"Capt.American" wrote
Why should we judge Kerry differently than Benedict Arnold?

Arnold later provided aid and comfort to America's enemy, Britian.

Whether Kerry did the same depends on who you think the enemy was. If you
believe it was the Vietnamese, or at least some Vietnamese, then he
certainly did so. If you instead believe that the real enemy was the little
group of politicians who conned us into a war that was killing 1000s of
Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese then he is not. Which is true?

Having ousted the French, Ho didn't know what to do. Educated in the West he
knew that western democracies provided people far better lives than
communism, but the USSR had helped him fight the Frogs when we had not. We
had even turned a deaf ear to his pleas that we come and teach his people
how to govern themselves as we were doing in the Philippines. Ike had a
suggestion. TEMPORARILY split the country north and south, communist and
capitalist, and then let the people themselves decide in a unifying
election. Meantime Ike figured we pour $$$ into the south, as we did into
West Germany so that come elections capitalism would surely win. It might
have worked had Nixon followed Ike, but he did not. We instead had buddists
(the majority) burning themselves to protest Diem and Kennedy wasted so much
time before going to Dallas that CIA polls showed commies winning by a
landslide. Meanwhile, JFK's "whiz kids", the bunch that gave Ford the Edsel,
had positioned themselves to pretty much control LBJ and after the Cuban
fiasco the last thing the wanted was to loose another country to communism
on their watch. They *unilaterally* decided that they could make Ike's plan
work if they could delay reunification for a year or two. The Joint Cheifs,
men who'd fought WW2 and Korea, were aghast at the idea! You cannot win a
grunt on grunt war in Asia. The Frogs had just proven that. But the whizzers
had no intention of winning a war, they just wanted to prop up our puppet
government til it could "win the hearts and minds of the people" and when
experienced military officers doubted that'd work the replaced the with
yes-men.

Problem was with Korea still fresh in our minds neither LBJ nor congress nor
the American people were likely to buy their scheme either so they duped us.
With McNamara controlling the military as SecDef and Bunker the CIA in Nam,
they transferred SEAL-1 to Bunker and had them kidnap whole fishing
villages. Ho responded by having the USSR build him a PT boat base. Mc had
the Navy position ships to monitor it, then Bunker had his SEALs do a quick
hit and run on the base and, predictably, HO's PTs came out shooting and ran
smack into Turner Joy - and she promptly blew their asses off - and there
you have the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

That let these idiot "whiz kids" and their yes-men sent 1000s of American's
best and finest to die in Nam, micromanaging the war to make sure they never
held an objetive - never won the war despite winning every battle - because
they thot the Vietnamese wouldn't see us as invaders like the Frogs. Well it
didn't work! Vietnam today is about what it would have been had the
reunification election came off on schedule. The only difference is that
1000s of young Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese got maimed and
killed over a few ivory-tower eggheads' attempt to keep their buddy from
being blamed for loosing another country.

Meanwhile, not all Americans were duped and, as battle after battle was won
then village after village and hill after hill given back to the "enemy"
ever more of us discovered the idiocy of their plan - especially when Vet's
who could not be dismissed as cowards came home telling the truth. One of
them was Kerry.

I do NOT support his candidacy, and will not vote for him, because he voted
against the advanced weapons programs, many initiated by Democrat Jimmy
Carter, that now allow us to deal with Saddam and the Taliban without
killing near as many Americans nor near as many non-combatants. He was,
after all, a buddy of Les Aspin who gave us Blackhawk Down. If he indeed
actually helped Ho kill Americans like Hanoi Jane then I despise him even
more. But let's call a spade a spade. JFK's whiz kids were the bad guys
sending Americans to kill and be killed by Vietnamese and if Kerry saw that
early on then he was ahead of the rest of us.

What if Bush had had our military fight halfway to Bagdad then pause and
slug it out man to man with rifles, denying them adequate air cover, for the
next 5 years because he didn't want us to look like aggressors? What if some
of the survivors returned to protest that philosophy? Well, that's what
happened in Nam! The sad thing is that the hippys wrongly blamed the
military and the military wrongly blamed the hippies for loosing the war
while the real culprits went on to bigger and better things. Do you remember
"Sound as a Dollar"? Do you remember when the dollar collapsed? Gee, it was
soon after McNamara took over the World Bank!