AmyStrange
Philosopher
This all sounds so familiar. I beg your indulgences while I take a trip down memory lane....
-Gulf of Tonkin incident-
- "Every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war" - Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, 1962
- "I am convinced that we have taken the military, psychological, economic and political initiative from the enemy... Victory is not attainable, if we do not exploit our hard-won initiative." -General Paul D. Harkins, 1963
- "The major part of the US military task can be completed by the end of 1965." Sec Def McNamara, 1963
- "Raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country" - President Lyndon Johnson on North Vietnam, 1964
- "I am convinced that American mobility and firepower, knowledge and courage, will defeat the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese." - Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, CiC Pacific, 1964
-Tet Offensive-
- "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." - LBJ, 1964
- "I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn't have a breaking point." - Henry Kissinger, 1964
- "Tell 'em they've got to stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age." -Ret. General Curtis LeMay, 1965
- "It's silly talking about how many years... when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas." -Ronald Reagan, 1965
- "We'll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster." - Gen. Westmoreland, 1966
- "I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. We are making progress." Gen. Westmoreland, 1967
- "The enemy has not won a single major victory... He is losing control of the people... The end begins to come into view." - Gen. Westmoreland, 1967
- "We are winning now. And if we prevent the enemy from winning, we will have won the war." -Robert McNamara, 1967
-Paris Peace Accords-
- "The enemy's 'General Offensive' has been a failure... we have reached a turning point." - Westmoreland, 1968
- "Vietnamization is working... the South Vietnamese are increasingly shouldering the full burden of the ground war." Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, 1970
- "The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time." - President Richard Nixon, 1972
- "We believe that peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is within sight." - NSA Henry Kissinger, 1972
- "The American people have had enough. We can't go back in. We gave them the tools, but we couldn't give them the will to fight." - President Gerald Ford, 1975 (as Saigon was falling)
- "The tactical success was ours, but the strategic failure was also ours. We won every battle, but we lost the war because we didn't understand the nature of the conflict."- General Westmoreland, 1976
- "I guess we just didn't realize that they [the North] were willing to die for their country in numbers that we couldn't match or even understand." - General Maxwell Taylor, undated
Colonel Harry Summers: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield."
Colonel Tu (North Vietnamese): "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
Off topic, I know, but one thing I learned a long time ago was that we should've been helping North Vietnam, but since Russia was behind them, it became a war against communism, but that's just my opinion.
Your mileage (as always) may vary if course.
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