Much has been written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Viet Nam's great victory in the American War. Many of these writings have been insightful and helpful to understanding Viet Nam, then and now, and relevant to understanding the ongoing wars in the world today. I share many of these with you in my blog. However, I believe that much of what has been written in the Western corporate media has also been misleading and unhelpful. So, read everything critically, with an open mind! - Bruce.
Viet Nam marks 40th anniversary of great victory, reunification
A spectacular ceremony with a parade involving nearly 6,000 soldiers, militia, and civilians took place early on April 30 in HCM City to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of southern Việt Nam and national reunification.
Story and more pictures:
By Jacob G. Hornberger
". . .The biggest mistake America has ever made was to graft the U.S. national-security state apparatus onto our nation’s original governmental structure in the 1940s. Doing so fundamentally altered America’s governmental structure and moved the federal government into a totalitarian-like direction — that is, a direction contrary to that envisioned by the Framers.
That’s why the U.S. government today stands for assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, coups, invasions, occupations, secret mass surveillance, wars of aggression, partnerships with dictatorial regimes, and other measures that we ordinarily associate with totalitarian regimes.
That’s why the U.S. government today stands for assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, coups, invasions, occupations, secret mass surveillance, wars of aggression, partnerships with dictatorial regimes, and other measures that we ordinarily associate with totalitarian regimes.
Of course, the war in Vietnam is long past. But the big “war on terrorism” isn’t. It’s time to acknowledge the biggest mistake in our history and rectify it. It’s time to dismantle, not reform, the national-security apparatus.
It’s time to restore a governmental structure based on the Framers’ vision of a constitutional republic. After all, the Cold War, which was the original justification for this deadly and destructive totalitarian-like apparatus, ended a long time ago."
It’s time to restore a governmental structure based on the Framers’ vision of a constitutional republic. After all, the Cold War, which was the original justification for this deadly and destructive totalitarian-like apparatus, ended a long time ago."
By Dana Visalli
"I am on a journey through Vietnam with a group of American Vietnam War veterans who now live in Vietnam and work to address some of the profound human problems still caused by a war that ended 40 years ago.
Known as VFP Hoa Binh Chapter 160, these men work to help people still being maimed by the estimated one and a half billion pounds of bombs (“ordnance”) dropped by the United States on Vietnam during the war that did not explode at the time they were released (7 million tons, or 14 billion pounds of bombs were dropped on Vietnam and an estimated 10% of them failed to detonate).
In addition these American veterans work to help some of the approximately 1 million people (a Red Cross of Vietnam estimate) people born with genetic defects or otherwise disabled or in poor health due to exposure to the 20 million gallons of toxic herbicides sprayed on South Vietnam’s tropical rainforests food and crops. The primary herbicide used was Agent Orange, which contains the known carcinogen dioxin. . .
Beyond the inestimable amount of suffering and death inflicted on the Vietnamese people by the war and its after effects, the destruction wrought to the land, the air and the water of Vietnam by the United States was extreme.
‘Not since the Romans salted the land after destroying Carthage has a nation taken such pains to visit the war on future generations’, wrote Ngo Van Long of the US war against Vietnam.
The damage was not the accidental by-product of war, but part of the attrition strategy which deliberately aimed to drive the peasants into the cities in order to deprive the National Liberation Front of a population and food base and safe jungle havens. ‘Tell the Vietnamese,’ said General Curtis LeMay, ‘that we are going to bomb them back to stone age.’
Much of Vietnam was turned into "free fire zones", into which hurtled immense tonnages of explosives and herbicides. The intention was to crush a peasant army by the profligate use of technologically advanced weapons and techniques. This involved truly massive rural area bombing, chemical and mechanical forest destruction, large-scale crop destruction, destruction of food stores, the destruction of hospitals, and large-scale population displacements; in short, the massive, intentional disruption of both the natural and human ecologies of the region. 5 million hectares, over 40% of the area of South Vietnam, were obliterated or badly damaged. . .
The flora and fauna of Vietnam have suffered profound losses due first to the destruction of the country’s forests during the war, followed by the needs of a growing population of impoverished and traumatized people afterwards. . .
If one absorbs the fact that we committed genocide against the 3.5 million of the Vietnamese people that we slaughtered in the American War (this number being one of the most recent estimates), and ecocide upon the natural environment of Vietnam, and takes into account that there was no reason whatsoever for the war, one comes to fully appreciate just how dysfunctional and destructive the human mind and so-called ‘leadership’ can be.
It is important to recall that the Vietnam War is not an isolated event. As I wrote about in my previous essay in this series (which can be read online by googling ‘War is God’s Way of Teaching Geography’), just before the destruction of Vietnam we obliterated North Korea; 15 years after Vietnam we were bombing Iraq. Today we are bombing five countries at the same time.
The greatest danger in the world today to the ecological integrity of the biosphere and the sanctity of life is the United States government and the masses of mindless young men who do its bidding, being incapable of thinking for themselves and starving for the identity of the uniform.
If that seems like a radical statement, re-read the previous paragraphs. At a deeper level the problem is the superstitious, almost religious response of the human mind to external authority.
We know power corrupts, but we persist in putting mere mortals in positions of extreme power. The global situation will improve only when we take responsibility for our own financial, ethical and ecological lives, and cease to allow ourselves to be led around by the nose by so-called leaders who are inevitably corrupted by the positions of power into which we ourselves put them.
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience." - Howard Zinn (US historian). . .
Dana Visalli is a biologist living in Washington State.
His web page: http://methownaturalist.com/
Read the entire article, and read/post public comments: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41733.htm
Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages..., and Weighing Their Implications
Debate over the nature and impact of civilian casualties from U.S. aerial attacks continues. “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.1 The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and of its offshoot ISIS, suggests the answer there.2
Reflecting in 2012 on U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, the former director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, Robert Greiner, wrote:
“One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”3
That same month a Yemeni lawyer warned:
“DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”4. . .
What of sustained strategic carpet bombing? Is there any correlation between bomb tonnage and political blowback?
During World War Two, United States aircraft dropped 1.6 million tons of bombs in the European theater and approximately 500,000 tons in the Pacific theater. Some 160,000 tons of bombs fell on Japan, nearly all of it in the final six months of the war. Much of it targeted civilian industrial areas, beginning with the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and including the atomic bombs dropped that August on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Decisive victory proved more elusive in regional conflicts of the postwar era, even when the U.S. continued to deploy massive bomb tonnages.
During the Korean War of 1950-53, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,000 tons of napalm, mostly on North Korea.7 And from 1961 to 1972, American aircraft dropped approximately one million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, and much more on rural areas of South Vietnam — approximately 4 million tons of bombs, 400,000 tons of napalm, and 19 million gallons of herbicides.8
On a per capita basis, Laos, with its much smaller and dispersed population, may have suffered a yet higher rate of aerial bombardment during 1964-73 – “nearly a ton for every person in Laos,” according to the New York Times.9
The late Fred Branfman, who learned Lao and worked with refugees displaced in the country in 1967-69, was one of the first to publicize the human toll of that secret U.S. bombing, in his 1972 "Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War". Branfman’s book was reprinted in 2013, with a foreword by Alfred W. McCoy that terms the Laos campaign “history’s longest and largest air war.”10 . . .
...In 1989 one of us (Kiernan) had published an article calculating a figure of 539,000 tons dropped on Cambodia.13
...Our 2006 article, “Bombs over Cambodia”, using the same database and analysis, calculated a figure of 2.7 million tons dropped on Cambodia in 1965-75.15 Our estimate, published in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, and in 2007 in The Asia-Pacific Journal, was widely quoted.16 But in 2010 we corrected that estimate, here in The Asia-Pacific Journal. We revised it back down to around 500,000 tons.17 ...We concluded: “It remains undisputed that in 1969-73 alone, around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia.”18
...[W]hatever the precise U.S. bombing tonnage dropped on Cambodia, it was massive. And as we have documented in three studies, much of it fell indiscriminately on populated rural areas. The bombardment’s humanitarian and political effects are clear. We stand by the conclusions we have published on these issues over many years of research:
During the four years of United States B-52 bombardment of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, the Khmer Rouge forces grew from possibly one thousand guerrillas to over 200,000 troops and militia.25
Writing about Yemen in 2013, Albert Hunt reported in the New York Times on a smaller-scale recurrence of such expansion:
“There is much evidence . . . that the drone strikes are creating more terrorists. In a report this year for the Council on Foreign Relations, the national security scholar Micah Zenko said that in Yemen, the Pentagon had conducted dozens of drone strikes, killing more than 700 people. In 2009, the Obama administration said there were ‘several hundred’ Qaeda members in that country; by 2012, the group had ‘a few thousand members’.”26
Dropping vast tonnages of bombs has to be destructive, and carpet bombing can inflict comprehensive damage. But understanding the human toll requires study of the impact on people on the ground and, as Fred Branfman did in Laos over 45 years ago, listening to their voices. And understanding the political consequences requires taking account of their responses.
Recruiters propagandizing among bombing victims have adopted varied political strategies, including genocide in the case of the Khmer Rouge, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.
The question whether the United States “creates more terrorists than it kills” has not gone away.27
Ben Kiernan is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985), The Pol Pot Regime (1996), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2008). He is Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University.
Taylor Owen is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (2015). He is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia.
Recommended citation:
Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 16, No. 3, April 27, 2015.
Related articles:
•Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent
•Sahr Conway-Lanz, The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II: The Persistence of Norms Against Targeting Civilians in the Korean War
• Mark Selden, Bombs Bursting in Air: State and citizen responses to the US firebombing and Atomic bombing of Japan
•Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction
•Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War
Read the entire article, and read/post public comments:
By Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
Debate over the nature and impact of civilian casualties from U.S. aerial attacks continues. “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.1 The rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and of its offshoot ISIS, suggests the answer there.2
Reflecting in 2012 on U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, the former director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, Robert Greiner, wrote:
“One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”3
That same month a Yemeni lawyer warned:
“DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”4. . .
What of sustained strategic carpet bombing? Is there any correlation between bomb tonnage and political blowback?
During World War Two, United States aircraft dropped 1.6 million tons of bombs in the European theater and approximately 500,000 tons in the Pacific theater. Some 160,000 tons of bombs fell on Japan, nearly all of it in the final six months of the war. Much of it targeted civilian industrial areas, beginning with the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and including the atomic bombs dropped that August on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Decisive victory proved more elusive in regional conflicts of the postwar era, even when the U.S. continued to deploy massive bomb tonnages.
During the Korean War of 1950-53, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,000 tons of napalm, mostly on North Korea.7 And from 1961 to 1972, American aircraft dropped approximately one million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, and much more on rural areas of South Vietnam — approximately 4 million tons of bombs, 400,000 tons of napalm, and 19 million gallons of herbicides.8
On a per capita basis, Laos, with its much smaller and dispersed population, may have suffered a yet higher rate of aerial bombardment during 1964-73 – “nearly a ton for every person in Laos,” according to the New York Times.9
The late Fred Branfman, who learned Lao and worked with refugees displaced in the country in 1967-69, was one of the first to publicize the human toll of that secret U.S. bombing, in his 1972 "Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War". Branfman’s book was reprinted in 2013, with a foreword by Alfred W. McCoy that terms the Laos campaign “history’s longest and largest air war.”10 . . .
...In 1989 one of us (Kiernan) had published an article calculating a figure of 539,000 tons dropped on Cambodia.13
...Our 2006 article, “Bombs over Cambodia”, using the same database and analysis, calculated a figure of 2.7 million tons dropped on Cambodia in 1965-75.15 Our estimate, published in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, and in 2007 in The Asia-Pacific Journal, was widely quoted.16 But in 2010 we corrected that estimate, here in The Asia-Pacific Journal. We revised it back down to around 500,000 tons.17 ...We concluded: “It remains undisputed that in 1969-73 alone, around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia.”18
...[W]hatever the precise U.S. bombing tonnage dropped on Cambodia, it was massive. And as we have documented in three studies, much of it fell indiscriminately on populated rural areas. The bombardment’s humanitarian and political effects are clear. We stand by the conclusions we have published on these issues over many years of research:
“The evidence of survivors from many parts of [Cambodia] suggests that at least tens of thousands, probably in the range of 50,000 to 150,000 deaths, resulted from the US bombing campaigns . . . The Pol Pot leadership of the Khmer Rouge can in no way be exonerated from responsibility for committing genocide against their own people. But neither can Nixon or Kissinger escape judgement for their role in the slaughter that was a prelude to the genocide.” (1989)22
“The still-incomplete [Pentagon] database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that . . . over 10 per cent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all …
The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent.
First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.” (2006)23
“Cambodia became in 1969-73 one of the most heavily-bombarded countries in history (along with North Korea, South Vietnam, and Laos).Then, in 1975-79, it suffered genocide at the hands of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge communists, who had been military targets of the U.S. bombing but also became its political beneficiaries.” (2010)24
Unknown US Bombing Targets, Cambodia
Writing about Yemen in 2013, Albert Hunt reported in the New York Times on a smaller-scale recurrence of such expansion:
“There is much evidence . . . that the drone strikes are creating more terrorists. In a report this year for the Council on Foreign Relations, the national security scholar Micah Zenko said that in Yemen, the Pentagon had conducted dozens of drone strikes, killing more than 700 people. In 2009, the Obama administration said there were ‘several hundred’ Qaeda members in that country; by 2012, the group had ‘a few thousand members’.”26
Dropping vast tonnages of bombs has to be destructive, and carpet bombing can inflict comprehensive damage. But understanding the human toll requires study of the impact on people on the ground and, as Fred Branfman did in Laos over 45 years ago, listening to their voices. And understanding the political consequences requires taking account of their responses.
Recruiters propagandizing among bombing victims have adopted varied political strategies, including genocide in the case of the Khmer Rouge, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.
The question whether the United States “creates more terrorists than it kills” has not gone away.27
Ben Kiernan is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985), The Pol Pot Regime (1996), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2008). He is Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University.
Taylor Owen is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (2015). He is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia.
Recommended citation:
Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 16, No. 3, April 27, 2015.
Related articles:
•Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent
•Sahr Conway-Lanz, The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II: The Persistence of Norms Against Targeting Civilians in the Korean War
• Mark Selden, Bombs Bursting in Air: State and citizen responses to the US firebombing and Atomic bombing of Japan
•Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction
•Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War
Read the entire article, and read/post public comments:
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