Some of us are old enough[1]I was just barely young enough to not have served in Vietnam had I been drafted. When I did try to enlist, after graduation from college, my right eye failed the vision test anyway, so I never served … Continue reading to remember how President Lyndon Johnson slowly expanded our involvement in the war in Vietnam, piece by piece, little by little, until we had half a million troops there.
There are 58,276 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, but our ‘leaders’ in Washington seem to have forgotten that.
Biden gives Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes within Russia using US weapons
By Alex Marquardt, Jennifer Hansler and Kylie Atwood, CNN | Thursday, May 30, 2024 | 19:19 PM EDTPresident Joe Biden has given permission to Ukraine to strike inside Russian territory with American munitions, though he has restricted their use so Kyiv can only hit targets over the border close to Kharkiv after Russia made significant advances around the city in the northeastern part of the country close to the Russian border, two US officials told CNN.
“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use US supplied-weapons for counterfire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the officials said.
The loosening of the restrictions marks a break from long-standing policy and comes amid growing international pressure from close US allies. But it is limited to the area around Kharkiv, and Ukraine has not requested permission beyond that, the official said, adding that they do not anticipate the US widening the area allowed.
Did President Johnson “anticipate the US widening the area allowed”? He certainly moved to widen American participation in the war, and later President Richard Nixon expanded the war by sending troops into Cambodia, to attack Viet Cong bases and supply lines there, but, in the end, that war was lost, with the US putting its collective tail between our legs and fleeing in 1973. Two years later, the Communists launched a major assault, which completely conquered South Vietnam. All of that blood and all of that treasure was wasted. If you haven’t read David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest, and how the cool, calculated thinking of the super-geniuses hired by President John F Kennedy slowly but surely deepened our involvement in that failed war, you should.
Further down:
The previous day, key European leaders signaled they had shifted position.
Speaking at a news conference alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined that French weapons sent to Ukraine, including long-range missiles, were permitted to target bases inside Russia.
“Ukrainian soil is being attacked from bases in Russia,” Macron said during a visit to Schloss Meseberg in Brandenburg, Germany. “So how do we explain to the Ukrainians that we’re going to have to protect these towns and basically everything we’re seeing around Kharkiv at the moment, if we tell them you are not allowed to hit the point from which the missiles are fired?”
“We think that we should allow them to neutralize the military sites from which the missiles are fired and, basically, the military sites from which Ukraine is attacked,” Macron continued.
Is this not the same thinking which President Nixon used to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia? While the Khmer Rouge were already a thing in Cambodia, following the successful coup d’etat by General Lon Nol which overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, but it wasn’t until after the US was gone that Pol Pot and his army of fanatics and sadists took over that benighted land, and the ‘incursion’ into Cambodia only helped the Khmer Rouge in the long run.
Now, European security services believe that Russia might be behind a spate of fires and infrastructure attacks. The Russo-Ukraine War appears to be slowly expanding. And if NATO and the United States are allowing their weapons to be used in Russia proper, why wouldn’t it be just as allowable for Russia to attack infrastructure in the European NATO nations?
Let’s tell the truth here. Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came nowhere close to the success anticipated for it, and Ukraine resisted far more strongly than ever anticipated, the Ukrainians are slowly losing this war. It does not matter how much money and war materiel we send Ukraine: they cannot defeat Russia unless NATO sends actual ground troops to fight directly the Russian Army, and that is World War III.
References
| ↑1 | I was just barely young enough to not have served in Vietnam had I been drafted. When I did try to enlist, after graduation from college, my right eye failed the vision test anyway, so I never served in the military. |
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Your analogy is particularly apt, since even though they are technically in an alliance of equals, there is another perspective in which China is waging a proxy war against NATO. China isn’t in a hot war with the West yet, but Biden has repeatedly engaged in saber-rattling so clumsy his staff had to walk it back, and so it has nearly as much incentive to help Russia bleed our arsenals dry as Russia has to accept their help.
Following on from that, I read the article about the fires and there’s a lot of claims and accusations. But China is the one with a formal strategy of Unrestricted Warfare, not Russia; and the Muslim hordes that Europe rolled out the red carpet for are quite willing and able to engage in random violence without foreign involvement (beyond their own foreign selves).
Moreover, from regularly reading the Substack of Simplicius The Thinker, I now believe that Ukraine couldn’t win even if NATO went all in. And with drones providing both total battlefield real-time surveillance and hyper-precise munitions, it would make Vietnam look like a walk in a jungle park.
SCIVO wrote:
It’s hard to say: Russia still has the manpower advantage, and now two years of combat experience, but the Russian population are deeply unhappy about how this war has gone. But the NATO nations have to travel just to get to the front, and we’ve seen, to our regret, just how well the mighty United States has done in wars half-way around the world. We’ve won most of the battles, but still always lost the wars.