Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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book recommendation
[Read the article: What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Robert Lewis, if you're the intellectually curious type, you may want to check into a recently published book, Triumph Forsaken, by Mark Moyar, that challenges much of the conventional historical intepretation of the Vietnam conflict- including a couple of the statements you made in your last comment: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a nationalist, and that Vietnam and China have a history of acrimonious relations and conflict that extended for more than a thousand years.
I've read the book- much of which relies on archival material that has only recently become avaialble- and I think the author makes a strong case on many of his points. I'm not quire ready to say I'm in full agreement with him, but he's opened my mind to hearing more on the subject.
What I'd really like to find is a comparative view, by scholars with special familiarity with the subject of Vietnam and the war, of the merits of Triumph Forsaken versus Neil Sheehan's A Bright And Shining Lie (a book that I've also read), an account of the beginnings of the Vietnam war that comes in for much detailed review and criticism from Moyar.
I need to note that Moyar makes almost no mention of the post-Tonkin Gulf era at all, or of the escalation that followed- the years 1965-75, which most Americans think of when they hear the phrase "the Vietnam War." He focuses mostly on the era from 1945- the end of World War 2- up to around 1965, along with bringing in some points from an overview of the history of Vietnam from earlier centuries.
One of Moyar's contentions is that the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem was a major blunder, probably fatal to the success of the early 1960s effort to defeat the Viet Minh. That assassination was part of a coup-d'etat carried out by "Big" Minh, a chain of events well-known to have been carried out with the knowledge and approval of the Kennedy administration (although I don't think it's ever been officially admitted, there is unanimous consensus on that, as far as I know.)
I was expecting a shoddy polemic, but it's a very well-written book, and I found myself impressed by the research and the extensive footnotes. And yes, I realize that any time a book refers to "recently opened archival material from Soviet/Chinese/North Vietnamese sources" of the "Cold War" era, some people out there will automatically yell "Forgery!"
I think that such skeptics should at least perform the preliminary effort involved in reading the book before doing so.
I've been restraining myself from addressing a debate that I'm already on-record as considering to be a largely irrelevant distraction from current political events, especially in the case of the Iraq war and the political campaign. But, considering the extensive body of comments preferring to concentrate on that decades-long debate, I might as well go with the flow, as it were...
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The Great Snark Hunt
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's all about the Snark.
Dude, you are so snarky.
You are Snark Plus Ultra.
You live in Snarkopolis.
You're a Snarkosaurus.
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@shooter 242
[Read the article: Beltway myth: "The left-wing base" vs. "the American people" on Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]previous message by you, in full:
That's ALLEGED crimes....
It's why crimes committed by the Washington elite go uninvestigated and unpunished
One would think that a lawyer intent on preserving rights for unlawful combatants would do the same for the President. Sadly, no. Tsk.
I'm not a judge, a lawyer, or even a law student. But even I can figure out that crimes don't get due process- defendants do. You can dispute whether or not a given action is a crime- but that doesn't require anyone else to grant the action the "benefit of the doubt". Especially not as a Constiutional protection.
And Glenn's comments did NOT single out anyone by name in the statement you excerpted. It was you who brought up George W. Bush (aka "the President.)
Passive-aggresive whine overruled, shooter.
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Mara Liasson and NPR
[Read the article: Beltway myth: "The left-wing base" vs. "the American people" on Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Note perhaps the most common consequence of any status quo-supporting comment, hedge, or neocon-comforting statement made by or position taken by an NPR newhost-pundit: it gets repeated by other pundits in the commerical mass media (I refuse to call it "mainstream", or to use the acronym "MSM"), particularly neocon supporters, to create the illusion of broad-based support for a given idea.
Given that the stance of NPR is widely held as the absolute limit of liberal or progessive opinion worth any notice at all by the merch media or the minions of the Beltway Establishment, their voicing or echoing approval of any position favored by Bush Republicans, particularly on foreign policy matters, is typically used as evidence of near-ironclad unity across the political spectrum on the real bottom line in such issues. And the audience is given the same impression, particularly if they're suggestible to having their own private impressions overruled by those who supposedly hold more expertise, and who "speak for the majority of the American people."
Thus, even though someone may keep a view favoring withdrawal, they may still be led to believe that they're part of a fringe minority- and thus discouraged from holding their favored candidates or elected officials to account, or to become more vociferous in their opposition to the Beltway status quo.
Parenthetically- note that when such politicians and pundits pretend to speak for "the American people", they typically refrain from even adding such qualifiers as "the majority", preferring to imply that the particular view they're expounding is simply held by all Americans- all the "real" ones, anyway.
By the way, none of their aid to "media consensus manufacture" on issues like the Iraq war allows the slightest pass for NPR in the larger context- Bush Republicans and neocons still feel free to hold it up to scorn and ridicule as an example of the "the Liberal-Left fringe"- or even such canards as "the anti-Semitic Liberal-Left Fringe", "the Baby Boomer Liberal Left", or the "Tree-Hugging Hippie Liberal Left, etc."- whenever a report on an NPR broadcast contains material or views that displease them ( in the more usual case, on a domestic issue.)