RIPPLE SALVO… #866… TREATY: ” AN AGREEMENT MADE BY NEGOTIATION OR DIPLOMACY BETWEEN TWO OR MORE STATES OR GOVERNMENTS.”… In the fallout of the President’s trip to and from Helsinki to talk to Putin, the integrity of the United States commitment to the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) of 29 nations has been questioned. Our obligation to respond to “an armed attack on one is an attack on all” (“The Defense Guarantee”) is at the heart of the questions. Tucker Carlson, among others, wants to know if an attack on new NATO member Montenegro will result in American troops and forces fighting in the Balkans. The U.S. experience with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) provides a history lesson worthy of review. This from the State Department, Office of Historian:…”…the SEATO charter was also vitally important to the American rationale for the Vietnam War. The United States used the organization as its justification for refusing to go forward with the 1956 elections intended to reunify Vietnam, instead maintaining the divide between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. As the conflict in Vietnam unfolded, the inclusion of Vietnam as a territory under SEATO protection gave the United States the legal framework for its continued involvement there.” (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/seato). Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CBS, 1965: “I believe the integrity of the American commitment is the principal structure of peace throughout the world.”… Author Jeffrey Record takes this on below… but first…

Good Morning: Day EIGHT HUNDRED SIXTY-SIX of a return to the events of the 1960s and the heroic participants of the air war over North Vietnam called Rolling Thunder…

HEAD LINES from the OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER on Friday, 19 JULY 1968…

THE WAR: Page 1: “JOHNSON AND THIEU MEET IN HONOLULU”… “President Johnson’s and South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu’s formal talks apparently will embrace possible direct Saigon-Vietcong negotiations and a total bombing halt in the North. In advance of today’s first formal meeting at the hilltop headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford said he avoided those two topics during his Saigon visit earlier in the week ‘in order in leave that up to Thieu and President Johnson’…. Before leaving Saigon, Thieu promised his countrymen in a television address that South Vietnam’s allies will not be allowed to impose ‘a solution harmful to our national interests.’… ‘I will not go to Hawaii to surrender to the Communists, to sell the nation, to concede territory, or to accept a solution involving a coalition with Communists imposed by the United States, such as Communists and a number of unscrupulous politicians have falsely claimed.’… “… Page 1: “MORTAR ROUNDS SOUTHEAST OF SAIGON”… “Vietcong gunners fired a dozen rocket and mortar rounds into the Nha Be petroleum depot seven miles southeast of Saigon late Thursday, but U.S. spokesmen reported no casualties and light damage…U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese infantrymen probing high ridges just south of the central portion of the demilitarized zone still have not made any significant contact with North Vietnamese troops, Associated  Press correspondent John Lengel reported. The operation is the first major allied move into the area in 18 months. Allied troops continued their patrols around Saigon to intercept any attempt to launch the long expected third major attack of the year in the capital.”… Page 1: “U.S. NAVY LANDING CRAFT SEIZED BY CAMBODIANS–TEN AMERICANS IN CREW”… “The Cambodian navy was reported today to have seized an American patrol boat in the Mekong Delta and arrested 11 Americans and one South Vietnamese aboard. …Saigon has confirmed that a Navy landing craft was missing in the delta but said it had 10 Americans aboard…. Cambodian officials hold that the Navy boat was seized a mile inside Cambodian river waters.”…

PEACE TALKS: NO COVERAGE…

Page 1: “JAMES EARL RAY ARRIVES AT MEMPHIS JAIL UNDER TIGHT SECURITY GUARD–WILL FACE TRIAL IN DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING CASE”… “…handcuffed and wearing what appeared to be  bullet-proof vest, was whisked into the Shelby County Jail before dawn today to await trial on a charge of murdering Dr. Martin Luther King.”… Page 1: “IKE ENDORSEMENT OF NIXON DOESN’T SURPRISE”… “…Nixon told newsmen shortly after Eisenhower’s Thursday that persuasion of uncommitted delegates was one possible benefit.”… Page 1: “SHE’S INCREDIBLE”… “…15 year old Philippine girl reads at 50,000 words a minute with nearly 100% comprehension…In a test she read a four page article for the final test of a five-week rapid reading course. She zipped through the article, containing 3,135 words in 3.5 seconds–an average of more than 53,600 words per minute.”… Page 2: “ASSOCIATE JUSTICE ABE FORTAS SURVIVES THIRD ROUND OF ROUGH CONGRESSIONAL QUIZ”…. “Abe Fortas told Senate critics the Constitution allows him to lecture and write about issues that come before the Supreme Court, but forbids him to answer questions from members of Congress about the same matters….he repeated this theme over and over Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee as he testified for the third day on his qualifications to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States.”… Page 4: “NUCLEAR CAPABILITY OPENS WAY TO CONVENTIONAL WAR”… “Pentagon leaders say the United States and the Soviet Union may have reached such an even balance of terror that nuclear weapons will no longer deter conventional wars–nobody will take the threat of their use seriously. Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown has told a Senate subcommittee that each nuclear superpower is so strong ‘that say all-out thermonuclear war would inflict unacceptable damage to both.’… Page 5: “HUMPHREY FAVORS TED KENNEDY AS #2 MAN ON DEMOCRATIC BALLOT”… “

19 JULY 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… Ogden Standard-Examiner (AP) No coverage of air war north of the DMZ… VIETNAM: AIR LOSSES (Chris Hobson) There was one fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 19 July 1968…

(1) An EB-66B of the 41st TEWS and 355th TFW landed short at Takhli and the aircraft was damaged beyond economical repair. Both pilots survived.

SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/MIA/POW) IN THE FOUR YEARS OF THE OPERATION OVER NORTH VIETNAM ON 19 JULY…

1965… NONE…

1966… LIEUTENANT TERRY ARDEN DENNISON, USN… (KIA)… and … 1LT STEVEN WHITMAN DIAMOND, USAF… (KIA)…

1967… COMMANDER HERBERT HUNTER, USN… (KIA)…

1968… NONE…

“Leave a Remembrance” at VVMF : “Wall Of Faces”…

RIPPLE SALVO… #866… JEFFREY RECORD addressed the American use of the SEATO treaty as justification for our land war involvement in the Vietnam war –sometimes called “The Second Indochina War–in his outstanding analysis of “Why We Lost in Vietnam,” THE WRONG WAR (Naval Institute Press).

I quote from Chapter One…

“In Southeast Asia…Munich blinded rather than enlightened American officialdom. policymakers’ tendency to view events in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s through the prism of events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the very disaster memories of which today shape U.S. policy just as profoundly as did memories of Munich in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia the United States was not dealing with the Soviet Union but rather a small, poor communist state. There was simply no analogy between Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, and between South Vietnam and the Sudetenland. As noted, the Asian communist dictator was not an instrument of Chinese expansionism. Nor did he harbor imperial ambitions outside of the boundaries of French Indochina, a piece of real estate of virtually no intrinsic value to the United States. North Vietnam was a small impoverished state whose ultimate victory in Indochina toppled not a single additional domino of any strategic consequence. (Hanoi’s ability, having conquered South Vietnam, to dominate Cambodia and Laos was never in doubt, and after Laos’s neutralization in 1962 no serious consideration was given to a direct U.S. defense of either country.) John F. Kennedy’s characterization of South Vietnam a ‘the cornerstone of the Free World in Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike’ whose loss to communism would threaten the security of ‘Burma, Thailand, India, Japan (and) the Philippines’ was, quite simply, rubbish.

“The rationale of last resort for those who plunged the United States into the Vietnam War was the perceived imperative of maintaining the integrity of U.S. defense commitments world wide. The argument was as simple as it was specious: the United States was committed to defend South Vietnam from external aggression, and failure to honor that commitment would lessen confidence in U.S. commitments elsewhere, from Berlin to Seoul. It made little difference whether the commitment to South Vietnam’s defense was wise or militarily sustainable; America’s word was at stake. Dean Rusk summed up this time of reasoning in an interview with CBS Television News in 1965: ‘The fact is that we know we have a commitment. the south Vietnamese know we have a commitment. The South Vietnamese know we have a commitment. the Communist world knows we have a commitment. The rest of the world knows it. Now, this means that the integrity of the American commitment is at the heart of this problem. I believe that the integrity of the American commitment is at the heart of this problem. I believe that the integrity of the American commitment is the principal structure of peace throughout the world.’ Rusk then added that ‘if our allies or, more particularly, if our adversaries would discover that the American commitment is not worth anything, then the world would face dangers of  which we have not yet dreamed.

“Was the United States obligate to do what it did in Vietnam? Johnson administration officials paraded the SEATO Treaty of 1954 ad nauseam in public speeches and congressional testimony as the legal basis of the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam’s defense. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who regarded the extension of U.S. defense guarantees to any and all willing countries, regardless of feasibility considerations, as an effective deterrent to communist aggression, had indeed conceived the treaty as providing the legal pretext for future U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. A pretext, however, is not an obligation. There was nothing in the treaty that enjoined a U.S. defense of South Vietnam; unlike the NATO treaty, which mandated immediate military reaction by the United States to an armed attack on any ally within the treaty area, SEATO required each signatory only that it ‘meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.’ The SEATO Treaty did not preclude the United States from entering the Vietnam War, but it certainly did not mandate intervention. It surely did not obligate an armed response to local insurgency, even a communist one. So testified Secretary of state Dulles in support of SEATO’s ratification. ‘If there is a revolutionary movement in Vietnam…. we would consult together (with other members of SEATO). …But we have no undertaking to put it down: all we have is an undertaking to consult together as to what to do about it.”…  End quote from THE WRONG WAR…

A raging argument in our divided nation is heating up between “globalists” and “nationalists.” Globalists think it would be a great idea to expand NATO to ever more members. Nationalists are realists who believe the United States “must think before it commits” to promises and obligations our impoverished nation –$22-trillion in debt– will be hard pressed to fulfill. The Vietnam War and SEATO Treaty experience deserve inclusion in that “thinking before committing.”…. Carlson asks: “Are our treaties serving us, or imperiling us?”…

RTR quote for 19 July: CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War: “…first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”…

Lest we forget…      Bear