Debunking the Neocons

I'm sure my readers have heard of this:

"In his 1985 memoir about the war, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S."

Supposedly, this was said by Oliver North.

However, here and here it is stated that no such quote exists, indeed, the book apparently doesn't exist. In fact, it is even brought into question whether there is any evidence that Oliver North made such a statement.

What does this mean? It means that the case for believeing that the war would have ended had the antiwar protestors just shut up and not "given hope" to the enemy has just suffered an enormous blow.

And in the end, that is most of the issue of Vietnam; whether we could have "won" without basically killing everyone in the country.

As for the argument that we won the war in 1973 and that the South Vietnamese could have held off the North if we had kept up our agreement to aid them? I don't know enough about the merits of this case to say for certain; if so, then the conquest of South Vietnam by the North was a tragedy, it was preventable, and yes we could have won without killing everyone in the country, in fact, with a minimum of brutality and so we should ahve done so in my opinion. If not, though, and South Vietnam would have eventually required more military help - and direct help from us - then I think that we couldn't win without killing everyone, and so we did the right thing pulling out.

In any case, though, this just goes ot show you, don't believe everything that you read.

That is all.