Thursday - September 30, 2010

double mulligan?

“According to opinion polls at the time taken directly after Tet and a few weeks after Tet, the American people wanted to escalate the war,” Robbins says. “They understand that the enemy had suffered a terrible defeat, so there was an opportunity if we had taken concerted action to actually win this thing.”

In fact, a majority of those polled after Tet considered themselves “hawks,” Robbins found. He adds that in the summer of 1967, hawks outnumbered doves on college campuses. “The notion that young people were long-haired dope smoking draft resisters in 1967-68 is not true. The ‘Forrest Gump’ view of history is wrong.”

One of Tet’s flaws, Robbins says, was that the North Vietnamese believed that if they attacked countrywide in the south with their tripwire forces, the south would rise up in revolt against Saigon and join the communists.

“And the reason they believed that was because they were reading the New York Times,” Robbins says.
...
To Robbins, the Vietnam narrative must be reclaimed from the “ruling class of hippies and leftists, who went from protests to the U.S. Senate in some cases” and those who “went from dope-smoking teach-ins to teaching from tenured positions on college campuses.”

Yes, there’s a whole book about it too.

h/t to Roger

Posted by Drew458     on 09/30/2010 at 10:04 AM   
Filed Under: • History • Media-Bias • Military • Politics •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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