True. Which was foreseen, stated - and ignored
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Steve Blair
...
... What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.
. . .
by folks with more idealism and arrogance than good sense who approved that coup and the almost guaranteed assassination that followed.
Diem was not particularly popular with the hoi polloi (and particularly the Buddhists) -- but he was theirs and the US hand in the assassination was well known. It did not do us any favors and the South Viet Namese would not trust us after that. Probably smart. I talked to a number of SVN Officers who expressed some anger over elements of the Coup...
Moyars and Sorley wrote essentially decent if slightly biased (ALL historians have bias) history IMO. Pearlstein uses them in an attempt to produce a preemptive political strike. Not very well but I guess he deserves credit for trying... :rolleyes:
Who Owns the Vietnam War?
Found this at The Belmont Club. Arthur Herman at Commentarymagazine.com. . . the press had presented the Tet offensive as a stunning Communist success and a signal that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The suddenness of the attack had caught not only the American military by surprise, but also the American media. After the war, one of their own, the Washington Post’s Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup, documented exactly how the major media proceeded to turn the reality of American victory into an image of American and South Vietnamese defeat.1 Basing themselves on that image, Walter Cronkite and others clearly felt they now had definitive grounds for mistrusting their government’s word and for concluding that, just as the antiwar movement had declared, victory in Vietnam was not and never had been a possibility.
Others went beyond this conclusion. In March 1969, the executive producer of ABC News told his Saigon bureau: “I think the time has come to shift our focus from the battlefield . . . to themes and stories under the general heading, ‘We are on our way out of Vietnam.’” One of those “stories” would be the massacre at My Lai, which took place in the aftermath of Tet but became a news event only a year later. The steady coverage of isolated but sensational episodes like My Lai, deaths by “friendly fire,” and the like had the effect of convincing many Americans that such extraordinary occurrences reflected the ordinary situation on the ground and were destroying their country’s moral standing. Seizing the opportunity, a weakened Hanoi tried to turn it to its advantage. As Mark Woodruff writes in Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army (1999), Hanoi “increasingly shifted its [own] efforts toward the American media and the antiwar movement and soon sought American casualties as [its] main objective.” Indirectly, then, the press’s willful misreading of the meaning of Tet and its harping on the idea that “we are on our way out” would increase the cost of the war in American blood.
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It generally seems to take about a generation and half for the truth to come out. Associated Press, Reuters, CNN et al tried to Tet us in Iraq. Didn't work so well this time.
Read your Parameters piece. Thanks
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Shek
This discussion is not intended to ignore or discount the influence of
detractors in the media—especially in the global media age—who willfully
misreport with the intent of undermining war policy and sowing doubt in the
domestic populace. Intuitively one recognizes in such media reports a corrosive
effect on national morale and public support for a war that is difficult to
measure or counter.
Having spent 12 of 14 pages not discussing tthe influence of detractors in the media, Darley finally got to the point I want made.
What hostile media gets out in print hours or days after the event becomes the narrative that stands for decades until disinterested, objective historians analyze declassified information and publish what really happened for the benefit of the small audience who still cares after such a long time.