08-04-2018, 08:23 AM
Jim DiEugenio Wrote:But Joe, in keeping with your historical parallels, it did not succeed because Nixon pulled the first October Surprise on Johnson.
And the Democrats chose not to call RMN on it either before or after the election.
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It did succeed in getting rid of Johnson but not in ending the war.
Nixon of course expanded the war after promising otherwise.
I covered a speech in 1972 at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) by William Sullivan,
Kissinger's deputy at the time and later the US ambassador to Iran.
Someone asked him why we were still in Vietnam. He said we were
there to get control of the oil in the South China Sea. I printed that
in my article for The Wisconsin State Journal, and the AP picked it up, and it caused a stir, though
what caused an even bigger stir was Sullivan revealing that the peace
talks about the war would be soon underway.
Sullivan and his people tried to claim
the speech was off the record, but I produced a letter from the
group sponsoring it inviting my newspaper to cover it. Ironically, the only book on Vietnam I've read
that mentions the oil in the South China Sea as a major motive
for the Vietnam War is Chomsky's otherwise reprehensible hit
job on JFK and Oliver Stone.
As we know, natural resources
are often the causes of war. That's why we are still in Afghanistan,
to control the minerals and the opium. We are not there to "win,"
especially since Afghanistan is a place that can't be conquered
in any traditional sense (the last one to do so was Alexander the Great).
To borrow a line from THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, we are
fighting that longest war in our history "to loot the place six ways from sundown."
The New York Times a few years ago actually ran an article admitting
we are there for the minerals. It reads like a shopping list
for the military-industrial complex: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world...erals.html