RIPPLE SALVO… HUMBLE HOST POSTS THIS SPECIAL RTR AS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE TAKEN IN STRIDE… HERE ARE THREE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT Office of the Historian Documents dated 15 February 1967 that every warrior who flew or fought in Vietnam will find interesting, perhaps captivating…
Document #81… A letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Johnson is delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wrapping up the failed February peace drill called SUNFLOWER. With the hand over of the letter the delivery boy (Lee Chang, the North Vietnamese Charge’ in Moscow) has a few things to say as well…
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d81
Document #82… A two page letter from Ho Chi Minh: “The Vietnamese people will never yield to force nor agree to talks under these circumstances. Our cause is entirely just. It is our hope that the Government of the United States acts with reason.”…
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d82
Document #83… A six-page telephone conversation between the President and Walt Rostow, the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs: “What do we do now?”… “Let’s have a meeting.”…
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d83
Humble Host is of the opinion that our fence-sitting President was presented with the opportunity to leap off either side of the fence at this point and the war would have been over and the nation would have been free to work on all the other problems that were festering then and still are. LBJ had three choices:
(1) Shock the world and go the withdrawal route with a cessation of bombing on Ho Chi Minh’s terms. We assassinated the leader in South Vietnam to get involved in the first place and with the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin Incident and Resolution based on a myth, we had a moral obligation to wrap it up and get out. There never was a line of dominoes to fall if Vietnam went communist from the Mekong to the Chinese border. China? they were wrapped around the axle and no threat. Soviet Union? They wanted it over too. Cut the losses and turn to dealing with the civil rights problems at home… More butter, fewer guns.
(2) Continue sitting on the fence. How did that work out for you, Mr. President? And meanwhile, 50,000 more good men died and the nation came apart at the seams, perhaps never to heal…
(3) Go full-bore with everything in the arsenal but nukes…Execute Linebacker +++ before the North Vietnamese elevated their Integrated air defense system to the extent they had by 1972… China? Divided and quarreling in-house. Preoccupied. Soviets? Would have done nothing but wait out the final result, which would have been about the same result that exists in Southeast Asia today. We would have declared victory, agreed to elections in the South and backed out. Democracy would founder and fail and socialism or worse would be the long-term result…
Vietnam was one heck of a history lesson from fifty years ago for our country– it cost us dearly to go to that class… There are many aspects of that painful lesson that cry out for the incoming Trump regime to take a hard look at. Fence sitters finish last. And sitting on the fence in the Mid-East and South Asia is what we are doing. History is the teacher and to ignore the lessons of February 1967 is first class folly.
CAG QUOTE: MAO TSE-TUNG: “Imaginative, intelligent and bold leadership is absolutely essential.”
Lest we forget… Bear