Sunday, January 22, 2023

Blind, Deaf, Dumb: LBJ's VietNam Strategy

As a reminder that military adventurism for the purpose of 'stopping the bad guys' is too often mis-informed by "intel" and/or persuaded by "experts" who can't find their ass with both hands we are told about LBJ, McNamara, and VietNam.  (Further, much of that adventurism is pushed by mil-supply grifters; remember that the "genius" McNamara was a Ford Motor exec--and Guess Who made the 'new' Jeep (known as the Rollover Special)?)

...We are still learning new information about the Vietnam War that reveals glaring deficiencies in American understanding of that conflict. For decades, American conventional wisdom held that the United States greatly overestimated its adversary’s casualties and underestimated its adversary’s military prowess and patience, causing it to hang on too long in a futile conflict....

Like what?

 ...Previously hidden sources show that the Lyndon Johnson administration never discerned North Vietnam’s greatest vulnerabilities. President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rejected recommendations from American generals to send ground forces into Laos and Cambodia to cut North Vietnamese infiltration routes, on the advice of civilian experts who claimed these measures wouldn’t be very effective and would invite Chinese intervention. We know now from North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet sources that Johnson and McNamara and their experts were spectacularly wrong....

Further, McNamara dissuaded LBJ from bombing the living s*** out of the North, although LBJ did order one such event ..............which nearly starved Hanoi!  But McNamara eventually prevailed and Nixon had to extract the US from the resulting mess.

There is little reason to believe that Biden is better-advised today on the increasingly bloody Ukraine war.  Certainly people like Lindsey Graham (who never fired a rifle nor lost one drop of blood in combat) and his ilk should be ignored, just like that Zelenskiy grifter and his shopping-spree wife.

The German, French, and Italian resistance to US demands should be a warning.

Think the Oval Office and the nutbag war-mongers surrounding it will notice?

 

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