixon sent US ground forces into Cambodia and Laos sharply escalating the war he was a Democrat?

How about before he was President and he sent Kissinger to tell the North Vietnamese delegates to hold out on negotiations with Johnson and that Nixon would give them a better deal? When he thus prolonged the war, Nixon was a Democrat?

Everyone who can is already leaving Iraq. The entire debacle was predictable.

[Seakony]

Originally Posted by Just Lucky

Nope.

Explain please.... Ike and kennedy sent in advisors and maybe some troops for support..But it was Johnson that really got the war going and sent over thousands of troops. Links please.

BTW.. I am refreshing my memories on all the wars in the 20th century...it's been a long time since history classes and I have had other things to worry about.

[PlayadelSoul]

Originally Posted by Just Lucky

So when Nixon sent US ground forces into Cambodia and Laos sharply escalating the war he was a Democrat?

How about before he was President and he sent Kissinger to tell the North Vietnamese delegates to hold out on negotiations with Johnson and that Nixon would give them a better deal? When he thus prolonged the war, Nixon was a Democrat?

Everyone who can is already leaving Iraq. The entire debacle was predictable.

The North Vietnamese supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, went through Laos and Cambodia. So, was it Nixon who expanded the war there or was it the Viet Cong? Guess it would depend on your bias. In war, the object is to stop your enemy, not allow them immunity because the ground they stand on happens to be on the other side of a border.

You are going to have to provide some sort of evidence to back up the claim that Nixon negotiated with the North before he became President.

[birdman]

You are going to have to provide some sort of evidence to back up the claim that Nixon negotiated with the North before he became President.[/quote]

Yes he is & more than some link to some obscure liberal that votes for a communtistic government takeover here in the U.S.A.

[birdman]

[quote=PlayadelSoul;855264]The North Vietnamese supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, went through Laos and Cambodia. So, was it Nixon who expanded the war there or was it the Viet Cong? Guess it would depend on your bias. In war, the object is to stop your enemy, not allow them immunity because the ground they stand on happens to be on the other side of a border.

In the new age wars we go in; take some ground then give it back, take some more ground, then take a poll.
We then tuck our tails & run because some of the population decides they are not happy with the way our Armed Forces are running things. Leaving those that fought with us & for us to fend for themselves while our liberal friends pat each other on the back & smoke a big ole cigar in honor of their victory.
It is a war folks, like it or not, & leaving now will not fix the situation. Like I said earlier, if you believe Hillary, Barock, or pretty boy John will actuallty get out if they are elected you are kidding yourselves.

[Seakony]

Originally Posted by PlayadelSoul

The North Vietnamese supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, went through Laos and Cambodia. So, was it Nixon who expanded the war there or was it the Viet Cong? Guess it would depend on your bias. In war, the object is to stop your enemy, not allow them immunity because the ground they stand on happens to be on the other side of a border.

You are going to have to provide some sort of evidence to back up the claim that Nixon negotiated with the North before he became President.

Yes nixon expanded it but he didn't start it...that was done by the earlier administration. I guess the point I was trying to get at...is it's not always the republicans that get into wars. The Dems have their share...Wilson, roosevelt to name a couple.

[horizon200]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

There was a story on this out of DFW, the coffin was in cargo. Isn't it true that the caskets weren't draped with a flag, as not to draw attention...

It was not a case of not drawing attention. There was no mechanism in place to deliver them to their final resting place other than commercial scheduled carriers...again the most expeditious means. The recieving funeral homes would them drape a flag over the casket prior to the service.
There was never an attempt at hiding the caskets. This practice had always been in place...however, some anti war advocates highlighted it as a Bushism and now we have a multi million dollar contract to deliver them home. In itself, not a bad thing. However, the rest of the story is that IF the contracted carrier is not available, we will transport the casket on a military airlifter. Thus taking away from much needed lift in theater. Additionally, there is an honor guard that must meet each acft not just attend the service...essentially doubling that requirement as well. All of this is heaped onto a shrinking over budget cut military (I know..this is where you insert we wouldn't be over tasked if it wasn't for the war!). Point in fact is that the previous service of using scheduled carriers was a veryu expediant way of delivering them to their final resting place.

[jevans]

For those who have fought for it, freedom has a taste the protected will never know.

inscription on a lighter found at khe sanh

[Just Lucky]

Originally Posted by birdman

You are going to have to provide some sort of evidence to back up the claim that Nixon negotiated with the North before he became President.

Yes he is & more than some link to some obscure liberal that votes for a communtistic government takeover here in the U.S.A.[/quote]
Here's some information about Kissinger and Nixon:

On the eve of his election in 1968, Richard Nixon secretly conspired with the South Vietnamese government to wreck all-party Vietnam peace talks as part of a deliberate effort to prolong a conflict in which more than 20,000 Americans were still to die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians. The devastating new charge against Nixon, which mirrors long-held suspicions among members of President Lyndon Johnson's administration about the Republican leader's actions in the autumn of 1968, is made by the authors of a new study of Nixon's secret world in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
"The greatest honour history can bestow," reads the inscription on Nixon's black granite tombstone in California, "is the title of peacemaker." But if the charges by authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan are correct, Nixon better deserves to be called a peacewrecker than peacemaker.
At the heart of the new account was Nixon's fear that Vietnam peace efforts by President Johnson in the run-up to the November 1968 US presidential election could wreck Nixon's bid to oust Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, and capture the White House.
Nixon's response to Johnson's efforts was to use a go-between, Anna Chennault, to urge the South Vietnam's president, Nguyen van Thieu, to resist efforts to force them to the peace table.
Nixon's efforts paid off spectacularly. On October 31, Johnson ordered a total halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, the precondition for getting the North and their Vietcong allies to join the talks. Two days later, under intense secret urgings from Nixon and his lieutenants, Thieu announced his government would not take part. Less than a week later, Nixon was elected president with less than a one-point margin in the popular vote over Humphrey.

The Vanity Fair article charges that Johnson knew what was going on. Intelligence reports to the president told him that Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, were playing politics with the lives of US soldiers. "Had it been made public at the time, it would surely have destroyed Nixon's presidential hopes at one stroke, and forever," the authors write.
Johnson offered Humphrey the chance to go public about Nixon, but Humphrey was afraid that the charges would be seen as election dirty tricks. Once Nixon had won, Johnson again contemplated revealing what he knew, but decided the national interest precluded it.
In the weeks running up to the election, Nixon's public stance was that, if elected, he would bring the war to an end more effectively than Humphrey. He promised not to interfere with pre-election peace efforts, pledging that neither he nor Agnew "will destroy the chance of peace".
In reality, however, Nixon used his campaign manager, John Mitchell, later his disgraced attorney general, to use go-betweens to encourage Thieu to believe he would get a better deal under a Nixon administration and to boycott the putative talks. Nixon constantly denied that he was conspiring with Thieu against the US government, but the release of previously classified FBI files used by the authors show this was exactly what he was doing.
Chennault, Nixon's main go-between with the South Vietnamese, was a right-wing Republican society hostess who was Chinese born and lived in a newly constructed Washington apartment complex - named the Watergate. She was vice-chairman of the Republican election finance committee and an inveterate lobbyist on behalf of right-wing and pro-American Asian interests.
Chennault regularly passed messages to Mitchell and Nixon during 1968 and they urged her to put pressure on the South Vietnamese leader to create delays and to refuse to take part in the peace talks.
US embassy spy operations, including wiretaps of Thieu's offices, revealed the Thieu-Nixon connection in October and Johnson was briefed about them. One message from Thieu's ambassador in Washington, Bui Diem, told Thieu: "Johnson and Humphrey will be replaced and then Nixon could change the US position."
When Thieu pulled out of the talks, Johnson exploded. He told his advisers that he would go public on a development that could "rock the world". That development, he said, was Nixon's "conniving" with the Thieu regime. An adviser had told Johnson that Nixon was "trying to frustrate the president by inciting Saigon to step up its demands". "It all adds up," Johnson told his advisers.
On October 31, with the bombing halt announced, Mitchell rang Chennault and told her: "Anna, I'm speaking on behalf of Mr Nixon. It's very important our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them. Do you think they have decided not to go to Paris?"
Chennault made contact with Thieu once again. An FBI report said that she "contacted [the] Vietnamese ambassador and advised him that she had received a message from her boss (not further identified) which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to 'Hold on, we are gonna win' and that her boss also said 'Hold on, he understands all of it'."
On November 2, three days before the election, Thieu announced that South Vietnam would not attend the talks.
Johnson's bad relations with J Edgar Hoover at the FBI meant that Hoover, a Nixon ally, did not tell the president everything that his agents had unearthed. Even so, Johnson had learned enough to speak to Nixon by phone the weekend before the election. Nixon denied Chennault was working for him. When the phone was put down, it was later reported, "Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter".
Johnson was certain Nixon was lying, and told Humphrey what was going on. Humphrey learned about the Nixon-Thieu contacts while he was travelling by plane to a campaign. "By God, when we land I'm going to denounce Thieu. I'll denounce Nixon. I'll tell about the whole thing," he shouted to aides. But he never did.
In the five weeks leading up to the election of 1968, 960 Americans were killed in Vietnam. In the years to come, under Nixon, 20,763 more US soldiers would die.
"What the Nixon people did," the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then attached to the advance US guard to the Paris talks, tells Vanity Fair, "was perhaps even a violation of the law.
"They massively, directly and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation, probably one of the most important negotiations in American diplomatic history."

From the Manchester Guardian August 9th 2000



In addition to that when Nixon "opened up" to China Kissinger met with Zhou En Lai(sp?). While this is after Nixon was President I think it shows the type of Realpoitik Kissinger loves to play. Here is an excerpt from their talks:

On behalf of President Nixon I want to assure the prime minister [Zhou] solemnly that the United States is prepared to make a settlement that will truly leave the political evolution of South Vietnam to the Vietnamese alone. We are ready to withdraw all of our forces by a fixed date and let objective realities shape the political future. . . .
We want a decent interval. You have our assurance. [marginal notation in Kissinger's hand.]
If the Vietnamese people themselves decide to change the present government, we shall accept it. But we will not make that decision for them.

Nixon and Kissinger Obfuscations About Vietnam: What the Documents ShowThere is a copy of what looks to be the original here:http://www.gwu.edu/%7ensarchiv/NSAEB...%206-20-72.pdf

[PlayadelSoul]

Um, that's not evidence. That is a conspiracy theory.

[melliedee]

Originally Posted by PlayadelSoul

Um, that's not evidence. That is a conspiracy theory.

We'd need to find these to determine if you are correct:

"Nixon constantly denied that he was conspiring with Thieu against the US government, but the release of previously classified FBI files used by the authors show this was exactly what he was doing."

Not that Nixon was known to be involved in shady dealings...

[kayt707]

Originally Posted by horizon200

I have to admit I haven't watched the entire video...but then again, I don't think I'll waste my time. Nothing wrong with questioning one's devotion to his/her beliefs, but one could just as easily ask him why he doesn't leave and go to Canada if he doesn't like the way the country is going. See my point?

BTW, My son was VP of the College Republicans at his school...he deploys in Sept.

To me serving in the military is not and should not be about politics. I have served with many democrats and many republicans...we did not serve to further our political ideology...we served because of something bigger than all of us. A calling to serve the country. We may not have agreed with all the decisions made for us, but we served anyway. It's hard to put into words...you have to experience it.

nicely stated.