© U.S. Air ForceAir Force F-105s bomb a target in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam on June 14, 1966.
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.
As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as
Pete Seeger satirized it, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.
Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the
1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive
Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them.
Comment: Washington D.C. is so overrun with those of the psychopathic mindset that it truly is a cesspool of the worst types imaginable. It attracts those who will step on anyone or anything to get their way. Unfortunately it's the public the suffers and they won't stop until they've completely run the country into the ground. And if one comes there with the hopes of doing anything to truly help the public, think again. It's basically "Play the game - or else". Not even the President of the United States is exempt.