Hot Air, MD
Oct 12 2007
When genocides collide
posted at 1:30 pm on October 12, 2007
Who is Harrison Salisbury? You’ve probably never heard of him unless
you’re a leftwing activist who has bought into his reporting or
bought his books over the years. He was long feted by the left, was a
friend of the Kennedys, and was against the Vietnam war long before
that became a more mainstream position. As such, he was a poor choice
to be a foreign correspondent (he had already taken a side in an
ongoing war) but he became a foreign correspondent anyway. He played
a little noted role in a genocide that the Democrats have never
called a genocide, probably because they’re largely responsible for
it. And, because it’s not far enough back in time for them to
actually see it for what it was. They seem to need 8 or 9 decades
before they can properly process moving history. The rest of us don’t
have the luxury of waiting that long.
Let’s look back at the 1960s. Harrison Salisbury was the New York
Times’ man in Vietnam. As I wrote about him on my old blog a few
years ago:
During the spring of 1965 the United States was trying to find a way
to end the escalating war that had by that time already been underway
for several bloody years. So on March 5 President Johnson authorized
the Air Force and Navy to cripple the North Vietnamese economy and
war machine through a massive bombing campaign cheerily dubbed
Operation Rolling Thunder. A couple of related campaigns were aimed
at cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, North Vietnam’s main supply
route to its allies in the South via Laos. So Rolling Thunder rolled
into action, systematically striking at military and industrial
targets concentrated around Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. Rolling
Thunder�s targets were military and industrial, but mostly
military, in nature.
Civilians always die in war. Rolling Thunder took place in the days
before smart weapons and Special Forces painting targets with lasers.
Bombs back then were very, very dumb, but Rolling Thunder
wasn�t. And it was working; the British charge d’affairs in
Hanoi at the time later reported that the campaign halted just as
North Vietnam’s economy was on the verge of total collapse by 1967,
the same year the Johnson administration halted it. Had Rolling
Thunder continued much longer, the United States probably would have
won the war.
So why did LBJ pull his best punch just when it was about to bring
victory? Because in the summer of 1966 Salisbury had written
dispatches accusing the US of targeting and killing civilians
intentionally. Mr. Salisbury, also a decorated veteran journalist
like Duranty, reported from Hanoi scenes of nearly unspeakable
devastation. He described the bodies of children killed by American
bombs. He described buses obliterated by American aircraft. He
described an American war against civilians, killing civilians
intentionally. LBJ had not sent in the Air Force to kill Vietnamese
children, but Salisbury reported that to be the case. The adverse
publicity made Johnson gun shy, and he began orchestrating missions
in ways not to win the war but to avoid Salisbury’s poison pen.
Result: Johnson pulled back on Rolling Thunder, the war dragged on,
and thousands more Americans died in what turned out to be a losing
effort. After the fall of Saigon eight years later, a million South
Vietnamese either died, were imprisoned by the Communists who took
over, or tried to escape to the United States on whatever rickety
craft they could find. Many of those `boat people’ never made it
across the Pacific.
The Duranty referenced above was Walter Duranty, the New York Times
man in the USSR who glossed over the Stalinist genocide there. See
any patterns developing? Commie genocides consistently get kid glove
treatment by the NYT, for starters.
The aftermath of our exit from Vietnam might or might not properly be
called a genocide, but only because the bloodbath wasn’t primarily
ethnic in nature. It was primarily political. Nevertheless, about 1
million died and the Communist North took control. The killing fields
in Laos and Cambodia sprang up from the chaos. The US Congress has
never condemned the violence that followed its own actions in
Vietnam: The South collapsed after Congressional Democrats cut their
funding.
Bad journalism can get people killed, and Harrison Salisbury and
Walter Duranty are prime examples of how that can happen. Newsweek is
as well, for its made-up flushed Koran story. We’ve seen some awful
reporting coming out of Iraq, too, where a premature exit on our part
could lead to genocide there.
Bad politics can get people killed, too. Many of the Democrats who
cut off South Vietnam’s funds are still in power (Rep. David Obey,
for instance), and they’re intent on repeating the same actions in
Iraq that led to the massive bloodshed in southeast Asia.
Hypocritically, they’re also the ones voting to condemn the Ottoman
genocide against the Armenians 90 years ago.
How about recognizing and condemning a genocide that you actually had
a hand in causing, Democrats? And how about learning from that, so
that you don’t end up contributing to another one?
genocides-collide/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress