Off another thread, to Bible Believers...if you had been a Hebrew at the time of the

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/vietnam-a-war-on-civilians/comment-page-1/

" But as scholar and journalist Nick Turse shows in a new book that is scrupulously documented, what makes the memory of this war so worthy of repression is that its defining feature was mass atrocities against civilians. Rape; the massacres of women, children, and the elderly; military vehicles running over civilians for sport; “Zippo raids” that burned down villages; indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment; despoliation of crops and drinking water; routinized torture—this was the unredeemable essence of our Vietnam War, not American teenagers coming of age and bonding against a bamboo backdrop, not “good intentions” in Washington leading us into a “quagmire.” "

This is from "The American Conservative".

 

Not from the Pentagon Papers which I asked for a citation from.

The book you quote is someones opinion unsupported with facts.

Once again considering the uncensored and unrestricted nature of the media during the Vietnam war how did such widespread atrocities escape the notice of the media and press?

Name another such similar act of murder by US troops as the crime committed at My Lai. Individual do not compare. In a war lasting ten years involving millions there will be individual crimes which is why the military has it's own law enforcement. I am refering to mass slaughter of hundreds of innocents. Any examples?

BTW yes the nuking of Japan was quote necessary for winning the war.

 

Unfortunately American soldiers did commit atrocities and lesser acts of cruelty in Vietnam. Any city containing half a million young men will have rapes, murders, and assaults. When that city is made up of military men engaged fighting a tough, brutal and determined enemy the "crime rate" will be higher.

The overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Vietnam were the result of the basic tactics and weapons used. Artillery and aerial bombardment was often used in Vietnam to minimize troop losses, a strategic choice that caused suffering and death for civilians. But there were proportionally fewer such casualties than in either World War II or the Korean War. In WW II for example, American firepower doctrine regularly leveled towns, villages, and cities, causing large numbers of civilian as well as military casualties. In Vietnam, where many civilians were cooperating with the enemy, the Communist NVA/VC infiltrated the civilian population making discrimination during bombardment difficult or impossible to practice.

During the period 1 January 1965 to 31 August 1973, there were 241 cases which involved allegations of war crimes by United States Army troops (excluding My Lai). One hundred and sixty of these cases, upon investigation, were determined to be unsubstantiated. Substantiated allegations of war crimes violations committed in Vietnam by U.S. personnel were prosecuted. From January 1965 through August 1973, 36 cases involving war crimes allegations against Army personnel were tried by court-martial. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 U.S. soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese.

 

Once again no crime on the scale of My Lai can be shown.

Yes crimes are committed in war as are atrocities.

These crimes are rather subjective however and do not compare to mass murder of hundreds.

Cutting the ears off of a corpse may be an atrocity but it is not nearly the same as slaughtering innocents after all a corpse feels nothing.

241 allegations of crimes over an 8 year period is not a lot especially when most of them are unsubtantiated. That is lower than the crime rate of the average city.

As I stated no one denies crimes were commited but they were crimes they were not the norm nor were such actions policy.

 

Carpet bombing, napalm, and village destruction was policy. All in a war we created the excuse for in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, proven to be a black flag to give an excuse for escalation.
The whole war was a war crime.
This is not an indictment on the men who fought in it, but rather those that waged it.

 

This is all false they were not polcies you cannot provide one document on which such policies are written.

The rest is just your idealology

 

Gulf of Tonkin false flag is ideology?
Denying it is ideology. That was explicitly discussed in the PP. It is not a matter of conjecture.

 

Say it was for a "good reason"....would you kill a child if God (or his emissaries on Earth) told you to?

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BTW, WHO TOLD the Hebrew soldiers to kill the children and babies...specifically?


Did God speak to them individually...or through their commander?

 

The Gulf of tonkin incident HAPPENED it was an exageration of the attack which led to the resolution and the war.

Calling the entire war a crime is in fact idealology and it also ignores many other relevant facts such as the SEATO treaty and the aggression of North Vietnam against the south.

 

No it DIDN'T HAPPEN. That is a matter of record.
How was what North Vietnam did our problem?

 

It did it was exaggerated that is the record.

Once again does the word SEATO mean anything to you?

 

I don't know what you mean by 'policy'. A thousand isolated incidents of murdering prisoners or turning them over to the White Mice to be murdered begins to sound like a policy.

 

It was fabricated.
SEATO was a treaty signed in the Phillipines that was ineffective from its inception and was a paper tiger, a thin excuse for the U.S. to act as it saw fit, as none of the other members had anything to contribute.
What about it?

 

It was not fabricated.

There were actually two incidents one on August 2 and one on August 4 1964. The second one appears to have been a non - incident in which a US Navy ship fired at radar ghosts.

The first incident however was an actually engagement between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese torpedo boats and even photographic documentation proves it happened. The questions which are still being debated is what provoked the incident, who fired first, and how bad was it. But it did happen and that is fact.

Where SEATO was signed is irrelevant since treaties are not binding once signed. They are binding when ratified by the Senate and SEATO was ratified making it a legitimate treaty. The point is the treaty did in fact make South Vietnam an ally and therefore the aggression from North Vietnam was our business. The only argument being how much of our business and how should we have responded. The treaty did not require military intervention but did not forbid it either.

As for other nations which had nothing to contribute you may wish to explain this to the many troops from Indonesia, Korea, and Australia who served and fought alongside us in Vietnam.

 

Just like the pathetic smattering that made the "coalition of the willing" that allowed Bush to deceitfully pretend this was not a unilateral invasion of a foreign country.

 

That is what is known as a false equivelance one has nothing to do with the other.

 

why?

I can't imagine a circumstance in which it's okay to kill children, wholesale. If you can, then I suspect you've crossed to the dark side without even knowing it.
That's the tricky thing about religion - eventually you can't tell night from day.

Of course, you may be an atheist who's simply trying to take the broader view - but even then, you'd need to tie yourself into a fairly complex knot to come up with a scenario which makes it okay to slaughter children.

 

Very equivalent.
Look up the numbers that sent troops to Vietnam.
Paltry.

 

Numbers did not send troops to Vietnam Presidents did.

False equivelance

 

Wow. Your desperation is starting to show.

 

Simple facts nothing desperate about them. If you meant something other than numbers you should have said so.

 

me personally no but my so-called leaders (european politicians) have no qualms about such actions and neither do our troops apparently.

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they did it in hiroshima, americans and they are atheists.

 

Amalekites have been Israel's enemy for many generations. This family of Amalek was what we know as a weed in the middle of your backyard... no other solution but to kill it from its root so it won't grow anymore.

 

Nonsense, you sound like Ward Churchill. There was no official policy of eradication. I understand why settlers periodicaly got upset having to put up with atrocities like these: http://www.reclinercommentaries.com/2011/04/fate-worse-than-death.html

I'm not an expert on Jackson, but he couldn't have been worse than Obama.

When you do a Pearl Harbor, these things happen. To repeat, after the nukes, some in the Japanese military wanted to continue fighting. Had we not done that, many more, both American and Japanese, would have died.

Nonsense, I believe God destroyed almost the entire world once due to sin, an evil nation may deserve to have two cities destroyed. What was your alternate plan to stopping those who did the Rape of Nanking?

 

guess that is what we will have to do to the christians too then