Exaggerated Claims of Violence
The Vietnam War was worse than what followed-BY JOHN KERRY *(probably his public relations arm while he’s parasailing somewhere)-Saturday, August 4, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

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I haven’t been on point with this I haven’t written about Kerry releasing his records for a while–which by the way, he hasn’t done completely YET, even though he’s had a lot of offers from people who would be more than willing to help him fill out his 180 the right way - and release the records to the public rather than his biographer at the Boston Globe.

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James Taranto misinterpreted my words and misreads history (” ‘It Didn’t Happen,‘ ” July 26). I know the tragedy that followed a tragic war. John McCain and I led the effort to locate American POWs and ultimately normalize relations with Vietnam. I traveled to Cambodia to help create a genocide tribunal to bring to justice the butchers of the killing fields.

Nobody’s misinterpreting anything. Did we misinterpret you when you said they “at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country”?

Sorry bub, why should we believe anything you and Jane Fonda have to say? You supposedly also cared for the Vietnam POWs that were last seen alive; instead, you helped to bury any hope of their families finding out what happened to them or even recovering their remains. So that your cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for Colliers International, could broker a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port at Vung Tau. Convenient that all of this led the way to normalizing trade relations with Vietnam. Nice one, Johnny old boy.

I thought it was our soldiers who were the ‘butchers’ in the killing fields, according to your Winter Soldier “Investigation”.

From Vietnam Vet at Free Republic:

The genocide committed by North Vietnam on the South was carried out quietly and bureaucratically and resulted in the deaths of more than a million. After the fall of Saigon “politically unreliable” subjects were arrested at their homes or scooped up off the street. These included former members of the Viet Cong—the North’s partisan allies. They were imprisoned where many of them died. Those who chose to leave the country could legally do so by paying a $10,000 fee per head to the communist government and abandoning all their property. Tens of thousands died in boats on the high seas. Others died of disease and starvation hiding in the jungles along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. The situation became so horrid that folksinger and peace activist Joan Baez—along with Cesar Chavez, Daniel Berrigan, I.F. Stone and others—ran full-page open letters in the New York Times imploring the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to show some mercy:

“We appeal to you to end the imprisonment and torture—to allow an international team of neutral observers to inspect your prisons and reeducation centers.”

Well, at least some people have a conscience. But you can leave John Kerry off of any list of leftists ‘with a conscience’.

John Kerry, since his youth, has served as a loyal steward of the goals of North Vietnam at the expense of American lives, non-communist Asian lives and U.S. interests. From his lying Senate testimony to his deplorable conduct on the Senate committee that investigated POW/MIA issues, Kerry has been the handmaiden of this brutal regime.

When John Kerry’s Courage went MIA

But what did not happen was the region-wide war or immediate chaos predicted by many who believed we had to maintain our massive military presence in Vietnam. A brutal dictatorship consolidated power in Vietnam, the region’s refugee crisis worsened, and two years after we left Vietnam, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge launched a genocide.

Right. And I doubt that would have happened had we been allowed to win the war, as we were doing. But that’s something you and your communist buddies didn’t want to see…even George Mcgovern admitted that winning the war in Vietnam was not what he wanted.

Mr. Taranto mistakenly views the violence after 1973 as a direct result of our withdrawal. In fact, the violence arose from the conditions that led us to withdraw: a Vietnamese civil war we couldn’t stop supported by a Cambodian insurgency we couldn’t bomb into submission. It’s horrifying that so many South Vietnamese suffered. But, even accepting Mr. Taranto’s estimate of 165,000 Vietnamese deaths–double that of most academic sources–this is a significant decrease from the preceding eight years when 450,000 civilians and 1.1 million soldiers were killed.

No one is mistaken but you, Mr. I-have-a-man-servant. People who know what it’s like to live under a communist regime - will fight it. People who haven’t been fooled by elitists into thinking that it’s the only solution-will fight it.

The Viet Cong were soundly defeated during the Tet Offensive. It’s widely known by military historians that the VC expected Vietnamese peasants to rise up and join the Communists which, of course, never happened. The VC and North Vietnamese forces, therefore, were decimated; it took, literally, years for them to rebuild their strength. This, despite the likes of Walter Cronkite erroneously, and some would say deliberately, reporting the exact opposite.

We should not repeat the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq, but let’s have an honest debate rather than a hysterical one. The agony of exiting a quagmire is that there are few certainties and no good options. That choice was created not by the advocates for changing course, but by the architects of a disastrous war.

Um…John - we can start by not listening to the democrats who spit on our military, spit on our right to exist as a democracy and are trying to turn us into a socialist country - the same kind of socialism that is in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam-which any regular citizen should be mortified by…any war that’s waged against a communist regime to a communist is ‘disastrous’. That’s why people marched in support of Saddam Hussein-And that’s why we shouldn’t be listening to you on Iraq, Mr. Kerry. And that’s why I’m astonished how in the hell you got re-elected.

Kerry only belittles himself by describing Taranto’s comment ‘The outcome of that war was a defeat for America and a humanitarian disaster for the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia’ as ‘hysterical’.