www.ditl.org

My goodness, I seem to have riled you up no end.

First you repeatedly say I'm making unsupported assertions (demanding sources and argumentation thereon), deny the relevance of pointing to the television media giant that CNN wishes it was, and even try to pick a fight on grammar.

Captain Seafort wrote:You want to provide links that claim left wing bias? Two can play that game.

And when I give you assorted sources and examples, your response is to accuse me of gamesmanship and reply with links to MediaMatters.org.

I mean, really, MediaMatters.org? That's kinda like me saying the Unabomber hurt and killed people with bombs and you having Tim McVey (Oklahoma City bomber) say "nah, he was a puss".

The MediaMatters.org folks are very far left . . . not surprising given that much of their funding comes from George Soros, liberal tycoon (who incidentally got his money from hurting people like the Brits via monetary maneuvers that kicked the ass of the pound), via groups like the very liberal MoveOn.org (supporting liberal Democrats) and the New Democrat Network (again supporting liberal Democrats).

Liberal media bias is not something that should be surprising to you. It's not some vast left-wing conspiracy (of the type Clinton always refers to in regards to the other side) . . . for the most part it's just people who are reporting things the way they see them. And of course we know how they see them:

"MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."

Source

But I guess that just goes to prove what I initially said . . . if you don't see the liberal bias, you're either unaware of the news or quite liberal yourself. If your favorite place is MediaMatters or DailyKos or something like that, then you're definitely in the latter camp.

DSG2k wrote:

Just keep an eye out for it, and you can't fail to miss it. Just note how many times pejorative terms are applied to Republicans and the President versus how that doesn't happen with the Democrats.

More unsupported assetions I see.

Watch the freakin' news.

I do - the Beeb. Lots of quotes about us handing over to the Iraqis later this year, lots about how your surge is working, nothing about how the casualty rate since the surge has been the worst since the war.[/quote]

The surge is working, which is why we're hearing less about Iraq in the news. They've hardly ever covered our successes . . . just American bodycounts.

Now that the surge is working, you've seen and will be seeing a shift among Democrats from "we're dying over there and getting nothing done" to "it isn't achieving our political goals for the Iraqi government".

The UN is still in Kosovo last time I checked.

Hell, the Yahoo AP wire responded to Bush's comments about pulling out of Iraq being akin to pulling out of Viet Nam (and the lovely humanitarian crisis and purge of enemies of the state that resulted) by quoting the Vietnamese government earlier today saying it was good that we left (of course it was! . . . though intriguingly that story can't be found on the site now), replacing it later in the day with a story about a single GOP senator calling for troop withdrawals, "likely to ratchet up pressure on President Bush substantially and lend momentum to Democratic efforts to end U.S. combat."

Even ABC News radio covered the Bush speech itself, albeit with assorted Democrat responses (including John Kerry) throughout the day.

Zogby pollsters, commonly leaning left in their political questions, nevertheless found that Americans view the media as liberally biased by a ratio of more than 2 to 1, meaning that your assertions to the contrary probably put you in the minority, as I suggested.

Who was it wrote:Truth is not determined by the number of adherents. That includes the collective opinion of a consensus. If everyone on Earth believed that 1+1=3, there would be consensus. However, the consensus opinion would be wrong.

Argumentum ad populum.

[/quote]

That was quite cute of you, using a quote of mine regarding folks trying to use collective opinion to determine objective fact.

It was also wrong, of course.

Last I checked, there was no objective measure of liberal versus conservative, ergo "truth" will be a somewhat subjective measure, best determined by (gasp!) majority opinion. I'm sure even our conservative news sources like Fox News would seem rather liberal to US folks of earlier decades.

And in Europe, for instance, I'm sure almost all US media and even US liberal politicians come off as rather to the right. By comparison to local standards, that's true. (Poor Sarkozy!)

Meanwhile, in the US, media like the BBC has come off as rather liberal for some time, to many in the US. Recent admissions on that point were quite unsurprising.

And this is also why, to you and your Media Matters subculture, US media doesn't seem liberal at all, and indeed breaks right apparently. In your world, that's how it is.

But that's now how it is for the rest of us.

DSG2k wrote:I mean, really, MediaMatters.org? That's kinda like me saying the Unabomber hurt and killed people with bombs and you having Tim McVey (Oklahoma City bomber) say "nah, he was a puss".

The MediaMatters.org folks are very far left . . . not surprising given that much of their funding comes from George Soros, liberal tycoon (who incidentally got his money from hurting people like the Brits via monetary maneuvers that kicked the ass of the pound), via groups like the very liberal MoveOn.org (supporting liberal Democrats) and the New Democrat Network (again supporting liberal Democrats).

So, now that you've finished complaining about the source are you now going to refer to the actual evidence of CNN favouring the Republicans over the Democrats in the examples I gave? Yes, a left-wing site will focus on right-wing bias. How does that refute the existence of that right-wing bias?

"MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."

Yes, this demonstrates that many news professionals are acting unprofessionally. We're discussing your allegations of liberal bias in the US media, not the personal leanings of individual employees.

Watch the freakin' news.

I do - the Beeb. Lots of quotes about us handing over to the Iraqis later this year, lots about how your surge is working, nothing about how the casualty rate since the surge has been the worst since the war.

The surge is working, which is why we're hearing less about Iraq in the news. They've hardly ever covered our successes . . . just American bodycounts.

So, I point out the Beeb's bias towards mentioning successes and not bodycounts, and you respond by saying that they cover bodycounts and not successes. Did you even read my post?

The UN is still in Kosovo last time I checked.

So? Kosovans aren't killing dozens of coalition soldiers every week.

Hell, the Yahoo AP wire responded to Bush's comments about pulling out of Iraq being akin to pulling out of Viet Nam (and the lovely humanitarian crisis and purge of enemies of the state that resulted) by quoting the Vietnamese government earlier today saying it was good that we left (of course it was! . . . though intriguingly that story can't be found on the site now), replacing it later in the day with a story about a single GOP senator calling for troop withdrawals, "likely to ratchet up pressure on President Bush substantially and lend momentum to Democratic efforts to end U.S. combat."

Let's analyse Bush's claims shall we. For starters the Vietnam war was all but won when US combat forces pulled out - it was the failure to provide air support (a "Linebaker III" if you will) three years later that led to the defeat of the ARVN. Mentions of piles of skulls and killing fields refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - a regime that came to power when US air strikes on the Ho Chi Minh trail severely compromised the ability of the Cambodian army to combat them. The Khmer Rouge was ultimately expelled in early 1979 by Vietnamese Communist forces.

Even ABC News radio covered the Bush speech itself, albeit with assorted Democrat responses (including John Kerry) throughout the day.

So? They asked members of one party what they thought of a speech by the leader of a different party.

Zogby pollsters, commonly leaning left in their political questions, nevertheless found that Americans view the media as liberally biased by a ratio of more than 2 to 1, meaning that your assertions to the contrary probably put you in the minority, as I suggested.

Who was it wrote:Truth is not determined by the number of adherents. That includes the collective opinion of a consensus. If everyone on Earth believed that 1+1=3, there would be consensus. However, the consensus opinion would be wrong.

Argumentum ad populum.

That was quite cute of you, using a quote of mine regarding folks trying to use collective opinion to determine objective fact.

It was also wrong, of course.[/quote]

I was agreeing with your point that the fact that something is widely believed does not necessarily mean that it is accurate (nor does it automatically mean that it is false). Do you now believe that popular opinion is the sole means of measuring when something is true or false?

Last I checked, there was no objective measure of liberal versus conservative, ergo "truth" will be a somewhat subjective measure, best determined by (gasp!) majority opinion. I'm sure even our conservative news sources like Fox News would seem rather liberal to US folks of earlier decades.

And in Europe, for instance, I'm sure almost all US media and even US liberal politicians come off as rather to the right. By comparison to local standards, that's true. (Poor Sarkozy!)

I note how you seem to consider the US to be the default, and anything left of the US on the political scale to be extremely liberal. Have you ever considered that the rest of the world, which outnumbers the US population by about 20 to 1, might be a better median?

Meanwhile, in the US, media like the BBC has come off as rather liberal for some time, to many in the US. Recent admissions on that point were quite unsurprising.

"Recent admissions"? I'd like a source for that please. As I mentioned above, the Beeb has a tendency to mention coalition successes in Iraq a lot more than failures.

And this is also why, to you and your Media Matters subculture, US media doesn't seem liberal at all, and indeed breaks right apparently. In your world, that's how it is.

It isn't liberal. I've given numerous examples of CNN (as an example) following the Republican party line and painting the Democrats in a bad light. Given that even the Dems would be a moderately centre-right party in the UK, and significantly further right relative speaking in other European countries, this bias puts CNN to the right.

But that's now how it is for the rest of us.

See above about your tendency to regard the US as the default position.[/quote]

If you want proof of the right wing bias in US news you need look no further than the infamous "athiest panel discussion" on CNN in which no athiest appeared or was invited to appear and one commentor was even heard to say that "athiest's should know their place" (I'm paraphrasing.)

Part 1 of discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiyJzWy3CDQ

Part 2 of discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPHnXrU5JzU

This wouldn't fly on the CBC or BBC.

And heres an internal Fox News memo on what to do if the Dems win control of the House and the Senate.

*Edit: and then there's the MSNBC program of which Phil Donahue was a host but was told that for every liberal guest he had he had to have balanced out by two conservatives.

Captain Seafort wrote: So, now that you've finished complaining about the source are you now going to refer to the actual evidence of CNN favouring the Republicans over the Democrats in the examples I gave?

First you wanted evidence, which was then a game on my part when provided. You responded by explicitly playing your own game, and you want me to reply to that seriously but without replying to mine which preceded it?

I started out fairly friendly, though you didn't take it well. I'll be less friendly for a moment here by pointing out that your approach to this debate of yours is rather dizzying in its illogic. It's all tactics and bluster and demand for evidence and trying to make things personal and so on, but you seem to bolt from the field of fact.

However, lest I give you the opportunity to cry that I have employed your methodology by pointing out your tactical silliness without addressing the facts, let's have at them:

1. "Whitewashing administration cock-ups" . . . or "CNN report ignored Bush administration's alleged responsibility for bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in 2001"

(What part of "alleged" did you not understand?)

A. "The documentary included a clip of Berntsen, the now-retired CIA officer who headed the unit, explaining how he had sent "a message back to Washington" in early December 2001 requesting more U.S. troops, but never received them."

i. By December 2001 Osama bin Laden was already out of Tora Bora, Afghanistan. He left circa Nov. 29 or 30, on foot for the few-mile hike to Pakistan, where our allies who were already in place did not catch him. Therefore there was little point in repeating the MediaMatters claim that the White House failed to supply troops when requested. We only got good and started in Tora Bora in December.

(Considering that we took a country within weeks instead of our usual slooooow buildup to overwhelming numbers before invasion, there were logical limits to how many boots could be on the ground where and when. Just because some CIA guy called in late . . . by which point OBL had already left at the end of November (at which point Cheney was just reporting getting reports that he was in Tora Bora) . . . doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme. Once we heard OBL was there we beat the shit out of it from the air and tried to get it surrounded until we could get boots on the ground, like the 10th Mtn Div and others. We still thought he was there on Dec. 10, when his voice might've been heard on a radio, but we were apparently unaware then that he was already gone.)

ii. I like how MediaMatters.org . . . and you, apparently . . . seem to like to confuse all governmental authorities for "the Bush administration", such as your link title of "administration cock-ups". For instance, anchor Sanchez claimed that the CIA guy on the ground asked "the White House" for help "but didn't get it". (And really, that guy Sanchez sounds like he's proselytizing for the Democrats. I thought he was an anchor in the "CNN Newsroom", per the link, and not an op-ed dude. Thanks for linking to something that proves my point.)

The reason this confusion of authorities is amusing is because also in your own link we hear of the CIA failing to communicate requests to the military. This, of course, was the CIA under liberal George Tenet, holdover from the Clinton administration and one of Bush's biggest mistakes (as the recent CIA report made scathingly clear).

2. "Right-about-turn, and not a peep from CNN" . . . or, "CNN's King failed to challenge Thompson on his apparent abortion flip-flop"

[link=http://www.google.com/search?client=ope ... 8&oe=utf-8]CNN has been mentioning it since July at least[/url].

Indeed, here's the CNN video.

So at best, you've demonstrated that Larry King isn't well-informed. Or, that he's well-informed enough to know (in the mid-August interview) that the issue's already been brought up to death.

You've also demonstrated that Media Matters seems to ignore such things in its effort to petulantly assert that the media isn't liberal enough.

Shall I go on?

BTW, add this one on my earlier pile.

"MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."

Yes, this demonstrates that many news professionals are acting unprofessionally. We're discussing your allegations of liberal bias in the US media, not the personal leanings of individual employees.

1. Didn't you just pick on Larry King and Lou Dobbs? Hell, Lou Dobbs is known to be somewhat conservative. That's like picking on Headline Prime having the Glenn Beck show. Throwing scraps like that is how CNN stays "fair and balanced", to coin a phrase . . . Glenn Beck, by the way, shares his TV crew with Paula Zahn, who is most assuredly not conservative.

2. Do you honestly believe that the 87% of journalists who gave enough money to liberal-party candidates to show up on federal filings that MSNBC located are all going to be 'fair and balanced' in their reporting? I figure they're just putting their money where their mouth is. But, even if they are self-conscious enough to not directly boo the President in their stories, don't you think their liberal ideas and ideals are going to color their stories? It's just going to be their natural brain info-filter.

Yes I know news is a business, and it's a business that by necessity must sensationalize things and pander to the audience to some extent.

I'm not suggesting some vast left-wing conspiracy here . . . I'm simply pointing out that most journalists are liberals, and that . . . with the exception of those who are openly liberal instead of hiding behind a veneer of professionalism . . . said liberal journalists are going to report things a certain way.

I do - the Beeb. Lots of quotes about us handing over to the Iraqis later this year, lots about how your surge is working, nothing about how the casualty rate since the surge has been the worst since the war.

The surge is working, which is why we're hearing less about Iraq in the news. They've hardly ever covered our successes . . . just American bodycounts.

So, I point out the Beeb's bias towards mentioning successes and not bodycounts, and you respond by saying that they cover bodycounts and not successes. Did you even read my post?

Did you read mine? July 2007 featured some of the lowest casualty counts in months. Which is why it wasn't discussed, except on "conservative" media, and an AP report or two which then spun it as a headline of 2007 being the worst year ever.

August rates do seem to be above July, so expect news reporters to play that up and repeat it frequently in advance of the September report.

The UN is still in Kosovo last time I checked.

So? Kosovans aren't killing dozens of coalition soldiers every week.

Yes, but as I noted in the bit you snipped, the pull-out crowd is going to claim a lack of political progress as a reason to leave, even though such things take a great deal of time even in better environments and with the so-called pros at it.

Hell, the Yahoo AP wire responded to Bush's comments about pulling out of Iraq being akin to pulling out of Viet Nam (and the lovely humanitarian crisis and purge of enemies of the state that resulted) by quoting the Vietnamese government earlier today saying it was good that we left (of course it was! . . . though intriguingly that story can't be found on the site now), replacing it later in the day with a story about a single GOP senator calling for troop withdrawals, "likely to ratchet up pressure on President Bush substantially and lend momentum to Democratic efforts to end U.S. combat."

Let's analyse Bush's claims shall we.

Don't change the subject. I'll answer your charge, but you ought to first explain why you think it's appropriate for a news organization to attempt to refute the words of a sitting president by surveying everyone who disagrees with him.

I'm not suggesting that they treat him with papal infallibility, but really . . . asking Vietnam?

For starters the Vietnam war was all but won when US combat forces pulled out

Uhh . . . no, it wasn't. Remember Tet?

We pulled out, thanks to the American left, when the ARVN was not ready, and cut funding to them when the VC still had all the communist funding they could handle. And, as our troop drawdowns commenced, the VC pressed their attacks with assorted offensives. Our bombs in response won more leftist complaints.

After our withdrawal, it was exceptionally easy for the communists to take the rest of the country.

Mentions of piles of skulls and killing fields refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - a regime that came to power when US air strikes on the Ho Chi Minh trail severely compromised the ability of the Cambodian army to combat them.

Yeah, it's hard to win a war when you're not allowed to kill the badguys, and are reducing troops significantly.

Some of the overall problem with Viet Nam was overabundant US caution regarding escalation. But a whole big chunk of the problem was politics. The anti-war crowd and their media counterparts were against any action that would win the war.

The Khmer Rouge was ultimately expelled in early 1979 by Vietnamese Communist forces.

You say that as if Vietnam did something good and humanitarian. In fact they simply took Phnom Phen after the Khmer Rouge invaded Vietnam.

Nice spin, though.

That was quite cute of you, using a quote of mine regarding folks trying to use collective opinion to determine objective fact.
It was also wrong, of course.

I was agreeing with your point that the fact that something is widely believed does not necessarily mean that it is accurate (nor does it automatically mean that it is false). Do you now believe that popular opinion is the sole means of measuring when something is true or false?

Did you even read my post? Your attempt to take my words out of the context of objective fact (e.g. 2+2=4) and to use them in regards to a spectrum of opinion (e.g. hippies dress funny) was invalid.

Also invalid is your maneuver above wherein you ignore my statement and also try to accuse me of inconsistency.

Last I checked, there was no objective measure of liberal versus conservative, ergo "truth" will be a somewhat subjective measure, best determined by (gasp!) majority opinion. I'm sure even our conservative news sources like Fox News would seem rather liberal to US folks of earlier decades.

And in Europe, for instance, I'm sure almost all US media and even US liberal politicians come off as rather to the right. By comparison to local standards, that's true. (Poor Sarkozy!)

I note how you seem to consider the US to be the default, and anything left of the US on the political scale to be extremely liberal.

I thought we were discussing American ChuckyB's comment on a leftist news media? Would that not make the United States the context?

And incidentally, have you actually responded to anything I've said yet? It seems as if you're always evading and changing subject even when quoting my words, pressing your point in some other way besides addressing what I've said.

Have you ever considered that the rest of the world, which outnumbers the US population by about 20 to 1, might be a better median?

Europe's to the left. Other countries are to the right. What of it?

If you'd like to conduct some sort of survey of the politics of world nations you're more than welcome to do so, but given that my greatest familiarity is with the US and its history, that's where I'll be coming from. And I can tell you that in the past few decades, while most of the western countries have ventured left overall, the US hasn't gone as far as Europe. Does that make the European standard superior, to you?

Meanwhile, in the US, media like the BBC has come off as rather liberal for some time, to many in the US. Recent admissions on that point were quite unsurprising.

"Recent admissions"? I'd like a source for that please.

Here's something of note from a former BBC editor.

Here is the late '06 admission of the BBC of its anti-American, anti-GWoT bias.

And here is the BBC's own words on the matter, noting that a liberal consensus was within the organization.

Are we done?

It isn't liberal. I've given numerous examples of CNN (as an example) following the Republican party line and painting the Democrats in a bad light.

CNN probably never follows the Republican party line, and certainly didn't do so in the Media Matters links you provided. The only thing those links prove is that, according to leftists, CNN sometimes failed to be left enough, meaning they didn't always follow the proper Democrat talking points.

Given that even the Dems would be a moderately centre-right party in the UK, and significantly further right relative speaking in other European countries, this bias puts CNN to the right.

But that's now how it is for the rest of us.

See above about your tendency to regard the US as the default position.

Praytell, if the US as the default position is bad, why should Europe be the default position? How is that better?

Cpl Kendall wrote:And heres an internal Fox News memo on what to do if the Dems win control of the House and the Senate.

That's hardly sporting. No one is suggesting Fox News isn't conservative. That was kinda the point of Fox News.

DSG2k wrote:
That's hardly sporting. No one is suggesting Fox News isn't conservative. That was kinda the point of Fox News.

Then what's the point of their "fair and balanced" catch phrase?

Cpl Kendall wrote:

DSG2k wrote:
That's hardly sporting. No one is suggesting Fox News isn't conservative. That was kinda the point of Fox News.

Then what's the point of their "fair and balanced" catch phrase?

Point taken. The idea I was trying to suggest was that no one was suggesting that Fox News isn't more conservative than its competitors. Whether or not that makes it fair and balanced depends on one's point of view.

My primary sources of news information are internet and, to a secondary degree, radio. FoxNews.com carries AP wires and some AP stories, and you can pretty much tell just from reading them whether it's a Fox story or an AP one.

As for me, I would call Fox News fairly conservative by comparison to others, but even Fox News feels it necessary to talk about the same stories, just sometimes from a somewhat different angle (a la the Lou Dobbs vs. Rest of CNN example Seafort gives). And of course their website has the AP stuff, so it's somewhat bipolar in that regard.

Does that make it fair and balanced? To a degree, yes. I certainly prefer it over Yahoo News or MSNBC. However, I don't watch the Fox News Channel much, primarily because I'm not a big fan of Bill O'Reilly, who is everpresent. I find him to be something of a blowhard, not as grand as he seems to think he is, and veering too far right on many occasions.

But of course, you know what you're getting with him . . . he's not hiding his persuasion as do so many liberal anchors and journalists. So it goes both ways, I suppose.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm probably closest to a Glenn Beck Radio guy. (He has a TV show on CNN Headline Prime, but that's so short that everything has to be all edited down and "sexed up" for the cameras, so you get these silly 30 second debates. On the radio, he's really quite good, and fairly moderate really.) Though I don't agree with him all of the time I usually can see where he's coming from.

Edit: And just for further comparisons with other radio . . . . Rush Limbaugh is . . . well, he's Rush. There's humor, but I agree with him less frequently than I do Beck. And Sean Hannity on the radio is just a humorless Democrat hate machine. There are others I hear sometimes like Schnitt or Schmidt or whoever, but he's kinda bland and Hannity-esque to me.

But then there's Michael Savage, who's a freakin' nutjob. I recently heard him yelling over a Bush speech with "Liar!" and such because in his mind, we're not fighting Iraq to win. From what I could ascertain, he seems to feel that we ought to just glass Iraq until AQI lays down arms. (That's probably not an accurate paraphrase, but it sure seemed that way at the time. I got the impression he wanted us to go all Tamerlane on the place to subdue it, more extreme than the Phillipines circa 1905.)

How he expects us to get to that point when he's railing against the closest thing to it (what, does he think Hillary's gonna go Manila on their asses?) eludes me utterly.

Ahh yes, Glenn Beck. The guy that agrees with Osama, here's a quote from one of his radio programs:

BECK: You know, there`s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We`re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.

Now I don`t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that's the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They`re right.

Great guy, real moderate. I'd hate to see what's classified as a liberal in the US by this example of moderation.

Very well, I'll withdraw from the left-right media part of the debate. I would, however, like to correct a few of your points regarding Vietnam.

DSG2k wrote:

For starters the Vietnam war was all but won when US combat forces pulled out

Uhh . . . no, it wasn't. Remember Tet?

Not personally. It was, however, not the time I was referring to , which was the final US withdrawal in 72/73. Tet, while a propaganda coup for the North, was nonetheless a US military victory. The NLF failed to achieve its aim of sparking a revolution in the cities of South Vietnam, and failed to even establish a hold on any of the target cities except Hue, and they were chucked out of that after a month of fighting. The offensive also destroyed the NLF as an effective force (whether that was a North Vietnamese objective is debatable).

We pulled out, thanks to the American left, when the ARVN was not ready, and cut funding to them when the VC still had all the communist funding they could handle. And, as our troop drawdowns commenced, the VC pressed their attacks with assorted offensives. Our bombs in response won more leftist complaints.

After Tet, and the Republican Presidential victory, the process of Vietnamisation, combined with the reduced effectiveness of the now PAVN-dominated NLF allowed the ARVN to become a far more effective force than it had been previously. The shift away from the retarded concept of relying on battalion-level and above combat operations towards a hearts-and-minds approach rendered the guerilla war all but won, which was why the PAVN launched its big 72 offensive rather playing a supporting role to the NLF as it had previously. Linebacker II dealt with that issue rather thoroughly.

After our withdrawal, it was exceptionally easy for the communists to take the rest of the country.

The ease of the takeover was not due to the US withdrawal, but to their failure to continue to support the ARVN with the technical personnel required to maintain its US equipment. This meant that by the time PAVN invaded in 75, the force that defeated them handily in 72 was immobile due to a lack of spare parts and routine maintenance. The aerial offensive "Linebacker III" that could have prevented the defeat was unavailable due to a justifiable fear by the US civilian population that it would be the start of US troops being drawn back into a quagmire as the had been in the 60s.

Mentions of piles of skulls and killing fields refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - a regime that came to power when US air strikes on the Ho Chi Minh trail severely compromised the ability of the Cambodian army to combat them.

Yeah, it's hard to win a war when you're not allowed to kill the badguys, and are reducing troops significantly.

I was talking about the rise of the Khmer Rouge and you responded with criticism of US conduct of the Vietnam War. It remains the case that the KR were a minor irritant until US military action gave them the assistance they needed. The bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail was a waste of time in any event - all the NLF did was shift it a couple of hundred paces and they could carry on as before.

Some of the overall problem with Viet Nam was overabundant US caution regarding escalation. But a whole big chunk of the problem was politics. The anti-war crowd and their media counterparts were against any action that would win the war.

The fundamental flaw in US strategy was their failure to realise that a guerrilla army cannot be defeated by military force alone but by depriving it of its support base - the civilian population - through hearts and minds operations. Once this method was employed post-Tet, the guerilla problem was rapidly brought under control. Unfortunately by this stage the US civilian population had had enough due to the incompetence demonstrated in the years pre-Tet, and by Tet itself. The poor public relations demonstrated by the US military - insisting that the situation was under control when it clearly wasn't, and failing to control the information flow out of Vietnam, exacerbated the impression given by Tet of a war on the brink of an overwhelming North Vietnamese victory when the true situation was serious, but by no means lost.

Captain Seafort wrote:Very well, I'll withdraw from the left-right media part of the debate. I would, however, like to correct a few of your points regarding Vietnam.

I'll leave that be. While I'm a big fan of history, there are some eras and conflicts that utterly disinterest me. Vietnam is one of them. Russia in Afghanistan is another. Chechnya, too.

Suffice it to say, mistakes were made in all areas by all parties. Getting too deep into the details is depressing.

DSG2k wrote:

Captain Seafort wrote:Very well, I'll withdraw from the left-right media part of the debate. I would, however, like to correct a few of your points regarding Vietnam.

I'll leave that be. While I'm a big fan of history, there are some eras and conflicts that utterly disinterest me. Vietnam is one of them. Russia in Afghanistan is another. Chechnya, too.

Suffice it to say, mistakes were made in all areas by all parties. Getting too deep into the details is depressing.

True, but those who fail to study the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. Reading about the performance of the US forces in Vietnam forty years ago may be depressing, but reading about them making much the same mistakes in Iraq today is even more so.

Captain Seafort wrote:
True, but those who fail to study the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. Reading about the performance of the US forces in Vietnam forty years ago may be depressing, but reading about them making much the same mistakes in Iraq today is even more so.

The most relevant part of that is the US military has publications dedicated to fighting an insurgency that are left over from the Vietnam War that contain lessons that are not being used. A basic example is that all vehicle mounted MG's should have gunshields, a feature lacking on a good many vehicles in Iraq. Or putting a layer of sandbags on the floor of the vehicle to help absorb blasts from mines. There's also relevant publications left over from the interventions in the Phillipines and Central America that contain many valuable insights on how to conduct a counter-insurgency. But true to form the US military finds itself relearning the same lessons in every conflict.

Captain Seafort wrote:Reading about the performance of the US forces in Vietnam forty years ago may be depressing, but reading about them making much the same mistakes in Iraq today is even more so.

The same is true regarding the politicians on the left.

i'm a little too timid to put my two penneth into this debate, but am really enjoying it, thanks guys for the rivetting read