Opinion - John Kerry - The true lesson of Vietnam is that a conflict won on the field of battle can still be un-won by feckless politicians

Why the Senate Shouldn’t Give John Kerry a Pass

By Bruce Thornton

In short, as America’s chief diplomat Kerry will be a faithful servant of Barack Obama’s foreign policy of American retreat and decline.

...................

....Which brings us to John Kerry, who has pursued and endorsed policies that follow from that erroneous “lesson” of Vietnam. Kerry, of course, 
notoriously began his public career by slandering his fellow veterans in his April 1971 Senate testimony. 

There he decried the “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to catalogue these crimes in which U.S. soldiers “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.”

Kerry then went on to recycle the false left-wing “lesson” of Vietnam: that “there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. 

And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy.” 

Rather than a pushback against communist aggression in the defense of freedom, the conflict was “a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence.” 

He then placed Vietnam in the larger context of the leftist view of the Cold War currently being recycled in Oliver Stones’ Showtime series: the “United States is still reacting in very much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers.” 

Thus in Vietnam “right now we are reacting with paranoia to this question of peace and the people taking over the world,” and the “so-called Communist monolith.”

....................

Read more: frontpagemag.com