Tuesday, August 7, 2007
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Ion Mihai Pacepa: Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush - '...During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness...'
The story of the Vietnam conflict will never be fully told, the denial literature, the denial pontifications are so mainstreamed and triumphalist that there is no way that story will ever be more honestly told in a thoroughgoing sense, even though some individual and worthy efforts have been made.
Still, the lessons can be told and perhaps will end up having some positive effect in relation to Iraq and the M.E. in general. Not everyone has placed their hands so resolutely and so firmly over their eyes and ears.