The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 2/3

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

5 Hours PG-13Here are episodes 6-10 of the Cold War series with Thomas777.The 'Cold War' Pt. 6 - Ho Chi Minh and the Origin of the Vietnam War w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 7 - Robert McNamara, Vietnam, and a World Turning 'Red' w/ Thomas777The Cold War Pt. 8 - How the On the Ground Battles in Vietnam Were Fought w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 9 - Battling the Khmer Rouge w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 10 - The Vietnam War Comes to an End w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Kupra plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Kupra and discover our latest offers. Kupra.

Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen. Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings?

We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Lidl, more to value. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas,

with vouchers from Trump Dunebag. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Kosh Faragea. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez Show, continuing the Cold War series with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm well, thank you, man. Today, I wanted to get in.

This is a somewhat difficult topic to address. I mean, not for the usual reasons, people bandied it, but because there's some. many misconceptions, both on the left and the right and then kind of sensible center. I'm talking about historians, I mean. And there's still a lot of, people still have a lot of strong feelings about it.

Be that, be that as it may. There's a basic lack of understanding, even among a lot of revisionists, of the kind of broader political context of the war, rolled in strategic terms and in ideological lines. And what I think of as apoccal terms,

I think people who watch our content, they've, they've kind of become habituated to some of my vocabulary. When I talk about apocal events, I'm not just trying to draw up on highfalutin language

or trying to create my own kind of, you know, revisionist Esperanto. I can't think of a better way to describe what I'm talking about. And that's a rough translation of a phenomenon

that Ernst Nolte describes. You know, and it basically the way to understand it is kind of practical zeitgeist, you know, but that's, I just wanted to kind of can clarify,

verify that and you know as I've talked about before much as much as they esteem guys like meersheimer um they're kind of locked they're kind of boxed in to the kind of like the clausowitzian conceptual uh cube as it were you know like a guy like mirshimer if if one wants to understand uh predict in terms of predictive modeling I think there's nobody better than him and like for example like in the run of the 91 Gulf War nobody modeled the outcome of that conflict with more accuracy than he did. And in fact, most people were totally off base. He's a Klaus of Witsian thinker through and through in ways both praiseworthy as well as not so praiseworthy.

But he's so fixed stated on conceptual modeling and on identifying concrete variables that can be insinuated into that sort of modeling. that he really misses apoccal like variables of apical significance. Okay. Nowhere is that more clear than in his discussion of the Vietnam War.

Mir Shabra is one of these guys on the political right like at the time and subsequent you know, he was constantly issuing the assertion that Indochina was strategically without value. You know, he's got

this idea that the global north, you know, Western Europe, you know, the United States in Canada, Japan, Korea, and some of the, some of the Upper Pacific Rim, that's, you know, in the Middle East, that's basically, that's basically, in few of strategic terms, that's the only, that's the location of the only stakes worth fighting for. But that's not why people go to war anymore, okay? and in fact, states going to war over commodities or, you know, to dominate trade routes and sea lanes. That's really, that really reflects kind of a narrow, like a narrow, a kind of narrow piece of the modern era, you know, wherein that kind of power political competition,

you know, translated very much to the concrete, the need to capture sort of concrete resources. You know, so it didn't matter that Vietnam were happening in Vietnam. You know, if it had happened in Nicaragua,

if it had happened in you know, if it had happened in in Greece, if it had happened in Borneo, like, it would not have mattered. You know, that's where the communist pushed. That's where

politics kind of could spot. and intrigued, you know, for great powers to come together in hostile terms. And that's where America staked the line in the sand. So it didn't matter. All right, this is where communism fought, you know, the American-led opposition. You know, what itself identified is the free world. And that's what people in the right miss, okay, I think. People on the left in contrast.

You know, they teach college kids, you know, bullshit, promulgated by people like Chomsky or by people like Howard Zinn, where they claim that, like, well, the Vietnam War was just, you know, the Pentagon, like, murder machine profiting. That's not really true. I mean, the, there wasn't kind of, the logic of the body count did become kind of a, uh, uh, a, um, instead of into itself. And that's perverse in all kinds of ways. but that's kind of the case in modern war in the 20th century. And I'm getting into that in the manuscript and right now about Nuremberg because about half of it gets into the 20th century generally.

And yeah, there was, you know, there was all, anytime it's a general war on it, and Vietnam was a general war, okay, you had a draft, you know, you had real casualties. You know, America was mobilized anyway or into the situation in Europe up and the ongoing the ongoing

strategic challenge presented by the Warsaw Pact but I mean anytime you're dealing with a general war situation or conditions you know

with on that spectrum there's going to be there's going to be people and agents and and and companies that profit from that okay but that's not that's not the incentive

okay like you know America didn't America didn't kill three million people and and and and and and and and lose a 60,000 of their own um you know and eventually like imposed like a decade long recession on itself just so that it could like sell helicopters to the Pentagon you know or so that cold could you know manufacture the arm of light and everybody makes money from you know outfitting the US army with the shit that it needs like that's that that's just every basic view of things and that's not that's not reality um and uh

It's something I emphasize to people, too, and it's hard to be able to put themselves in this kind of conceptual mindset because, you know, the Cold War is, like, receding, like, out of living memory, but there was real stakes to warfare in the 20th century. I mean, that's not to say there weren't reckless decisions made, and it's not to say that during the Cold War, you know, men in the Pentagon and command roles and in the Department of State didn't intrigue and inspire, you know, to go to war when a, It wasn't absolutely the, you know, essential course of action. But this was taken very seriously because there was real consequences. But also you had a real coterie of public intellectuals shaping defense policy. You know, and you really did have a lot of the best and the brightest putting their minds to the waging of warfare. You know, on the technical side at Los Alamos would be the zenith of that, you know,

and people quite literally developing, you know, more and more effective nuclear weapons. weapons but you know you had you like i make the point of people a lot this was 1970 or 1980 a guy like elin musk could be working on sdi you know um you'd have guys who are going to work on wall street now as quads you know they'd be working for the pentagon of the department of state or they'd be working uh for these NGOs you know to figure out how to uh how to wage world war three you know you didn't just have these idiots and these uh these lose these like abstract losers uh like like like like like Pete Buttigig, what the fuck his name is.

You know, these other freaks that, you know, we've had in Washington since 1993, you know, just kind of deciding that, you know, we're going to generally deploy in some theater for no particular reason. I mean, that did not happen in the Cold War, because it couldn't happen. And it just wouldn't have, it would have been

like unthinkable, you know, the degree to which there's a paradigm shift in the public mind. It can't be over-emphasized. But what I want to get into today, I want to get into the political background of Vietnam and why it became such a critical theater. And then next episode, like I said before, we're alive. You know, we'll get into the battlefield situation because that's an important topic. It's not just, I mean, I'm not a military guy, and I mean, it's not really my wheelhouse.

But I do know something about military science topics in a very, like, abstract sense. I mean, obviously, I don't have experience like Brunsty or something, and I would not purport to. But the kind of competing, I want to get into Westmoreland versus Creighton Abrams and their kind of tactical orientation. I want to go to John Paul Van and David Hackworth, you know, both of whom had profound ideas that they contributed on asymmetrical warfare. And, you know, I want to get into why the U.S. Army really, really couldn't adapt itself. It started, I single out the Army because Franklin the Marine Corps, as well as the Air Force, like, they did adapt pretty well. And in the Air Force, the case, it's pretty remarkable because the Air Force was totally purposed to essentially, like, drop nuclear ordinance on the Warsaw Pact at that time. And, you know, to repurpose their aircraft.

You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers.

Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited, subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. and Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th

because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Liddle, more to value. you know for essentially you know like fire support you know and a conventional bombing role that was remarkable but today we're going to talk about politics

which isn't as sexy as a battlefield kind of stuff but it's essential to understanding it and in the case of Vietnam I think I think it's I think it's paramount or the military side of things the seeds of the Indochina Wars

which I mean really we could say that it goes you know things come as in 1931 I mean when the

Jabin Imperial Army assaulted China but for our purposes what's conventionally viewed as the Indo China Wars is you know the French the French war against the Vietnam that kicked off in

1946 you know there was the story defeat that Jim Ben-Fu, you know, the Foreign Legion got, you know, surrounded and annihilated. You know, and then, um, the American War, which traditionally is viewed as commencing in 65, because that's when there was the mass conventional buildup, you know, U.S. involvement ended in 73. Saigon fell in 75. Um, I'd include, uh, I'd include the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the Khmer Rouge, uh, conquest of, uh, Cambodia within that same, like, conceptual

paradigm two as well as the 1979 war that Vietnam fought against the people of the public of China which is fascinating and that the latter event informs the strategic landscape today in profound ways I find it fascinating but actually sensible

and I attribute this to Robert Gates also who was a rare like sensible man and in in policy corridors you know post 93 but he Obama, like, in my opinion,

Owen to Gates's tutelage, lifted remaining restrictions on armed sales to the people's Republic of Vietnam. Very obviously, you know, employ Vietnam as a military hedge against the people of Republic of China, which is very smart, honestly. It jumped out of me because it was

one of the few power political moves that not only made sense, like rational sense, but actually was strategically sound. And you'd never really see US government engaged in anything sensible anymore. But Indochina, you know, it really was kind of the jewel of Southeast Asia.

You know, there's a reason why the French hung onto it, and it wasn't just prestige and clout the way they did. You know, Vietnam was not just this backwater. It's a comparatively huge country. You know, a very large population. and it was a cosmopolitan place. Okay. And in geostrategic terms, like I said, again, that wasn't paramount,

but a French Indochina, according to guys who spent a lot of time, spent a lot of time with geopolitics, you know, beginning in really in the 19th century, like on Crimean War, yeah, probably around like 1812, final Napoleonic era, is that kind of closed out. And Europeans started thinking a lot about the then contemporary battlefield. People generally associated Indo-China with kind of the eastern third of the mainland of Southeast Asia. Okay. And they viewed it as essential in that regard.

Like, you know, not just as like a hedge against, you know, powers emerging within the interior. But, you know, there's, it's, you know, it's got CX, it's obviously. you know on this extensive coast you know things like that so it's Americans tend to be kind of geostrategically illiterate and they they also have this time to dismiss everywhere some backwater and that's particularly as guiding as a vietnam like yeah Vietnam was largely backwards in 1965 but most of this planet was backwards in 1965 and those places that weren't like a lot of them were still like in ruins because 20 years before like you know the world they're going to hell in a hand basket.

And, you know, and there were some places, including in Europe, mostly behind the wall, but not exclusively, that, I mean, still, like until 1980s, like, you know, there was visible, like, battle damage from, you know, combat 40 years previously. So,

um, that's something to keep in mind. The, uh, Hocci men himself was, uh, well, actually, the milu that Ho Chi Minh came out of,

the Vietnamese were looking for an identity in peculiar ways. Vietnam's a complex society. It wasn't like North Korea or something. I don't know if people know the history particularly well. It's strange. But you know, Kimmel Song, you know, who became

Stalin's protege, he was one of the Soviet Koreans. You know, part of Stalin's issue with the nationalities was you know not just you know genocidal programs against people that he considered to be you know

politically unreliable but also trying to simulate populations that he considered to be useful like in the kind of the Soviet sphere of influence and his Soviet life well the Koreans and the Soviet Far East he considered to be one of these populations and Kim Il-sung really had no interest or under his in or

understanding of communism. And if you look at North Korea today, like they, you know, it's, it's this kind of like pastiche of like 1950 Stalinism and kind of cargo cult a military dictatorship type of the

1980s or something. It's also a hereditary, it's like a hereditary dictatorship. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think Stalin had told him, you can't you can't do that. And they were like screw you. We're just going to do what we want. Yeah, exactly.

But people have this, like, people tend to have a tendency to, like, transpose that those kinds of tendencies to places like Vietnam, which is very, very misguided. And like, among other things, I'm sure, I'm sure some people are going to claim that this as me being like a chauvinistic white man or whatever. I mean, I obviously don't care, but

I, um, colonized peoples, they tend to take on the characteristics of their colonizers, okay? And the French are very sophisticated. people. Okay. I'm not saying

that the Vietnamese otherwise it'd be stupid or something. I find the VATs actually to be very interesting. That's why these people, I've included Vietnam features heavily in my fiction

as people will see you in the second book drops. But, you know, so Vietnam, like any place, whether it's Algeria or Vietnam or anywhere or Morocco that was, you know, colonized by the French. It was not going to it was not going to be some backwater like

North Korea, okay? I mean, regardless, even if what the German would call the mention material was not particularly I'm trying to be delegate here, it was not particularly capable of human stock, okay? But the Vietnamese, you know, they're

a relatively creative people. And Ho Chiman himself, he was the son of a Confucian scholar. And he was a mysterious guy. His birth years generally accepted as 1890, but that's never been verified conclusively. A lot of sources, both within Vietnam and without, like, claim other years. His father and his family, like, lived in central Vietnam, which was kind of like a hub of culture as well as political activity.

And this endured through, like, the American War in Vietnam. But it, oh into his dad, his father's prestige. you know not just as an intellectual but he was this he was a kind of like he was an imperial magistrate um like the uh when

Vietnam became technically an empire like after uh the Japanese deposed like the French in uh 1945 this was before the war on it it was the Vich regime um and uh

and uh the 13th emperor of Vietnam uh who who stepped down who advocated in 1955, but be as it made, there was an imperial court. And Hocheoneman's father, he was like this, he was like one half like cop, one half

judge kind of, and he was demoted because, uh, for abuse of power. After some influential local honcho was, uh, was, was available to summary punishment um, in, in his father's core and he was sentenced to

something crazy, like a hundred lashes uh, with a cane. you know, and the guy died. Okay, so so Hocheeman's dad was, I mean, he was something, I mean, he loomed large to say the least, and he was, you know, he was basically a judge

and an intellectual and a Confucian, a judge intellectual and a priest, kind of. I mean, Confucianism is kind of confusing to the Western mind, including mine own, but, you know, this was not, Hoichmann was not some guy of peasant stock, like quite the contrary. Hoicheman did kind of rewrite his biography,

as communists all kind of did. And, I mean, to be fair, partisans all do that to some degree. Even Cromwell did that. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you. Even before you drive.

The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of uptrapers. to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement

from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th

because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. talking thousands of your favorite Lidl items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Um, he claimed, Ho Chi-Man claimed that he was radicalized in 1908 when, because he was sent to Hui City to study, okay, um, and he said he came across his demonstration of these

poor peasants who were bound in this kind of peculiar form of serfdom that existed in Southeast Asia. I can't remember what the French word is for it, but it was basically, like, think of a surf who's bound to the land

and who's not compensated for his labor, but he's like, you know, paying rent on his occupation of the land, which he can't leave. This was a big deal in Vietnam especially. There was this demonstration that that the Imperial Court cracked down on violently

and, you know, social justice types of the day, including a lot of Catholics, because, you know, obviously, you know, Catholic missioners were very active in Indochina, or under the French regime. But as well, as well, it's kind of the socialist international.

This was like a big deal. And Ho claimed, like, well, this is when I realized, like, I was a communist, okay? I mean, well, that's true or not, who knows, but he was mired in a revolutionary environment. Owing to the fact, owing to his family's downer mobility and no small measure because of the scandal with his father and this canning victim who died,

oh realized that he wasn't going to be able to, he wasn't going to be able to get a job, you know, with the imperial court. And he said he refused to try and work in the colonial administration because he refused to serve the French. And that's probably true. So what he did do was

he applied to work on a French merchant ship when he got to Saigon. And in 1911, he traveled first to France and then he ended up in Dunkirk. He hopped back and forth between the UK and Marseille for a few years.

And then from 1913 to 1919, mean, he was in London. It's disputed by some these days, but there's actually a plaque in the New Zealand house in London, you know, which is, which house is literally, you know, like the New Zealander diplomatic mission that said that, like, Ho Chi men worked here as like some kind of pastry chef, okay? So, I mean, he was moving in pretty elite circles, you know, albeit in a, in a kind of, in a kind of menial role, but, I mean, he was a young guy, so it wasn't something that would have

been seen as improper for a guy of his station and he wouldn't just be viewed as like a coolly you know because he was i mean he was even he was very young okay even though he was a teenager early 20s i mean even though we don't know his precise birthday i mean that much it's clear um in 1919 um he returned to france in part because uh a uh a french socialist named Marcel Cashin, I'm sure I'm torturing that pronunciation, as I often do, excuse me. He was an activist in the Socialist Party of France.

What Kashin essentially convinced Ho of was he said, look, you know, the Versailles Summit, this is our chance to approach the allied leaders about freedom for Indochina. you know because now they'll be receptive you know not owing to any particular uh you know interest in our cause but because uh you know something's gonna have to something something something's gonna have to you know replace the imperial regime and like even they have to see that you know and part of this

part of this was kind of rigid marcus uh you know thinking deterministic rather thinking like you know this this is you know like reading the proverbial signs you know like like an auger wood like obviously this is you know a crucial moment in in the advance of history you know we've got to get the attention to these men because um capitalists though they are you know oppressors as they though they are you know they're they're nonetheless you know they're nonetheless serving uh the cause of history as all men are you know it um i mean this is all very clear to people kind of understand a marxist ontology such that it can be said to exist um But what Jim and subsequently claimed that what drew him to Paris initially was that he joined the group of Vietnamese patriots.

That would have translated to the, again, I can't pronounce the French moniker. But it was this group that had coalesced in Paris, you know, most recently are a university in vice. irons but they all they did have some power within the syndic within within the cynicalist uh unions that had and there's a number of Asian workers like who were present on the ground um i mean obviously because um you know the French empire was always uh was always um was always um was always hungry for menial laborers menial labor is from the outer dominions but this this particular faction um it included uh basically the guys who became kind of like the core of the Vietnamese nationalist movement Okay, um, including a fan chutrin, um, fan van Trong.

Um, these names probably don't mean anything to anybody today, but they, they were, um, in the interwariers and into, uh, into the French and no China war. Uh, these guys constituted an early cadre of, um, of, uh, of a, of the political leadership cast, um, resisting, uh, resisting, resisting French, uh, control political and military. So, I mean, these were, like, heavy, these were heavy people, okay? And, I mean, undoubtedly, um, Ho was able to finagle that, like, owing to his background, you know, I mean, he downplayed his,

his privilege and everything like that, but he, I mean, he was a guy who was, I mean, again, he, um, his father was, was, uh, was a, was a, was a, was a, was a very esteemed individual, as well as, owing to Ho's Confucian education, you know, he would have had to be, he would had to have mastered colloquial Vietnamese in a way that most people just would not. You know, he developed aptitude in French. You know, he knew Chinese

letters because you had to study Confucian text. You know, I mean, he was, he was very, very well situated to take it to, you know, to make contact with revolutionary cadres. Particularly

in, particularly in, in, in, in, uh, in, uh, interwar of, France. And Ho

and his comrades they actually they formally sent their letter to the allied delegation you know

Clemence So Woodrow Wilson and they were unable to obtain any consideration but what it did do was it I attribute this the fact that

Ho was very he was comfortable with Westerners and was familiar with them as well as his French was was beyond competent.

It was probably not absolutely fluent, but it was far more so than, you know, your average, your average Oriental at that time that, you know, you'd run into in Europe. Ho Chi men begin identified as the leader of the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam, for better or worse. And we've discussed in the course of our, you know, of our discussions

and I've made the point myself repeatedly on my pod and my long form a lot of what role any man becomes insinuated into regardless of his aptitude or ambition I'm talking politically particularly as revolutionary if people decide that

you know you are the leader well than you are in some real sense okay and this the Versailles delegation identifying how even though they effectively snub them the fact that they identified him as the leader of the Vietnamese resistance, I'd say that that's what launched his career as a professional revolutionary.

Is there is there any evidence of like who he was reading, who he was most inspired by? That's a good question. I speculate, despite the fact, and this is going to seem strange, particularly because most people, people, you know, who are familiar with the French left, not just younger people. I mean, people might as a little bit older. They do the French left is kind of the driving force behind the 60-8ers and the kind of

break with the Warsaw Pact. And, you know, the kind of, you know, the new left was literally founded by Foucault, at least in Acadine. However, in the inner warriors, particularly at the time of Versailles, the, you know, the French the French communists were very very orthodox Marxist Leninists.

They very much believed in the common turn in its orthodoxy probably even more so than anybody probably even more so than the Germans because there was

one of the reasons why the so you know the SED not the KPD began the ruling party in East Germany was because the social Democrats and the Marxist Leninists could never come to the table.

France did not really have that problem. Yes, France was a... I mean, I say France was a house divided quickly. I mean, would be a gross understatement, but the French communists, for whatever reason, they... I owe this phenomenon to very strong cadre building. They were very, very much united.

And I would speculate, and again, I'd have to deep dive into it, and it would be very hard, I think. I mean, it could be done, but it would take time. to kind of tease out real data on what the primary sources were but whether we're talking about paul pot or ho chie men or um or giop who uh who hoci men uh had met at hui when he was a student there um all these guys uh either only to the fact that they were in france or you know only of the french

influence um upon their cadre structure like in indochina they they'd be reading marks and lennon you know um and they and they and they and they and they'd be reading you know they'd be reading hagel and they you know they would have become familiar with aristotle and and and and they would have become and and and Thomas Payne and walk but they but they like marfs and whenan would be their you know their bible as it were um but yeah that's a great question and it's kind of a fascinating subject especially like again you know like we just mentioned uh it's uh like like imagining the French left is kind of like the standard bearer of you know

rigid orthodoxy is it's kind of hilarious but I mean that's that's that's the way it was um excuse me the uh um this is actually what gives rise

the myth I don't know I don't know how much this is bandied about by court historians these days because frankly I don't read a lot of court history um on uh on either World War or on the Cold War, I mean, any more.

I mean, I do for, like, for dedicated purposes, like, in my writing and research, you know, like, if I say, like, okay, well, you know, I, like, refresh my recollection with what, you know, with what kind of, like, the mainstream historians of the day we're saying about, like, say, like, the French War in Algeria, you know, and then, you know, so not just for the sake, like, teeing off on that, but just kind of, you know, get a sense of what people take for granted in terms of kind of the, not just, not just, not just, not just, not just, not just the key events that they identify as being essential to understanding the conflict, but also kind of like, you know, what sort of values are insinuated into the narrative,

you know, in deliberate hindsight. But when I was, like when I was high school age, if you read like a college textbook or like, if you took, like, you know, an international relations class in your high school, it say that, oh, you see, you know, in 1919, there was this Wilsonian moment where, you know, Ho Chi-Men, he could have adopted a pro-American stance. If only Wilson had paid attention to him. But, you know, because, you know, these like mean white men were just, like, being mean and racist, like, this didn't happen. Like, I think that that's nonsense for all kinds of reasons. I mean, first of all, it's, like, kind of sending it's fucking stupid.

But also, it really kind of sells people like Ho Chi-Men. short. Ho Chiaman wasn't there to be a coo-e and grovel for, you know, towing concessions. He basically sent, he basically penned this document and Owen to his

influence of kind of his French patrons who were experienced revolutionaries. They seemed to think that Wilson would recognize, Wilson and Clementsso would recognize they didn't know China was going to be a significant, battle theater.

There was nothing friendly about this communication. You know, and this idea that everybody, if you give Ho Chi men a Coke in a Snickers bar or Hershey Barn, pat him on the head, they'll, like, you know, give you a buck tooth grin and say, I love G.I. Joe, Coca-Cola.

Like, that's way more, quote, unquote, racist than anything in Wilson's mind. This brings us to, I realize I'm jumping around a lot, but as we get into this further, like, I think I shall be redeemed because people will understand and I want to get out of the way now, because I'm going to reference a lot of these

things as we get into kind of the hard and fast strategic analysis of the conflict. And I don't want to have to keep jumping back and saying, well, this is what this was. People talk all the time about how Vietnam was like this grave kind of failure of collective security.

And why do they say that? Well, they say that because of CETO, S-A-T-O, like what was CETO? C-O is the Southeast Asian treaty organization. And if you think it sounds a lot like NATO, you'd be right. Because that's what that's what its whole notion was. It's created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, also known as the Manila pact. It was signed in September 1954 and you guessed it Manila, the Philippines.

Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must. tabs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro search cooper and discover our latest offers cupra design that moves finance provided by way of

higher purchase agreement from vows wagon financial services arland limited subject to lending criteria terms and conditions apply vogue financial services are limited trading as cooper financial services is regulated by the central bank of arland um now who is the driving force by cito it was uh Vice President Nixon, who upon returning from Asia 953, said, look, we need some kind of collective security arrangement in Asia that, you know, tantamount to NATO. There was far more confidential conflict diets in Asia. The strategic landscape was a lot more fluid, and Nixon realized that. But at the same time, he said that, you know, one of the reasons it's impossible to, you know, develop a meaning. kind of strategic posture moving forward is because it's uncertain like what any what if anything

you know anyone's willing to commit and what what they're willing to stand on as you know essential interests and this creates a credibility problem um george kennin also was very much behind this idea if not cito itself he said there's got to be some kind of collective security structure of a formal nature now i make this point a log as people for a few people for few reasons. People act like NATO was this magical thing that, I mean, obviously, like, anybody who claims NATO actually still exists as a fucking moron,

but also, such that it does exist, it's profoundly destabilizing. But we don't know if NATO was effective or not. What we do know is that there was basic credibility behind it, and the Soviet Union considered America, you know, represent a credible threat, you know, if the primary conflict, dyad in Europe was triggered, you know, which was obviously the inter-German border. But at the same time, America periodically had to meet Soviet efforts to decouple

European collective security from American strategic interests, which is one reason why America maintained intermediate nuclear forces in Europe. That's another question. and that's a complicated issue, we'll get into that. My point is that it's not treaties themselves that promotes stability. It's the willingness

of the signatories in order to it's the willingness of the signatories to establish credibility there are in, okay? And it should be obvious. Where the signatories to CETO. It was Australia, France, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

I might add this. Out of those signatories, Australia, New Zealand showed up to fight the Vietnam War. France had just fought the Vietnam men for eight years and been defeated. Thailand was definitely a combatant in the Vietnam War. I mean, this was very much below board in terms of their special operations forces

who were very effective. But Thailand unconditionally availed their bases and their airspace to do anything that the Allies needed. The UK, the UK just this caused great consternation.

Anthony Eden profoundly offended U.S. Department of State of the era and by essentially making it clear that the UK would not commit any kind of collective security arrangement

as regards into China. why they put pen to paper on the Manila pact. That's another question that's kind of complicated. It owed kind of the weasel words inherent to diplomats, I think. I don't have some kind of hatred of... I don't know if I'm not... I don't have some kind of hatred of diplomats in and of themselves, but there is a kind of lawyer ball they play about, you know,

qualifying their willingness to outer treaty allegations and in the case of the UK deciding on with CETO, it had a lot to do with claims of, well, this is a quote, defensive alliance, I mean, which is meaningless and more in peace, as Carl Smith taught us.

There's no other thing as an offensive or defensive war. All wars are both offensive and defensive, but that's a bit outside the scope. In any event, it was, Cito was headquartered in in Bangkok, Thailand, incidentally, too. And again,

Dolis, John Foster Dolis was 100% behind it too. In fact, he could be viewed as kind of the primary architect. Like I said, Nixon, Nixon was convinced a formal collective security arrangement was necessary. Modeled roughly on NATO. Dulles was the one who pushed for Cito as the answer to that.

And it was Dulles who, who, um, who, uh, who, who, who, who, who,

who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, it goes to do you to do you,

that, like, the quote, special relationship between the United States and the U.K. I mean, there were people in the UK who had fag realized the UK lost World War II when

Eden's a complicated figure. And a year later in 1955, like Eden became prime minister, but that's, um, he's, he's one of the more interesting, post-war

British executives, I think. But be as it may. Like he made it clear that the UK was going to sit out anything that happened in Southeast Asia. And it's an interesting question.

You know, I mean, obviously neither Eden nor anybody else was not going to auger, but you know, war literally came to the UK's doorstep in Northern Ireland. And the Revisional IRA's

efforts were very much perceived as part of the anti-colonial movement. I mean, I don't want to start some big controversy with people. I'm not sitting here saying that Athenians are a bunch of communists or something like that, but at point being,

everything all's aside, even if even if there'd been some kind of hawkish like Proto Thatcher type at Downing Street. I don't, the situation that they actually developed in the UK in the 60s, I don't think they were in a position to be, they'll be fighting some general war against, against, you know, North Vietnam and, you know, halfway across the planet. But as in as it as a counterfactual, the, uh, the background of what, what immediately gave rise to CETO, from April 26th until July 20th,

1954, there was a Geneva conference on the status of Indo-China. Like, why was this convened? Well, the French had just taken a defeat by the Vietmen at Yemben-Fu, which I would say was, other than Singapore, where the Jambs Imperial Army just smashed the United Kingdom that Singapore was most devastating defeat ever levied to a

white Western power by a rising a rising non-Western state Jim Ben Fu was the second okay the psychological impact on this was devastating and the Vietnam men showed that they were a martial race okay they manhandled

artillery up the mountainside and bombarded the French positions. The Vietnamese they've got a genuine aptitude for war. We'll get into that in the next episode as we get into the kind of battlefield realities of the war. That aside, the characteristics of the Vietz themselves aside, you know, France

France was a real military power in those days, too, they weren't slouches, you know, and they weren't, they weren't, you know,

the France in 54 wasn't the France of today, you know, these, this wasn't some half-ass army of mercenaries or something either. I mean, it was the French foreign legion,

you know, and these were correct troops, you know, highly motivated, um, arguably, uh, arguably the best equipped

the army on the planet at that point. You know, um, I was comparable, you know, the United States, uh, the gear they was comparable

with the United States was fighting with in Korea after mobilization kicked off in earnest. But as it may, there's a need of a conference in the States of China.

Half of it was purposed half of it was purpose to deal with issues resolving from the Korean War you know, in the and the armistice and half was to kind of resolve the French and no China situation, which is a recipe for disaster to begin with, okay?

Like, you don't want to take that approach to, you know, just say, yeah, we're going to, we're going to knock out two words of one stone with this, like, great conference. And, you know, we're just going to figure out, you know, based the whole status of Asia by, you know, putting the right, you know, putting the right, you know, putting the right, putting the right paperwork together. I mean, all the thing's ridiculous. The delegation The delegations We represented on the status of Korea

It was the Soviet Union Peels Republic of China North and South Korea and the USA And the Indochina side Of the Ready for huge savings We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th Because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale

Is back We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers.

Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading is Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. The conference was France, the Vietam.

although a non-state actor, you know, they had a former representation, the USSR, the USA, the People's Republic of China, the UK, and the nascent the the maybe the beleaguers, I should say, like

successor government in Vietnam, to what had been the Bishi regime that was deposed by Japan, which as I indicated at the start of this conversation, at the start of this talk, only had a year

to remain. In 1995, there was the referendum and the emperor stepped down. And Baoudai was the emperor to be replaced by the what was the sense of Vietnam in 1954? Well, there was two regimes of Vietnam. There's

a Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the Communist Workers Party. and the state of Vietnam, again, Luba Emperor Baudai. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was strongest in the north and in the center of the country, but it had some followers in the south as well.

So basically what you're talking about is you're talking about a country that's a political map of it looks almost like leopard spots at this point, okay? And the the Cidessority that's claimed by the is really a sovereign name only.

At the time of the French defeat, 65,000 documented members of the Workers Party lived south of the 17th parallel, which is what became the divider between northern South Vietnam. And the Mekong Delta region alone, which is in northern South Vietnam. So, I mean, a key strategic piece of real estate.

there was 30,000 party members concentrated. In addition, there was 100,000 others in the South, who were, you know, sympathized with the Vietnam, or who were, you know, just, you know, card-carrying communists, varying stripes. In short, the Democratic Republic of the Vietnam, which whose sole representative was the communists, they could claim membership throughout the entire,

country. Okay. The formal state of Vietnam, led by the emperor, part of the problem with this was part of the problem that was characteristic of those resisting

the communist movement globally. You were looking at a house divided. You know, the war had, World War II had destroyed the right for all time. There was no real political right anymore. Okay.

There's reactionary elements, you know, who bags people like Emperor Boudai, you know, in various monarchists. You know, there was people who didn't really have a political consciousness, but they, you know, they were hostile to communists for self-interested reasons. You know, there wasn't, there wasn't, there's not really corraling these people. You know, like you can't build a movement, particularly when you're facing off against dedicated cadres. You can't just build an, you can't build a political, you can't, you can't build a political army based on opposition to something. You know what I mean? That was, that more, nowhere was that more evident than Vietnam. And I think that I can't really be overstated because the, the Vietnamese who resisted the communists really do get kind of a bum rap.

You know, they're either, they're either cast as cowards or, or just, you know, uh, you know, these kind of, these kind of third world, uh, kleptomaniacs or,

or just, uh, you know, pitiable kind of, um, uh, lackeys and cooies. Like,

that's not the case at all. I mean, they were a mixed bag, but there were, uh, they, they, they,

they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,

they, they should have been looking out for their interest most aggressively, we're not doing so. I think on, on the military side, I think, I think they were.

there was there's plenty of American commanders in South Korea and South Korea really came to fight in the Vietnam War they deployed their force levels were about 50,000 men and her country size of Korea is a major deployment but on the military side you had some very game commanders who very much wanted you know to give

the South enemies what they needed to win and led these guys into combat very bravely, and these guys perform well with honor. But on the political side, you know, it's like what, what's, what do you have in South,

what do you have in what became South Vietnam? It's like, okay, you got, you got a cadre of like kind of upperly mobile, or a cadre kind of like upperly mobile Catholic types, which the French were still here. You know, you got, you got guys are basically small businessmen who don't like the con.

to take their stuff. You know, you got the Buddhists were kind of like put upon by everybody. You know, you got various minorities, like a Monten-Yards, Owen Sundry, who, you know, realize their numbers off if the communists win. But, I mean, there is, I know it probably sounds like I'm somebody who's, like, totally fixated, um, only to, um, you know, kind of the, the central emphasis on my research being Nuremberg and kind of the political theoretical trajectory of things subsequent. um america's problems in the cold war really can be chalked up with the fact that you know it's like well

you know if you waging a war of extermination against the political right like it's not that that doesn't you're you're not lividable to hovel out when you're um trying to draw upon your own cadres to defeat the communists and um in vietnam uh that's a topic that's not particularly um emphasized but i uh I think it's more important than in some theaters. Like, legit. I, um, it, uh, and as we'll get into, like, later in the series, um, America learned its lesson in part, um, by, uh, the final phase of the Cold War. And that's one of the reasons why, um, the, uh, that the contras are so effective in places

like Nicaragua, where, uh, honestly, um, the, uh, the, uh, the San Anista regime, the Soie's probably invested more in that regime than any other sense of Vietnam era. I mean, as a client regime, outside of the media sphere of influence, I mean. But in any event, the Geneva Conference basically all it did was it formalized a division that was already, burgeoning, you know, even in the, even before the French had been defeated at Diem. Ben-Fu. But what it did was, it created this kind of arbitrary dividing line to create kind of the fiction that, you know,

there was two sovereign states here that were at war. And like, that was never, that was never the kick. I mean, the Vietnam War was a civil war. I mean, it's not me, there's not me having sympathy for the devil or, trying to simplify the political or strategic situation. A civil war doesn't seem to be a civil war because great powers, you know, converge and draw like an imaginary line on the center of the country. That's quite literally what happened. The fact that you had, you know, we'll get into this too.

You know, North Vietnam was a crack army. It was an incredibly game forest as well as like a truly conventional army. This idea that Vietnam was kind of like weird guerrilla war, like that's bullshit. Yeah, there's aspects of asymmetrical war, particularly in the Mekong Delta

and particularly early on. Make no mistake. The reason why Vietnam was so bloody and so brutal was because it was a conventional war where firepower carried the day. The North Vietnamese

the only way that the only way that they could accomplish their political objectives was through a conventional military victory, and they knew that. This is one of the reasons why America deployed so heavily the way that they did. Was that misguided? Not in and of itself, but we're going to get into why that didn't produce the results that it had to.

but this is a this is also another example of how this you know whether or not we accept the kind of whether or not we accept that quote democracy is utilized at present and even during the Cold War

when it actually had you know some kind of a identifiable meaning even if it was only like contra Marxist Leninism I return to kind of the Schmidian notion that it doesn't do you any good at war to have this kind of ongoing discussion in policy terms because even if people are doing so in good faith, which they never are, because this becomes another means of exploiting.

You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance. and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro.

Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated

by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite LIDL items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Divisions within the electorate for some sort of competitive advantage. But even if that were not the case, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't

endlessly debate military questions as if they're, you know, ordinary policy matters. And the fact that that's what a general war became led to some really perverse outcomes, both on the battlefield and in terms of what came to be considered a success in political terms. And I think Vietnam was a rare situation where the political and the military questions were basically synonymous. and the Pentagon on some level recognize that, but the way they proceeded in actual policy terms whereas if these were two discrete things that had success metrics independent of one another,

if that makes any sense. I'm going to know more of what I mean in the next episode when some concrete examples emerged as to how this phenomenon played out. but ultimately, and I'm going to wrap this up in a minute, what the Geneva Accord led to do was this fiction of two Vietnam's, okay? And it created a pathway, or at least a roadmap, to unification, that was supposed to obviate any potential crisis of authority,

but it was contingent upon it was contingent upon in plain language both purported sovereign governments advocating any use of armed force in order to

affect a political outcome and dominate the future state by way of a single party regime. And obviously the Hanoy government always claimed that the Viet Cong or the National Liberation Front was

independent of their authority. It was a spontaneous uprising. There was some true to that, but obviously Hanoi cadres were operationally insinuated into the NLF. The Saigon regime always

maintained that, you know, the NLF was nothing but a direct client of Hanoi and that so long as it existed, it constituted a terrorist threat to the unification process and so none of the terms that Geneva agreement had to be honored

so I mean this outcome was entirely predictable okay I mean there's basically no way that there's basically no way that any other any other outcome would have been emerging but that's that's why the kind of political foundation was so murky and kind of unworkable

you know, it's, um, and I also got to show you that, you know, I make this point a lot. There's, and I generally don't engage people because it's, it's just like bad faith bullshit. But people, without knowing what they're talking about, like, you know, they let a debate about colonialism and how bad this was. It's like, okay, so you really think what I just described here, like, you really think that's superior to having, like, the French administering Vietnam? Like, I, I mean, like, in what way, shape, or form, you know, and you could say that, um, Well, that was just another example of, you know, White Westerers imposing this paradigm. Like, it really wasn't, man. I mean, the reason why it was so dysfunctional in Fubar is because you did have it.

You did have Beijing, like, having their say. You did have Moscow having their say. And obviously, you know, in having their say, they were deliberately sabotaging the proceedings and creating conditions wherein, you know, a cadre-based movement could, you know, effectively sabotage any government that emerged in the same thing. south, but you can't, you can't, you can't just, you can't just shut down a conversation. I say, oh, that's just like something the white man imposed on into China, you know, so it's, everybody's always, people act like this kind of, you know, people act like the 19th century

regime that endured really till 19, 1990, I mean, like, you know, Britain, France, Germany, you know, dividing up the world in these, in these key things. theaters, like, was this like a bond situation? It's like, what's your alternative? They're like, they never, they never have one. You know, it's, like, it's idea like the world's kind of exists in situ and like, it's like a place of plenty in peace, but then people screwed up just by like imposing politics upon it.

It's like, I think ontologically, like, I think people just like don't, like a lot of people, even people aren't particularly dumb. They just like can't grasp like the ontological reality of politics. I mean, I don't know, but at any event, let's, let's, let's, um, let's, let's, um, let's wrap up for now because I want to shift gears with what we get to do next. And I realize this might have been a little bit dry, but again, like I said, I'm going to reference

all this stuff when we get into the the, you know, discussing the battlefield situation and kind of the political maneuverings of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon, so it becomes important. But yeah, I hope

this didn't bore people at death. I hope they got something out of it relating to the topic. So just run through your, uh, anything you want to promote and we'll go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. I mean, good things are happening. We, uh, you know, like I said, within the next week or so, we're launching the YouTube channel at one list. Um, Steel Storm 2 is dropping this month to be on the lookout for that.

Um, I've got some big stuff happening on the podcast, uh, but I'm going to announce that formally, um, on, uh, on the next pod episode, um, which are going to be. become more frequent. But you'll, you'll, I don't want to, I want to get into that, like on the pod. But yeah,

that's all I got. You can find me on Twitter at Triskelyan Jihad. The T is a 7. Find me at Substack. Real Thomas 7777.7.com. Thomas, I appreciate it. Until the next time.

Yeah, likewise. Thank you, people. This is part seven of the Cold War series. Thomas 777. How are you doing? Hello, everybody. I'm okay, man. Today, the issue with the Vietnam conflict, as we kind of got into the last episode, it's

not just that the sort of controversy around it that endorsed to this day, you know, in terms of ethics and in terms of policy critiques. I mean, some of that is contrived, some of it's not. But even if we take people's sort of values and partisan ideas out of the equation entirely, The Vietnam conflict straddled, for like a better way to characterize it or describe it, in multiple epochs in terms of political and military affairs. You know, as Vietnam jumped off in earnest, as we'll get into what, which was very much during the Kennedy administration, I know some people have this sort of like, you know, this, this revisionist notion that,

oh, Kennedy was trying to disengage from Vietnam. That's not true at all. But regardless of that, a paradigm shift in military affairs was underway from the post, New Look, Eisenhower era, which was kind of bookended by the Cuba crisis, which put an end of that kind of thinking. you know and and um from that kind of like the first phase of the american war you know like 62 to 65 i guess you could say represented you know that is sort of a gray area um between you know sort of policy orientations um the uh the kind of revolutionary period in the third world where like you know the colored revolt if you want to look at it like that was an underway full swing um You know, what the, what remained of the Western powers were still engaged, you know, Spain, Portugal, France, who just, you know, been interested in crushing defeat at the Mben Fu.

You know, they were trying to, they're trying to find a way to, you know, utilize firepower and the technological edge that they enjoyed, you know, in order to advantage them in counterinsurgency warfare. Vietnam ended in the 1970s as the era of true strategic parity and was emerging from the United States and the Soviet Union and major powers were disengaging from the third world in direct capacities like owing not just the fact that you know interdependence was causing more and more conflict diets to emerge where escalation could have brought the superpowers into direct collision like in 1973 in the Middle East but also just because you know there's a certain weariness for you know this kind of constant engagement in active combat in multiple in multiple theaters um so vietnam's important for all those kinds of reasons but also

just um it there's because of all those things i just described and kind of the you know the historical situatedness of the conflict in like temporally i mean there was a lot of data to be derived from it about warfare. You know, where the road meets the road in terms of combat and things and technology and how these things impact the modern battlefield, but also

you can extrapolate things about the American system. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor,

Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited.

Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30. because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Lidl items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Liddle, more to value. And how particularly wartime administrations, uh, politics, uh, is very much insinue. into the decision-making process. I don't mean high politics, although that is the case, too. I mean, these kind of, like, domestic intrigues spill over into the decision-making process as regards, you know, war and peace decisions, and that's really, very bad. And obviously, this gained a lot of momentum, you know, during the kind of, you know,

the rise of the, you know, the modern or contemporary, not modern, contemporary, like, news cycle, which really began in the 60s and 70s. You know, like reaching it's zenith, you know, in like 1990, 1990, 1991, where you had the true 20-war news cycle and the Gulf War on TV. I mean, now, obviously, that's done. I mean, there's certain, like, media is ubiquitous, like, in a way, it's never been before. But there's not this bully pulpit of, like, the news media, you know, the terrestrial news media. That's what everybody watches, and that controls, you know, narratives and the parameters of discourse. Like, that's what I was talking about.

But to dive into the topic. There's nobody who's more associated with Vietnam than Robert McNamara. Okay. And Errol Morris, who I've got great esteem for, I mean, he's this weird nevish type, but he makes great films. You know, he did a documentary on Fred Leichter, you know, who authored the report. He did a documentary on Donald Rumsfeld. You know, in his, I mean, not to go too far afield from our topic,

but Errol Morris really pioneered the documentary style of filmmaking in a way that's become convention. And him letting his subject and, you know, obviously his primary efforts are biographical, of historical personages, or if people he's just interested in, like in the case of Leitler, but putting the camera on the subject and letting the subject just testify, and Morris asking his questions off camera, or the filmmaker or the interviewer asking it was on camera like morris invented that style but he i highly recommend anybody um the fog of war i think it was released in 2003 that's a pretty good kind of capsule summary of macnamara's career from you know it's the

testimony of macnamara himself but because it's only like a two and a half hour film obviously a lot of things are left out but it i i i highly recommend that to anybody wants to learn more about So let's talk about the man himself. Robert S. McNamara. The S stands for Strange. His middle name was strange. Robert Strange McNamara. He was the longest serving Secretary of Defense to this day from 1961 to 68. Nowadays, even administration is that have a comparatively strong mandate. You know, they play musical chairs with their cabinet postings. But even in McNamara's epoch, it was unheard of for a secretary of defense to serve that long, okay? Like, why did he serve this long? Well, McNamara came from humble origins. He was born in San Francisco in 1916. His father was the sales manager of some kind of wholesale firm that literally made shoes and other things like this.

Okay, like shoes and boots for, you know, like nurses and factory workers. So, I mean, like part of the upper kind of kind of like the lower middle middle. class upper working class um he he proved himself to be a prodigy of sorts with um mathematics uh what we consider to be uh um logistics and data management or well i mean logistics is we consider to be like data management today um he graduated 1937 from berkeley went out of the Harvard business school uh in ninth in graduate 1939 um obviously right around this time you know the uh the uh the new dealer's war was was jumping off it was only about you know two years away and when magdemeur found himself in uniform uh he ended up in the army air corps and guys of his kind

of caliber and intellect tended to be shuttled that way um for obvious reasons and he uh he entered the army as a captain in 43 he served under curtis lemay who then was a colonel um when mcdemer and LeMay, and it's interesting, is McNamara and McNamara gets into this in the fog of war documentary. Like, McNamara was probably the closest thing LeMay had, like, a friend. But, like, McNamara was, you know, and he's

like, I felt like I didn't really know the man very well, you know, at all. And then it's like, when LeMay died, apparently LeMay's widow kind of McNamara, and it's like, yeah, Curtis said, you know, he loved you. He said all these great things about you. And McNamara's like, really? Like, I hardly heard the guy's seen more than one

word. But, any of it, Matt DeMurz, as a young officer, kind of a defectal adjutant to LeMay. He kind of demonstrated his chops for, for military logistics and just kind of, you know, applied analysis of, of, you know, the mission at hand. And in terms of like getting results within the, you know, rationale of what, of what the Army air force charged within the Pacific. LeMay and Magnamara, they came up with a way to assault

the Japanese mainland from the Marianas Islands, instead of having to, you know, jump the Himalayas, this has been, it's had been done. And this owed to things I don't quite understand, like, you know, fuel consumption versus load, you know, versus, you know, travel

within or above or below the jet stream and all these kinds of things. You know, the complex, the complex calculus of the then, nascent science of military aviation. Okay. So the Magdimer, the guy really was a polymath, okay? I mean, he demonstrated that really by the time he was about 30 years old.

When the Magdma got discharged, he ended up at the Ford Motor Company in 1946. And the Ford Motor Company, it seems strange these days because like a college reason really mean anything. but in those days when it was a rare credential and when unless you were one of these kind of rich boys

went to Yale or something if you went to college on merit it's because you were a guy really, really knew his stuff there was very there was a dearth

of managers and executive officers at Ford Motor Company you were college educated so guys like McNamara was in demand he got recruited there as a manager of planning and financial analysis,

he advanced rapidly. By 1960, when he was in his early... Yeah, I was in his late... Yeah, it was in his early 40. He's been like 43, 44. He became the first president of Ford Motor Company outside the Ford family, which was a huge deal. And this was November 9th,

which is a date that I think we're all familiar with. And if you were not before, I hope that after watching the stuff that Pete Canonis and I do, you are familiar with it now. November 99060 was when he became first president of Ford. This was one day after JFK was elected. And during his tenure at Ford, both as what we now consider a quant and like a corporate accountant. And during his brief tenure as president, he's credited. with basically like making forward competitive in the post-war period,

like after like the government pork like went away, obviously. And this, in the 1950s and early 60s, like a huge amount of American automakers like just ceased to exist. Okay. I mean, all these kind of iconic brands, some of them endured, like, AMC endured to like the 70s or 80s. But like there's a huge number of automotive brands that went under during the 1950s. It was, I mean, that, I mean, it's one part. one part market corrective one part it just you know um this the scaling back of uh of the subsidies they'd enjoy you know during the kind of salad days of the new deal for for big manufacturing firms

but in any event jfk whatever we can say about him and i don't want to i don't want to get into a discussion on the man's merit um or character or uh that of his politics one thing is into see is that with the exception of the kind of naked nepotism in the case of his brother, but I consider that to be more of a matter of self-preservation,

you know, with installing him as the Attorney General. With the exception of that, Kennedy and or his advisors, they had a remarkable eye for cabinet talent. And, um, Kennedy's, uh,

Kennedy's first choice for Secretary of Defense was Robert A. Lovett, who'd been the Secretary of Defense, under Truman, interestingly, from 51 to 53, height of the Korean War. So obviously Kennedy was looking at for a man who had served as a wartime secretary of defense, okay, which indicates the kind of hard realism pre-Cuba that Kennedy's not conventionally credited with, but that I think is clear if people know how to read between the lines. But the reason why he broke up at first is because he didn't, he, nobody thought that

manned the mirror would leave for a motor company. So it wasn't even, it wasn't even like within consideration. Not on Grange's mirror or anything. It's just that, you know, the guy with the... You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you.

Even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and a... discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance

provided by way of hire purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings?

We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Frickin All-Star. And Wabodolus had been a progen at George Marshall, and I don't think the Marshall plan was this great policy coup. I don't think it accomplished much of anything, other than putting some shine on the occupation regime,

which needed to be rehabilitated in order to get the Boondish Republic to play ball the way the Truman and Eisenhower and the Truman and later Eisenhower administrations needed it to. But that's another story. George Marshall had tremendous clout in those days.

And a lot of it aside in the fact, again, that he'd cut his teeth as a wartime defense secretary, coupled the fact that prior to that he'd serve as Marshall. was under Secretary of Defense, and he was very much a protege of the guy. But a lot of it declined. He's like, you know, out of raw fatigue, I think. But also he said, you know, you should approach McNamara because he'll probably take it.

And Kennedy went through Sergeant Shriver and offered him the Secretary of Defense position or the Secretary of the Treasury. McNammer immediately accepted the appointment of Secretary of Defense. Was Magmur and knowledgeable about defense matters? Well, I mean, compared to anybody since Cheney, let me qualify that. I mean, I don't people think not in karate that Cheney's a total piece of shit. When Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 43, I think he very much had a sense of what needed to be done in the transition era

from the from the from the from the cold war is literally ending okay and I only invoked him because regardless of the guy's character which I think we're going to agree is not something laudable and whatever other issues he has

he was a highly qualified secretary defense no we did not come up through the military but he was something of a polymath and he understood military matters as regards policy or the rim use the road in a really splendid way. Subsequently, I think the Secretary of Defense these days is kind of, it's almost like

it's almost like Kremlinology. You've got to look through the kind of big, there's all these like syndicures that don't mean anything anymore and people's titles don't actually indicate what their roles in fact are. Like I think Robert Gates was the de facto shadow foreign policy president.

I also think that Secretary of Defense has become Secretary of State in a real way, which is very strange. But in the Kennedy era, these cabinet positions carried a lot more weight. And there was a lot more transparency in terms of the man who held the office was very much the decision maker. With some narrow exceptions, you know, they're, it, when you have an executive who was as much of a, who was as much of a hands-on sort of all theitarian as FDR, yeah, they're very much for some. people who were ciphers and key roles because he simply didn't want them to do anything, but exempting that, you know, if you got appointed Secretary of Defense, you were a pretty

heavy hitter. And Magnifer was known with the fourth Secretary of Defense, because until, you know, until Nuremberg was Secretary of War, it was the cabinet posting. But that's, that's a lot to unpack there, frankly, but that's outside of scope. But in any event, McNamara was kind of a perfect choice for this era. okay because the technology and I mean this was the dawn of the information age okay like computing as we know it was very much just at a beginning then it had begun during the second world war but in an applied capacity it was emergent McNamara understood logistics better than anybody he understood a highly scaled systems and management of those systems and how to identify variables and the bounded rationality of the system in question and what it was purposed for.

You can identify what was most essential to production. And that's an odd skill set. That's kind of like what management comes down to, in the burn-up sense of managerialism. I mean, when I say management, I don't mean some dick who, like, manages a Home Depot. I don't mean, like, the way he ate, like, fat H.R. ladies talking about management.

I mean, in terms of, you know, actual, actually knowing how to, knowing how to optimize the performance of both the human element and and the autonomous element within some highly scaled structure you know with all kinds of variables uh some of which are more essential than others you know but the core ones that facilitate productivity and the most concrete ways you know need be identified like most people can't do that um and particularly in uh magnum eras day yeah as a descendant. indicated, you know, this was like the dawn of the information age, and, you know, technology,

there's going to punctuate an equilibrium of technology, and then we can all agree on that. You know, like, once there's, there'll be one innovation, and then, you know, that, that, that, that that leads to others, you know, in a very kind of, in a very kind of, in a very kind of, in a very kind of rapid capacity. This was underway, but you didn't have at your disposal, like all this kind of you know you didn't you didn't have consumer tech um that we take for granted and big business in those days you know like you didn't you you were basically like using like a pen and paper and abacus like proverbially and sometimes literally you know to handle like massive reams of data so uh the kind of like the right man in the role and they were almost

always men um not for conspiratorial reasons but pharyngological ones um um um um You know, this was more essential then than even today, although it still remains essential. But McNamara's philosophy in his own words was, he said the Senator Defense in the then current era had to take an active role. He said, you know, he aimed to provide aggressive leadership questioning, suggesting alternatives, proposing objectives, and stimulating progress, just as he had done at Ford Motor Company. that might sound corny on its face or like corporate PR. I mean, like, McNer is the concept company man. But in his case, I think he really believed that. And honestly, I think in a lot of respects, that's like, what he accomplished?

He rejected radical organizational changes. Like I just indicated, there was a lot of people, both within the military establishment and also within the policy establishment. And this was very insestuous in some cases, too. but on Capitol Hill there's all kinds of people who are trying to force, you know, these kind of top-down changes to the military apparatus. You know, the command structure, you know, the way forces in being organized, you know, at the division level and, you know, and what weapon systems were going to get privileged over others.

Even usually as that, there was debate about the draft. and its future. Okay, there was a committee. I cannot remember the name of it, and I'm sorry. Headed by Senator Stuart Signington. He wanted to,

his committee with him leading the charge, they wanted to abolish the discrete military departments. They wanted to replace the joint chiefs with a single chief of staff and, you know, not, and give him dominion over,

over, they wanted to like an inter-service command structure, okay? You'd abolish discrete ranks between the services. You'd have like this unitary command structure that went to this one man who interned was accountable only to the president and his national security captain, which in my opinion is a terrible idea. But like this was the kind of thing among other stuff that was being taken seriously then. You know, and McNamara, as soon as he took office, he's like, no, that shit's over with. You know, like, shut the fuck up.

That's not happening. And, you know, we're not, well, we maybe we'll be, you know, we may be will be fighting World War III, you know, in a few years. We're probably going to be at war, you know, in a secondary theater, you know, within months. We're not, we're not going to completely upset the, we're not going to completely upset the wagon or the Applecart, you know, and start playing games with, you know, with force structure or organization. And that was, and that actually, that, that was, that, that was, that, that was huge, okay, because things would have, I, I, I think, I, Sigminton's idea was particularly stupid, I think, but there's all kinds, there was all kinds of stuff being bandied about that would have really, that wouldn't really kind of upset the ability of, of, of, um, of, the entire defense establishment to react.

And, um, really from, from, from, from, after the Cuba, a crisis I mean in 73 and then in 83 I mean yeah there was there was the punctuated crises of a strategic nature that were truly critical but about every two years like in between like you there were there was some kind of like what you can think of as like brush fire um uh crisis of a secondary in a secondary theater that that nonetheless you know like required an active response and this ultimately this is one of things that led to like the creation a special operations command, but that's outside the scope too. You know, like a unitary command for special operations forces.

Unfortunately, a lot of disasters happen for that to become... Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast.

Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Terramar.

Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. KUPRA Design that moves Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited subject to lending criteria

Terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Kupra Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland Implemented but that's kind of always the way it is not just with the military but

what was Kennedy's policy vision If you don't understand Vietnam's escalation They don't just mean the punctuated escalation that was yielded or exploited, depending on your perspective, by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Vietnam, true engagement of Vietnam began at Eisenhower, okay, in a real capacity. And when Kennedy took the oath of office, there was special operations forces types on the ground who were directly engaged with the communists. okay so I mean it's this this idea that you know this idea that you know like I said before we went alive oh Kennedy was trying to disengage from southeast Asia but then you know Johnson is this this bad guy you know just engaged us engaged the America engaged the country at war

said he could you know make money by you know bell helicopter selling selling stuff to the Pentagon or whatever the fuck Oliver Stone and Howard's in claim that did not happen um in his speech to Congress on March 28th, the core emphasis of the speech was defense. It was Cold War, it was

war in peace, it was power politics stuff. In part, because, you know, Nixon was always not just got a, on the campaign trail, I mean, Nixon was not just always trying to portray Kennedy as some punk rich kid who's wet by the years. He was, he basically was always

calling him a pussy, you know, and saying, like, he saw a, on communism, you know, he's a rich kid. He doesn't, he does not have the presence to command, nor does he have, like, the knowledge. You know, which is ironic,

because Kennedy was a lot of things, but he was, like, anyone should they stay in the Kennedys, he was a gangster's son, and he was a war hero, and he served in the brown water hate. Like, the dude was kind of a bad. You know, like, he, like, he wasn't, like, a big pussy, whatever. I mean, yeah. But the,

but, I mean, politics was politics. and being what it is, that's, you know, and, I mean, it wasn't just Nixon, other people, too. They, you know, Kennedy, he had kind of like a boyish charm, like, our phony you might think that is. Like, he did not, you know,

he didn't come off as, uh, this, like, heavy personage. And especially succeeding Eisenhower, like, the Soviets were genuinely afraid of Eisenhower. And, uh, I think for good reason. Like, I'm not, I don't think Eisenhower is this rare genius like some people do.

and I think in some ways he was an ugly eye in terms of his character but he he was a ruthless SOB you know and he definitely had a kind of command presence I mean that goes without saying but

what Kennedy outlined to the March 28th, 961 speech what he outlined is he said look massive retaliation as a doctrine he's like that's over okay he's like so is the new look as it's been, you know, as it was

euphemistically assigned, you know, he's like we're not, we're not going to rely on on first, on splendid first strike capability, nor we're just going to rely on the nuclear deterrent, you know, in lieu of conventional forces. Like, it's not realistic.

It's totally inflexible. And frankly, it's and frankly, it's totally, it's morally bankrupt. You know, you don't, You don't keep the peace by threatening the several states of the world with, like, massive, like, genocidal countervalley with salt. You know, like, as a standing policy. But it, uh, um, I mean, it's somewhat facetious, but there really was, like, um, they're, they got the middle of Lou that Herman Con came out of.

And I think Herman Conn was great. And I'm not putting shit on them at all. But out of the middle of con and Van Neumann, like, there were guys. like genuinely autistic guys who'd uh you know come up through uh academia and game theory and stuff who who were suggesting things that you know made sense in terms of you know the the raw variables of balance of forces and capabilities but we're just like completely remember just like grossly moral offensive morally offensive in terms of like uh in terms of policy orientation but i mean like dr strange

of like yeah it's like it seems like over the top ridiculous like something of a piece stick movie but it was like ringing on like a real phenomenon you know like uh which is which is kind of funny but also kind of fucked up but uh the um he uh Kennedy also to his credit and this wasn't realized until Carter and a presidential director of 58 and 59 um and obviously the technology of that point it made it far more critical for human decision makers to assert control over a nuclear arms and commanding control, but things were already moving in that direction whereby not only were human decision makers being sidelined, but the military

and specifically strategic air command was very much taking control of these processes. And Kennedy said that's got to stop. you know and um and magna mera was exactly the man to kind of see to that you know in terms of structuring forces and protocol strategic forces i mean to uh to obviate the threat of uh of civilian control and the commander in chief role being appropriated by um by um a military element um he he magdur i believed in more to obviate that than anybody and jill carter and as we get into the Carter era, we're going to talk about like all that cool stuff. I think it's cool.

I'm fascinated by the late Cold War and the kind of strategic nuclear paradigm and artificial intelligence therein. Some people probably think that's boring as fuck, but I think it's really cool. But in any event, what's key

about Kennedy's policy speech on defense was he said quote, We need to operate with an eye to, quote, prevent the steady erosion of the free world through limited wars. Now, this is the crux of why America went to war in Vietnam. Okay.

The way you got to look at the Cold War is that obviously there's the ongoing strategic nuclear threat of, you know, a total war between Warsaw Pact and NATO, which would be catastrophic. I mean, that goes not saying. But the real issue as a basic stability. ensued between the superpowers. It could be imagined and the Team B, the Team B exercise and the men who organized and facilitated it

and who were instrumentally getting Reagan elected, frankly. The scenario these guys painted was like, look, imagine in America where essentially all of Asia save South Korea and Japan, all of Latin America save Mexico, all of Africa save like a handful of the Arab states who are nonetheless like Soviet-aligned,

you know, goes communist or becomes basically sympathetic to the communist perspective and is either staked out, you know, a position of absolute neutrality in the Cold War or is availed itself as a Soviet proxy. Like, yeah, America would survive

in those circumstances, would it basically be this garrison state that was kind of a second-rate power within the western hemisphere, you know, surrounded by a hostile. Like, that's a very, that's a very dangerous world to live in. And a lot of the things we, even if some kind of perennial peace could be achieved, a lot of the things we take for granted just would not exist. You know, that would have kind of frozen American tech and American wealth at a certain point. Because just by virtue of dominating the rest of the planet, you know, like the Soviet Union could have kind of like remade the world in its own image. Kind of like how America like remade the world in its own image after 1989, which is not a good thing. But my point being, like people who act like the Cold War was this kind of like ridiculous paranoid fantasy or that it was like this excuse to like sell munitions and helicopters, you know, by defense contractors.

Like it was in fact a real thing. And this was the potential outcome really until Gorbachev and until the Soviets folded their flag. It wasn't this binary thing, like either, you know, total war or peace or, you know, oh, this, oh, communism, quote, doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work, but that doesn't matter. All kinds of the shit doesn't work that, you know, nevertheless, like indoors or shuffles on, like, like some,

like some fucking Frankenstein's monster or something. like that that was a very real possibility and kennedy's uh what he was saying here is look if we ignore if we ignore theaters like you know china if we ignore theaters it's up there in africa if we ignore especially um you know uh developments in their own backyard i mean that's two folds on the road doctrine but that aside for a minute you know it's like we're going to die like death by a thousand cuts as regards our ability to you know influence the course of politics and the rest this planet. You know, and do you really want to be like a garrison state, albeit a continent-sized garrison state as large as self-sufficient, but you really, do you really want to be like

the American island in like the red world? I mean, that was, that was not only poignant, but it was very realistic. And I give Kennedy a lot of props for that, for that speech. Like I said, I'm reading wind of lines as he intended. Congress to read Win the Lines. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 20, 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers.

Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is... services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. But that's, I'm not a Kennedy fan or apologists at all, but not only is that,

because, go ahead, I'm sorry. Let me ask. Okay. You said that the Cold War was a very real thing. Is that because of, was it a continuing ideological war between the, the neoconservatives and who, started them and the Soviet Union that whole time?

Well, there's wars within there's wars within that camp. I mean, if you want to know what I think I agree with Yaki's perspective that the doctor's plots like that epoch, not that incident itself, but that incident was demonstrative of like a break within the communist camp like a leadership cast, okay?

And it's also one of the reasons where Israel often just became like massively anti-communist. Like all of a Sutton. Okay. So yeah, there was that. The Soviet Union became this kind of strange thing. Like, yeah, it was a, it clung to revolutionary socialism until the end of its life. But, like, was it a Marxist-Leninist state? Like, as much as such things existed, it was. But, you know, what the Soviet Union really had going for it was the kind of Soviet DDR model, that was really appealing to people in the third world.

You know, like, Oliver North, when he was undercover, like, doing very shady things. When he landed at Managua airport, he were laid back under, like, State Department cover, if you liked their teleks or whatever. He's like, I'm at Managua airport.

It's a mirror, it's like, it's a mirror image of Checkpoint Charlie in the Inter-German border. You know, he's like, there's a bunch of Nicaragans running around acting like through the Stasi. You know, he's like, this is, And, I mean, that spoke for itself. So even when Stalinism, even when the, even when the worst up pat, kind of like, even after 68, and I mean, even before, like, putting 608 has got on the formal breach, you know, with the new left, even like nobody in France, nobody in the Netherlands, like even commies, I mean, like, looked like the Soviet Union for inspiration.

Like, you better believe that, like, hundreds and millions of people in Africa and Latin America, you know, in Indonesia. Like, they did. You know, like, they looked at that as like, wow, this is a great model for progress. And, you know, we don't need to suffer, you know, the, we don't need to suffer the pain of exploitation to reach, you know, the bounty of technology and plenty and modern productive. Productive techniques. You know, all we have to do is, like, sign on with the Soviet block and we'll get all those things. And plus, like, you know, they're going to lead us, they're going to lead us to this Tlericotopia, because eventually we're going to fight. America. I mean, like, that's

and yeah, within that, like the godfathers of neol conservatism, like, they became, like, on that target list, ironically. Like, that's why, like, communism, like, a Frankenstein monster. Like, a lot of people who are, like, called, um, which is the meaning was term, but a lot of

people are called, like, anti-Semitic. People are like, oh, how can you say that, you know, communism was, you know, emerged from the Jewish world of social existence, the Soviet Union hated Jews. It's like, well, there's such a thing is, like, you know, there's such a thing as, you know, a gole and a frog, okay? Like, you create something and it gets out of control, or it turns on you.

But it's also, too, like, ideologies aren't any, like, one thing. It's like, you can't say, like, well, communism was Jewish or just not Jewish, or that, you know, the coalition that created it in Russia, you know, consisted of, like, XYZ kind of people and nobody else. The Soviet was a weird coalition of, like, indigenous. Slavs, you know, who hated the European overcast. You know, they were aligned with a slightly more cosmopolitan element, you know, of Ashkenazi Jews who hated that same overcast for different reasons.

And these people didn't really like each other, but they had common enemies and common interests. And when that fell apart, in large measure, because the situation of the Jewish people are nationally totally changed after Nuremberg after the Alford Declaration. Yeah, they stopped keeping up appearances at all. And yeah, I agree with Yaki

basically that if you were on the right after about 953, 555 they were running around like a John Birch or like calling for the death of Ivan, you were a fucking idiot. I mean, basically because it,

Russians definitely, like the Soviet Union definitely wasn't. and Russia honestly is not really your friend if you're a white Western man, but they're not really your enemy either. I mean, as a hedge against people who really are your enemy, it's better that they exist and they not exist. But that's probably a subject for a different episode. But yeah, the Cold War, the way to understand it in very raw terms,

especially in the Kennedy era, before things got a little bit more complicated through the Tant. and then like when the Cold War jumped off again in earnest in 1979, 80, whatever. It's not reductions to say that there really was a, quote, colored revolt underway. This was the question of the day in power political and military terms. It was very much led from Moscow. It was facilitated by Warsaw Pact, arms, logistics, equipment,

foodstuffs, technology, manpower, everything. and that's what was on the table. Yeah, there was other deeper nuances to, like, the ideology that had created it. But as the world that stood when Kennedy took the oath of office, like the Cold War was what I just described. And that was a really real thing. And like I said, yeah, guys like Yaki, guys like Otto Riemer. Yonki was dead by then.

But what he'd been saying before and what Riemer was saying, the day he died was, you know, if you're a European, you know, who's under occupation, which all, which they all were, I mean, it's still of this day. But in those days, you know, the Red Army was also in Berlin. But, you know, I said you need to be very careful about what you wish for. And in advocating that, you know, the Soviet Union should be destroyed because it's really the only hedge against the traditional enemy of Europe. And I agree with that.

but uh for our purposes I have besides the world situation as it wasn't kind of the oath of office because I came on this idea like oh you know what a bunch of horseshit we got to go fight the communists and now before where they'll be over here like that was not what was on the table that's not what anybody thought and the quote

domino theory wasn't this like crazy thing that John Burchard's thought or that crazy generals thought like this was actually happening like huge swaths of the planet were going red okay um Stalinism had real cachet and, you know, a huge, in, in, in a huge percentage of the global population. And the entire, like, raison d'etra supposedly of Nuremberg was we're going to create this world society.

I know we even have a United Nations. So, okay, well, if, like, you know, at that, at that time, I think there's about, like, I think there's about, like, I think there's about, like, five billion people in the world. It's like, well, if, like, four billion of those five billion people, like think that communism's great you've got a problem okay I mean that's what the Cold War was about you know it wasn't about you know when I walk outside and Terry Hode in Vienna

you know there's gonna be some there's gonna be some Chinaman with a red star in his hat and a bayonet you know who's gonna like fucking you know charge me and like you know turn me into fucking sashimi and like enslaved my wife and you know maybe everybody go to the drive in and watch like shitty communist movies nobody likes

like that's not what people thought and maybe some people thought that but that's not, you know, like, that's not what underlay the Cold War and, like, people like Maddenor. Well, let me, let me ask you another question. It almost makes it sound like you could, like somebody would say that they're reactionaries. You know, you know how people on the right are always just, we're all reactionaries. It makes it sound like if the, if the third world is turning red and these dominoes are falling,

there's a reason why they're doing. it and they're reacting to what they're seeing happening to Europe, basically. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it seems like... I think a lot of the case, too. And that's why, I mean, today, there's something interesting. I spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time reading about and kind of studying as much as I can,

what some of these, like, Middle Eastern Nazi actors are doing. And a bunch of these guys, like, a popular front of liberation of Palestine, general command, like who were big time alive with Warsaw Pact like they flipped Islamic like very profoundly and like very immediately like after the wall came down and like some people be like those guys are just being mercenary and doing what they have to do to keep

you know money and weapons flowing I don't think it's that simple man I think to your point a lot of these guys they were basically they basically had contempt for like the features of capitalist modernity that they consider to be like most offensive, you know, whether it's like

sexual essentialness or, you know, like, the erosion of meaningful roles for men and women, or, you know, like mixing between races or you know, pornography. And I, there there is a certain puritanical aspect

of communism as it manifested in the third world, but even otherwise. You know, like that was one of the things. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

For Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply.

Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs,

when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Little more to value The uh that was a that was a cause and refrain I mean there's like all get the fuck device and stuff in the DDR you know like I mean there was like not like narcotics but like prostitution and sex stuff and

and all kinds of really crummy social ills but at least the official line was that this stuff nasty it's it's it's it's it's it's it's deplorable uh this is the kind of thing characteristic of the capital is west like we don't have any truck with that and and it's kind of of thing should be identified and stopped out wherever we'd find it. So yeah, I think there's an aspect to that. And yeah, but that was, that was Yaghi's all point. And some of the people he inspired subsequent, like H. Keith Thompson, and like James Maddo, a lot of people think was a crack. I actually hold them in a lot of steam. That was the point. The whole point was that Washington and New York or

in Los Angeles or how a lot more, you know, quote unquote, red in Moscow and East Berlin ever were or were or will be. So yeah, there's an aspect to that. It's a kind of a question. And it's like a question is it quite, it's like a theoretical philosophical aspect to it like

we just raised, but there's also like a practical aspect in concrete terms and the way people were like leading their lives, you know, like you raised too. That's why raised the issue of these Middle Eastern peoples and stuff. Because I also think they're kind of like a bellwether for sort of radical tendencies but that I mean that's that's my

I've got my own thoughts on that that's that is like way too far side of scope but yeah I'll I'll uh I'll uh I'll uh I'll try and get to the point and I wrap this up to really I've been rambling for a minute

but the uh I can ask questions that get people doing that what's it no no I uh I appreciate you asking questions man like I appreciate that like the give and take I mean, you always insinuate, like, meaningful stuff that a lot of time I haven't thought about, but also it just, it helps me because I, I worry sometimes that, like, I go out too many tangents

because my brain sort of works that way. But, yeah, I interject whatever you want, and don't, I'm not going to feel like to explain it or something. But the, the, the, yeah, can it? basically I mean what basically underlay all this too in a in again kind of like raw strategic terms too like without I mean aside from the politics um Kennedy realized that you you need a lot of for lack of I forgive me if this sounds like flippant or silly but you need like a number of menu options in military affairs in terms of your response okay it can't just be either like massive assaults mass of

countervalue with salt or some kind of like inglorious retreat or doing nothing. You know, I mean, that's it's like, it's like high and like starship troopers, like this, which is like a thinly veiled metaphor, a thingly veil of a critique of, like, Eisenhower, Truman

and Eisenhower era. Military thinking, like some young officer candidate says like this grizzled like infantry captain. Like, what the hell do we need conventional imagery for? And the captain's like, let me ask you something. Like, if a child's misbehaving, you cut his head off, or you spank him?

You know, like, you don't just, like, maintain a hatchet to, like, be head and a misbehaving child. You know, that's, which seems like macabre, kind of silly, but it's actually poignant. And, yeah, that's something we take for granted as the way things developed, particularly through the Reagan era, and in terms of military affairs, I mean. but in the 1950s really through like 5960 people were literally talking that way like hey we've got nuclear arms we can threaten anybody with you know basically like countervalued genocide like why why do we need why do we need to best around with conventional forces you know and that's that seems crazy but that but it wasn't just I'm not just talking about like goofballs like in the media or something like the equivalent of like internet guys the day like I mean like at like as a actual guys with clouded policymaking circles, you know, and guys who had a chest full of ribbons and a hat full of brass, like, you know, fucking talking this way, man.

But it's, um, McNamara, um, and that's why we'll get into this, like, as we, as we proceed in our series, but the roots of the revolution and military affairs, uh, are here with McNamara. and McNamara, one of the things he diligently worked towards. I mean, the Vietnam War ended up taking up a huge amount of his time and labors, but obviously. But developing a conventional capability, not just for the purpose of flexible response, but to really make a devastating conventional capability, the kind of spear point of American power. Ready for huge savings?

Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the lead will be able to Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Lidl items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to

2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. That very much came from McNamara and he realized the way the world was going and part of it was he realized you know what we just talked about that you know nuclear

arms are purposed for a very very specific exigency that almost never ever ever occurs but also just you know the dawn of the information age the you know the the kind of rapid the punctuated development of all these applied technologies, you know, like things were becoming possible in the battlefield that were unthinkable even, you know, 20 years ago, you know, in the then present. It's the, and McNamara, McNamara's fortune is really, during the Kennedy administration, I mean, if you need any more evidence that Kennedy really did. kind of marry the u.s the republic of vietnam in terms of um you know uh global security policy

it was uh it was mcdhna who uh who put together really the first military advisory group that uh landed in vietnam like in real depth i mean yeah going back to ishenhower there's been you know advised on the ground what became military assistance command of Vietnam you know Mac V it was a it was during when Kennedy was still alive it was during the last you know like year and a half of his life or whatever the Macnam era raised force levels to about from a few hundred to about to about 17,000 okay um I mean this was well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident okay in August 964 after Mr. Kennedy was dead of course but the uh the um and the golvot tonkin is a tricky issue too like i i don't know how to approach that

because it warrants more attention than i'm giving it right now but people talk about it like i know that i'm going to get like hate messages for this been because i do anyway from libertarians but libertarians have this idea about the uh about um about article one and article two like express delegated powers. They do these things like they do the gold standard, like something like they're sacrosanct and never ever change or something, but formal declarations of war between

powers that enjoy equalities of status and a multipolar world where the entire planets like divided up, you know, between these aforementioned powers and where like a change in the status of relations comes from like a formal declaration of war and this is a recognized policy

instrument that doesn't happen anymore. Maybe that's bad. maybe it's not, but it doesn't happen anymore. And since Nuremberg, it's not thinkable for that to happen anymore. So for guys to come out and be like, well, actually, it requires a declaration of war. Like, no, that's not how things work.

Okay. And I'm not going to like bore anybody with the next position for next hour. I'm like why it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't. And you've got to take my word for that. Okay. And Article 2,

an expressly delegated power that is not negotiable and does not change with the times is the president being the command. or in chief, okay? And the present ability to command forces is not contingent upon a 19th century style declaration of war. Okay, however, considering Congress controls the purse strings, it's a good idea to make your case for why you should get, you know, endless money and cargo to wage the war. That's what the Gulf of Tonkin was about. Okay. Was it a ruse? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. It doesn't

matter. Joshua was going to get his war somehow, or his mandate somehow wasn't Johnson's war. Congress had to find a way to give him the tabular rasa to do so, and also signal the Pentagon that they were willing to flip the bill. And this is the way it came together, you know, basically to protect the record. You know, because America, I mean, here's the fiction of, oh, we're always fighting defensive wars. Hey, we were attacked. And finally, like we talked about in the last episode, there was a lot of fictions that went into the drawing of the map in Indochina after 1955.

And whether northern South Vietnam are truly sovereign states, that was not even really clear because the 70th parallel was supposed to be a stop-gap measure pending, you know, pending countrywide elections whereby there would be a single seat of government. And that didn't happen. and the and the DM government claimed initially that that was because the NLF, you know, the Viet Cong, you know, had resorted to violence

in order to sway in order to sway, you know, opinion in their favor. It's a terror. So, these elections are definitely postponed. So, I mean, it's not as simple as, well, you know,

the Republic of Vietnam is a sovereign country and it's under assault and we have an obligation to them moral as well as juristic. But I'm getting it is that, it's not so simple to say like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the alleged incident and the resolution was like some ruse by evil

Mr. LBJ to get a war mandate pursuant to a lie and oh by the way that's illegitimate anyway because there's no declaration of war like it's 1840 like not it's not the way to approach it and like I said I know people are going to send me like fuck you messages I don't care as I'm right

and you're wrong but that's important and I'm the last person who's going to defend LBG in the record but whether it been Kennedy whether it had been Ike whether it had been mr. Nixon they probably would have finest it a little better than LBJ did but they would have gotten their war mandate in some similar way okay it did it just would have okay that's that's not arguable um obviously after the Gull of Tonkin resolution was um was rushed through um um um

uh that's uh basically the the escalation over vietnam like quite literally began like with the air war um initially was massive retaliatory airstrikes um against naval targets and um and um and targets within north vietnam proper that were said to you know be facilitating its it's um it's blue water navy capability which you know supposedly is what it brought you know American vessels under assault. But from there, I mean, the kind of fix was in. And people can, I mean, the fix was in is where I'm going to characterize it. Because like I said, I believe, within the bound of rationality of the Cold War,

the Vietnam War had to be fought. Okay. And I stand by that position. But McNamara even had that not been the case. You know, if there's a security defense, you know, like any, cabinet officer, I mean, you're accountable to the commander-in-chief. Okay, I mean, it's not

it's not like McNamara, heady, you know, first of all, you can't be some conscientious objector and fulfill your obligations to the office of secondary defense. But whatever McNamara did or didn't do, I mean, he was executing the orders of the commander in chief, and policy does not

originate with the Secretary of Defense's office or at the Department of the Army, or with the Pentagon, frankly. However, as we get into McNamara's successor, his true successor, Melvin Laird. I think the career of Laird and kind of the trajectory of his tenure and his machinations against Nixon and Kissinger, I think that was kind of the origin of the true, like, modern deep state as we think of it.

There's always been shadow government. Shadow government's not the deep state. That's something that was emergent, in my opinion, really interest around the 1970s. but um in uh in any event uh magmara anyway he

he uh you know magma visited vietnam repeatedly like in person you know i mean and not just not just diplomatic meeting greets you know or he where he'd visit you know

DM or two and go to go to some embassy party and then you know take some like handshake shots of some general I mean he he visited McVee he spent time that Long been asking junior officers, like, what's going on here, exactly? You know, you spent time pouring over, you know, embodying statistics. They were coming from battalional headquarters, you know, in the field.

You know, like, docked over whatever and saying, like, you know, this isn't right. This is not possible. So this idea that he was just like this kind of ghoulish warmonger, just like signing off on everything or, you know, somehow enriching himself. I mean, McNamara, we don't need to sit here and, like, feel sad for Magnamara. He ended up at the World Bank subsequently. He lived a very good life. You know, but the fact that in public life, he was ruined.

You know, it's like, what great stuff did McNair get from, you know, this kind of 70 years of managing the Vietnam War? Like, it's not, it's not like he got, like, some great benefits from this. You know, it's not like he pulled out Zelensky and, like, was pocketing a billion dollars in when he would have been at nobody before. Like, this was, like, a huge step down. You know, like, Magnimer didn't get anything by, by waging the Vietnam War on behalf of Johnson. Like, he really didn't. But, um, we're coming up in the hour here. Let's, I'm going to get into Melvin Lair and the rest of McNamara next episode,

and we can do that whatever you want, like, even this week. And I'll, uh, I realize, I got to cut to the chase. It's just somebody is, a person that's kind of towering as Magnumer. It warrants a lot of attention, like, more so than some. than some people and even some presidents. But yeah, so I hope I didn't, I hope I didn't drag it out too long for your. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah.

I figured you would have, like, kind of reined me in if I was like, too far on tangents. But yeah, no, thank you, Pete. This was really great. Yeah, I mean, the only reason I interrupted was I had questions. So. Oh, no, no. I want to take up that question proper, too, like in a dedicated episode.

Maybe it's like the bookend when he finished the Cold War. That's a hugely important question. And to me, especially, like, I spent a lot of time with it, you know, just only to my own kind of interest and things. So, yeah, no, I interject whatever you want, man. Like, please do. Like, it helps me organize my thoughts. All right. Do quick plugs, and we'll get out.

Yeah, man. As people might have noticed because I tweeted it out, as well as I announced on my substatic chat, like Steelstorm 2, you know, my second science fiction novel, it's been printed. it's in the hands of Imperium Press. I've got to touch base and they're dear friends there anyway, but they physically haven't. So I'm going to get word from them when it's going to go up for sale on

Imperialpress.org, and I'll drop word of that. In the meantime, you can find me, you can find my podcast and some of my long forum at Substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. You can find me on Twitter at Triskeleon Jihad,

the T is a number of seven but if you seek me on Twitter you probably shall find or just like search Thomas 7777 that's basically where I'm active right now. I am watching the YouTube channel by the end of the month I promise I know it's been delayed and delayed

but by the last day in January I mean before then but by the end of January the channel will launch so please look for that too it's Thomas TV on YouTube I appreciate it until the next time I like that, man.

Thank you very much. Thanks, sir. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show for part seven. Is this eight or seven? Eight of the Cold War series, Thomas 777. How you doing, sir? I'm very well, man. Thanks for hosting me as always.

Don't feel bad. I only know that it's part Ocho because that was indicated when I joined the meeting. That is Cold War with Thomas part eight. you know, like Jason takes Manhattan, but it's just like Thomas talks on Zoom. But as it may, we're going to continue to flesh out, you know, the career of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam conflict. Not just because McNamara is a key personage, you know, in understanding the Cold War. I mean, he represented a certain type, truly. you know, people derisively would refer to people like McNamara and Thomas Schelling,

who we'll talk about probably the episode after Next. He was another brilliant shelling. I mean, he was another brilliant polymath. He was instrumental in Cold War strategic planning and, you know, gaming scenarios that were wherein, you know, a strategy could meaningfully be incorporated into X-Stad technology and weapons platforms. and the degree to which this shape policy at every level cannot be overstated. I mean, I guess on the one hand, that's obvious because we're talking about, you know, I mean, I mean, the essence of the political is war and peace.

You know, kind of the zenith of war fighting technology is a general nuclear war, even if, you know, we stipulate that a lot of the kind of hysteria around nuclear weapons is just that hysteria. But, you know, the shelling was far less of a point. public figure than McNamara, I mean, for a few reasons. Not that I think are obvious, you know, shelling didn't preside over an active war, wherein, you know, Americans were dying in theater. But McNamara kind of became that,

a figure that the left kind of loved to burn an effigy, you know, proverbially speaking. I think he I think he kind of like embodies that era like the era of the technocrat and I don't I don't mean that in punitive terms I mean certainly that there's a lot of men

who that that kind of that kind of sociological structure produced that we're not attractive people and that we're lacking in a grounded morality and and we're not you know we're not the kind of men who one would want

sort of guiding policy and concrete ways. But, you know, McNamara himself was a complex person. And I make the point again and again, like, McNamara was not this guy who aspired to be Secretary of Defense. He wasn't like one of these kinds of, he wasn't one of these guys who really had no way of kind of like capturing clout other than going to Washington and capitalizing on connections. You know, they asked him. He didn't ask them. And like we talked about, it's not like McNamara resigned in disgrace or something. You know, I mean, he, he went on to be the chairman of the World Bank. But at the same time, you know, his name became synonymous with the kind of gruesome calculus of the body count, you know, with, you know, the kind of, the kind of narrative of people that came to surround the pen papers.

You know, so it's not like, it's like Merriman to somehow, like, profited immensely from his tenure as secretary of defense. And, you know, his, he even when, even public opinion precipitously turned against the war, post-Tet, you know, it's, McNamara didn't simply exit stage left when things went bad. And I can't, I can't emphasize enough, too, the fact that he served for seven years, that's an eternity for a cabinet post, particularly for Secretary of Defense. and particularly during a wartime administration. So like I said, I'm sure a lot of people are going to just claim that I'm some kind of McNamara apologist owing to, you know, owing to, you know, either like emotional factors or, you know,

some kind of hero worship. Like, neither of those things are true. But I, at all, anyone who hasn't seen it, like I said, I highly recommend you watch the Aero Morris biopic on on McNamara where I mean he interviews the man himself

you know because that's what Matt what Morris does I reserve judgment until one views that Magnamara quoted himself incredibly well and and compare that to one of Morris's subsequent biopics about

Donald Rumsfeld who just came off just as really kind of I mean just really just a really really just nasty person, you know, I mean, in every sense of the word. You know, I think, I think compared to, I think compared to those who followed who were either clowns or just, you know, kind of, you know, cynical creeps like Rumsfeld. And I think, I think McNamara looms very large in, in mostly positive terms.

But we've left off last episode, I believe, talking a bit about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the incident itself i don't want to uh i don't i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to rehash the entire debate as it were that still surrounds the incident that gave rise to the congressional revolution that you know gave johnson the tabula ross to escalate essentially i i just made the point then as i'll reiterate now that for better or worse and I understand the libertarian argument against this precedent, and I very much understand the kind of constitutionalist objection to it, but for better or worse, this is how the business of war and peace is conducted,

and this is how it's finessed in policy terms. Okay. Some kind of incidents is identified as a clear and present danger or constituting a necessity, you know, demanding intervention, you know, Congress affords the executive the ways and means in budgetary terms and in command terms to accomplish, you know, the mission in general terms. And then, you know, it's the legislature bows out of the decision-making process. In large part, you know, in, in, in, in, in in a formal capacity, you know, until, uh, until, until, until something happens or a series of

occurrences ensue that, um, you know, brings it back within their direct purview, you know, either willing to, you know, revolt of the, of the body politic, as it were, or, you know, um, some kind of perceived malfeasance on the, on the, on the part of the executive in terms of the kind of of the war, but we're not here to have a discussion on abstract constitutional theory, you nor on, you know, war power and what it, and what its significance is in the, in the post-Nerber era. I just wanted to make the point that the Westphalian practice of literally declaring war as a change of status and relations between equals, like that, that's totally obsolete.

And it doesn't matter if we think that's good or bad. That's the way it is. So the Gulf of Tonkin resolution doesn't stand out. Is this uniquely, you know, kind of corrupt, uh, way of a of a rather morally you know

compromise executive recurre a war mandate I'm not going to say there and say Johnson was had any redeeming characteristics but um even like if Kennedy had been in the White House he would have pursued um

he would he would have proceeded in much the same way um as with Nixon okay as would you know, Reagan had he been in the White House? I mean, this is something important to keep in mind, but I won't believe that point anymore. But what the resolution represented was that, and I'm going to, I'm going to jump backwards a little bit as we proceed to talk about Colonel John Paul Van, who I think is very important. He was, his analysis of the Vietnam War, like, as it was underway, I think is essential to understanding the battlefield situation. you know kind of the tactical shortcomings of uh particularly of mac v but i don't want to get into that yet but what's important um to keep in mind um in discussing the escalation that was facilitated by

the tonkin resolution is that military assistance command vietnam it arrived in country in 1962 and from 62 to 65 there was a proper counterinsurgency campaign underway against the viet Cong and this really you know army special forces was very much purpose for that you know and uh that we talked earlier about you know Kennedy's uh you know Kennedy's a strategic orientation towards secondary theaters, you know, and the need to, you know, not surrender these contested territories to the communists, you know, for not just for, you know, on grounds of military necessity, but, you know, owing to profound political implications, a communist victory, you know, in these, in these developing countries, you know, the, and the fact that he, that Kennedy was such a champion of

Special Operations Forces is inextricably bound up with that policy vision. But Vietnam pre-tonk, and Galt. So Kennedy in 62 and 63 was Commander-in-Chief guiding these missions. Yeah, essentially. And I mean, he had, it was McNamara, and it was, you know, Kennedy had a lot of talent around him, you know, who were helping him identify kind of the concrete variables and how this translated to actual war fighting.

But, so I mean, obviously, it wasn't just emerging from the mind of Kennedy. But Kennedy did understand military matters reasonably well. You know, I mean, he had been in pretty heavy action in the Navy. You know, he wasn't just some, like, civilian neophyte who had no idea of, you know, what, what this constitute and what the difference was between the heavy army, you know, organized. organized around armor, you know, and that had a very, very close of witsy in view of war fighting, you know, is the advance of fire. I mean, this really did, like, rule the day, you know, and I mean, for good reason, frankly,

because the Army's most probable military mission was to fight the Red Army. I mean, but the kind of tactical flexibility that early specialization, operations forces represented this really was like a revolutionary idea you know like people under like 45 or so when they think of the army they or they when they think of the military establishment they think of special operations forces um that's completely the opposite of the way things were during the cold war okay um and it uh and there there's a lot of there was a lot of institutional resentment of the army towards special operations um and i mean that's a whole other issue that's fascinating but point being there's kind of this mischaracterization among court historians that okay in

Vietnam there's this guerrilla war underway and you know Johnson you know being the you know being the kind of fool that he was and you know the army being you know trigger happy as they are they just like looked over the situation and said you know what we're going to employ in massive in massive depth and we're going to throw like as much firepower as we can at the vietnam like that's not what happened you know there's a years long counterinsurgency low-intensity war against the National Liberation Front by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, you know, by the Arvin Ranger element,

which was kind of their quasi-special forces elements. And like we talked about, the Saudi enemy's army does get a bad rap because there were elements among them that fought hard and were very game fighters. But yeah, there's actually a fascinating old movie called Go Tell the Spartans, which is about exactly this topic.

It's about, you know, like the Kennedy era of Vietnam War and these green berets of this kind of forlorn outpost, you know, as they realize the kind of tactical situation is changing. And obviously in the back of their mind, they're terrified, although they'd never, like, let on this is the case of, like, the North Vietnamese army one day showing up

and just, like, sweeping through, you know, out of nowhere. And I mean, things like that did happen. you know, later on, like against, against the purported, you know, in, in contrast to what Army intelligence was claiming were the capabilities extant of, you know, had no way to deploy in the South. But as it may, as the, as things that are going bad in the South, and as DM made it clear that he was willing to negotiate, you know, we talked about the kind of murky political status of Vietnam, you know, and it, um, it, there was, there was a lot of, there was, there was, there was, there was great concern that DM was just going to,

you know, quote, to sell out the West and come to, you know, come to terms with, with Ho Chi men and with Hanoi, you know, incorporate, you know, not just the NLF, but, you know, the Communist Party of Vietnam, uh, into, you know, into, uh, into, into a, in, into the ruling apparatus. And I mean, obviously that was unacceptable um because that you know that that the the precedent that that would set would be completely would be completely at odds with what you know america was trying to accomplish in the developing world and you know we talked about how again like you know the uh the it was it was at base we're talking about a political conflict it doesn't matter that you know um there they're there that that's indochina's

not you know a bounty of natural resources it doesn't matter that you know there's not there's not some absolutely essential you know maritime port of call that you know has uh has profound military significance there um you know the line in the sand was uh was vietnam and um that's that's where the communist challenged and that's you know the challenge that was going that challenge was going to be met or it was not and um the communists had great momentum in the third world even really up until the late 1980s, you know, like long after, you know, long after

like Stalinist type rule, you know, and Marxist-Leninist-Revolutionary ambition and the kind of the armed insurgency culture or a political culture around it, long after that, like lost its luster, you know, for anybody but, you know, total diehards. You know, like the kind of people who joined like the Bader Meinhof gang, you know, in the Western world, this kind of thing

had an incredible power to animate people. in the third world. You know, and I mean, Ho Chi Minh was a, himself was a testament to that. You know, like we talked about,

Ho was not some, it wasn't some bumpkin or some, or some ignorant, you know, farmer or something. He, you know, he was,

he was, he was highly educated. You know, his family was, uh, was, was wealthy and well situated. And very insinuated into the,

uh, indigenous political structure. You know, in, uh, in Vietnam. So, You know, and he was not an outlier, nor was he an acronymism.

But be as it may, it, uh, the, uh, the mass escalation, I mean, yeah, part of that was owing to the fact that the, uh, the post, uh, new look army, um, you know, once, once conventional forces, you know, kind of became, uh, once again in vogue, for like a better way to describe it. Um, the army, uh, The army remained obsessed with firepower, you know, and the idea that, you know, combined arms and a lot of these nascent technologies, you know, and the precursor to smart weapons, you know, as well as like the technologies immediately preceding the revolution in military affairs that allowed command of control to truly direct fire. But like the destructive capabilities of these things was just awesome. So there was, in fact, the sense in the Pentagon that like, look, you know, asymmetric warfare. There's considerations emergent, you know, within that paradigm and that's got to be accounted for within the battle space itself.

And within, you know, and it's got to inform decision making of how forces are structured and deployed in country. But at the same time, you know, if you can blast the hell out of everything, you're going to get a lot done, you know, and how can the National Liberation Front, you know, no matter, it doesn't matter how hard they have. are it doesn't matter you know what kind of uh what what kind of civilian support they have you know it doesn't matter you know kind of how uh it doesn't matter that they've got this kind of mass youthful male population to draw upon you know if you if you if you apply this kind of pressure in the form of you know just relentless and massive firepower against the adversary he's going to just crumble i mean there was there was more than you know like a modicum of a of a that sort of thinking. I mean, obviously. However, it was clear, you know, in 1959 and

1969, all the way to, you know, 1974, 75 when the People's Army Vietnam launched its final offensive, it was clear that Hanoi was not going to prevail without a massive conventional assault on the South. Vietnam's a comparatively huge country. The National Liberation Front had the capability to dominate the countryside very effectively. Thus, this is what was responsible for the kind of hearts and minds campaign, all of that. And the idea of free fire zones and strategic hamlets, and we'll get into some of that later. But the key urban centers, the Viet Cong could not,

not only could not capture, but they couldn't, you know, and there was a dearth of, of necessary civilian support, you know, which was the true kind of, like, infrastructure, the Viet Cong, you know, like any guerrilla movement, that's what they have to draw upon. but even like their big coup was when they their big battle field coup was when the nlf captured hua city you know and that's you know and and uh there's just those dramatic shots of u.s marines you know like raising the american flag like over the citadel in uh in huay you know um because it was this horrible like pitched battle but i mean just really really raw that's why i think it's cool that full metal jacket like focuses on hui you know um and and uh um um Gustav Hasford made Hway the focus of the battlefield segment of his novel for a reason.

But the point is, like, you know, they couldn't hold it. You know, it's not like, it's not like the NLF took away and sent it to this massive push on Tet 68. You know, and then the civilian population, he came out and droves, you know, allow them to consolidate that their presence there, you know, quite the kind. contrary. So it was clear that South Vietnam either was going to have to develop a competent conventional capability butch-rest by or facilitated by rather, you know, modern combined arms and hardware as well as the training of their people, you know, to operate these, these weapons systems and weapons platforms, or there's going to have to be direct intervention, you know,

by CETO, ideally, and we got into CETO the other day, or some constellation of, you know, American allies in order to stave off this, this imminent assault until the South could stand on its own. And that's what I just said. That's what became grand strategy in Vietnam. you know um and um as any military man will tell you know you don't you don't you don't wait until uh the exigency is afoot and then respond to it you know just like just as you anticipate capabilities um you know not you know you don't just consider you know probable action in terms of uh in terms of judging and you know a potential opposing uh force you you preempt the ambitions of that opposing force.

You know, you don't wait until the people's army of Vietnam is assaulting across the 17th parallel, you know, in depth, you know, with combined arms, you know, to decide, like, how are you going to react to that? Okay, so this was the logic behind the massive escalation. and there had been at its peak pre-tonken Gulf, I think. It was between 17,000 and 18,500 approximately American forces on the ground in Vietnam. This was by the end of 1967,

this had swelled the 485,000 troops. And by the peak, which was the summer of 1968, It was over half a million. It was something like $530,000. Okay. The, uh, and obviously, you know, as, as the casualties

mounted, um, and as, uh, and as, um, the plume situation, you know, kind of like restricted the, uh, the tactical environment and, and what was, and what was permissible according to the rules of engagement.

Um, you know, commanders on the ground, uh, down to the, company level you know their their constant refrain was like basically we need more manpower you know we need we you know we need to be able to apply more um apply more pressure now and and why why was it kind of boiled down to that metric okay well you know we talked uh we we we talked when we

we talked when we first kind of scratch the service of uh of the atomic age i mean like it's advent and what the implications were in policy terms as well as military ones and obviously i can speak a lot more about the former than the latter because I'm not a military man and I I you know that's not really my wheelhouse but I do know something about policy as it interfaces with military decision making and the needs of you know the needs of the military establishment and to accomplish stated policy goals as directed by the civilian executive there came the ability to the ability to corral data and the ability to interpret data, the ability to apply data to all kinds of problems at scale.

You know, whether you're talking about, you know, whether you're talking about the best way to offset liability, if you're, you know, if you're manufacturing automobiles, you know, and thus that was the, you know, unsafe at any speed. That was like the Ralph Nader book about, you know, the auto industry and it's, it's macabre calculus of, you know, how many, how many desowing to, the products liability issues were acceptable um you know vis-a-vis what would be the cost of remedying these design defects i mean everybody's familiar with that okay um this this was something that was emergent just like across the board you know um in uh in the private sector in government you know in in social planning um the military uh in the cold war um It, what, you know, what the, what the victory metric was in these secondary theaters, you know, where the primary challenge was a political one, you know, not a military one, you know, a comparable situation would be what the British were facing in Northern Ireland. Okay.

I mean, that, that conflict developed very differently, but identifying, you know, not just. what the tactical orientation should be in order to neutralize the opposing force, but what the performance metric is, you know, of those forces in theater. Well, what this came boiled down to was, you know, the ability to manufacture enemy dead, quite literally. The logic of the body count became the performance metric. So there be demands from a battalion. Italian level, you know, originating with,

originating, you know, at at Longbin, you know, and trickling down to company and then platoon level, you know, like, you need to produce bodies. You need to produce enemy dead. And as a standalone metric, that's problematic, I mean, aside from the fact that it's macabre and all of that, and I realize it's kind of a gross thing to talk about, that makes people

uncomfortable. But this is very much like, I mean, this is the stuff of modern warfare, okay? But it took on a significance into itself in Vietnam owing again to the kind of, to the kind of the culture of strategic planning. But it wasn't just spillover from, you know, the kind of the data revolution spearheaded by IBM. And it's got to proto computers, you know, that were utilized. in the Second World War and

and you know thereafter obviously you know the victory metric of in nuclear war is very much distilled down to you know the ability to like the ability to yield you know enemy dead

at a beyond like a certain tipping point you know that's that's literally what the term you know like mega death indicates an assured destruction mega death was not just you know the name of like kind of a

like a fucking heavy metal man you know like it actually it actually was a term of art if not a nuclear war studies and game theory but

be it as it may there is something to uh there is something to this logic of the body count um I mean if you're if the burn rate that

uh that you're uh that you're imposing upon the opposing force, you know, far exceeds the population in military age males, you know, who can be trained, equipped, and fielded, you know, to replace those losses.

At some point, you know, the insurgency is going to fall apart or it's at least not going to be able to mount operations, you know, beyond, you know, like platoon level or something. And this did work in a sense. I'm one of the few defenders you'll find in the Phoenix program. We'll get into that at another date. And people who don't really understand it, like even people are otherwise sensible,

like it's become this kind of, it's become this kind of horror story that they like to bandy about, you know, that it's kind of synonymous in their mind. You know, it's taken on kind of the characteristic of, it's become kind of like the exemplar of, of executive overreach and violence therein. You know, but it, something like that, identifying enemy cadres. I mean, if you have a reliable system of identifying these people and targeting them for annihilation, with a minimum of collateral damage where possible. That's basically how you fight counterinsurgency warfare,

or how you wage counterinsurgency warfare. And that's what the British Army started doing by the late 90s in Northern Ireland. The way they did it, obviously, was, or by the late 80s, I mean, sorry, not the late 90s. But the, this, this, this, this this was underway in vietnam um at the same time that you know there was this kind of a there was this kind of like body count driven effort in uh in you know being waged by you know conventional forces

you know just to rack up uh the body count i mean obviously this led to all kinds of problems you know wherein these these numbers were confabulated you know civilians were counted as a as a his enemy combatants, you know, like really, very, very corrupt things happen, you know, of a moral and of material nature. But that happens in every war, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's also, this didn't like somehow emerge in McNameer. Magna wasn't this ghoulish guy who was like, oh, well, I have an idea, you know, let's, let's transform, let's transform the military apparatus into this kind of corpse manufacturing enterprise, you know, because that's just a great thing to do. I mean, this was

this was the thinking at the time. And frankly, too, I mean, there's, again, the Cold War was strange. I mean, in some ways, there's commonality to all, you know, to all conflicts where there's, you know, where there's certain variables present, you know, that, that, that cause, you know, combat to resolve in similar ways, you know, adjusting for technology and things, you know,

like within disparate theaters and across, you know, across, you know, the temporal divide and stuff. But there were strange things about the Cold War that limited what was possible, not just because the threat of escalation, you know, even in, even in a very secondary theater, excuse me, it was always present. But also, again, if you're fighting a primarily political war, you know, you know, we're not just talking about, we're not just talking about the enemy's ability to field military age males, you know, who can be trained as infantry or sappers or whatever. Not every man is going to make it as a Viet Cong that requires a certain radicalism within, you know, within, you know, the quote, heart and mind of that individual. You know, I mean, it's not, if you're, if you're looking to build a.

insurgent army, particularly in a situation, like, what the Vietnamese is called the American War, where, you know, basically there's like an 80% chance you're going to die. Like, you're not, it's not like being drafted into the U.S. Army and, you know, to go fight the Korean War. It's like a very different thing.

You know, like you, every man pretty much needs to be a partisan. And yeah, you know, there were, there were, there were, there were, there were NLF fighters, you know, who were basically, like, press ganged and, you know, like, joining the Viet Cong and stuff. But that, that was the minority because you don't get results out of people like that you know i mean so it um the idea

that we've got to kill as many of these people as possible in a targeted capacity and you know killing them is a is an end in itself because that's a victory metric in order to kind of alter you know the political conditions on the ground and how these conditions translate to the military power you know, albeit in an asymmetrical way. Like that, that is a real thing. And that's, that's a legit analysis. Like, I'm not saying legit and, you know, moral terms, whatever. I mean, I'm not rendering decision on that one or the other.

But in terms, there, there is a tactical logic to that. It's not, you know, insane or something or totally off base or the, nor is it kind of 1960s, you know, technocrat version of Chateau generalship. And I think that that's important. It's, uh, but moving on. McNamara became very, very skeptical of administration policy. Not just because Johnson, as we talked about, you know, Johnson viewed escalation and the threat of escalation as a kind of political bargaining ship,

which is not how you wage a war. Okay, I mean, that's not, and I mean, you're, first of all, you're playing with the lives of the men, you know, who are charged with fighting that war. But also, it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't work. you know that's not the going to thing that yields concessions um and you know it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't instill fear in the opposing force you know it basically tells them that you know eventually you're going to be willing to compromise because otherwise at the end of the day you know if you if that was not the case you know you'd be fighting this war there'd be no restraint on the

rules of engagement like don't get me wrong you know uh the uh despite uh despite uh despite the kind of, that's kind of canards like, oh, America was like fighting the Vietnam war with one hand tied around his balls or something. I mean, we killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam, okay? Like some real cowboy shit was going on. I'm not trashing the war effort

at all, okay? Like, unlike World War II, I think within the bound of rationality of the Cold War, like I've said, Vietnam had to be fought. Okay. But there was a lot of there was a lot of wholesale killing of human beings, according to pretty loose criteria.

You know, the tactical restraints, there was, you know, the, that literally the parameters that were imposed on the operational environment, like, yeah, that had a, that rendered victory problematic. Okay, like, no doubt. about it. But the, but the, but, uh, but, uh, but this, but this idea that, you know, America was like hesitating to drop bodies in Vietnam, going to crazy ROE, like that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's completely facile. But the, uh,

but the, uh, but when I never realized was that, uh, you know, the dropping more and more, deploying more and more men to Vietnam was not going to solve the problem, you know, nor was a nor was a nor was a nor was the problem that you know there the the bombing campaign wasn't intense enough or something you know like he he basically reached the conclusions you know that that we're going to talking about now and like a lot of like like like a lot of what i'm drawing upon to describe his mindset and describe some of the extant challenges of of of the secretary defense um in his epoch i'm drawing upon his own direct testimony you know i mean among other things obviously, but in winter in 1967, Magnavon went as far as this is just freezing troop levels.

And it basically to prepare, McNur has said like within, you know, we don't, we don't have an indefinite timetable, you know, to make South Vietnam, like, combat ready in terms of their forces and being, you know, to stand on their own against the north. You know, it, like basically said that The situation is not going to improve on the ground. Either the Army of the Republic of Vietnam can fight now or it's or or or or it can't fight. You know, two years from now, the situation is not going to be radically different. This was rejected outright by Johnson. And that's, you know, it was November 29th of 67 that McNamara announced his pending resignation.

He didn't retire until February 16. or resign rather. But that, I mean, that thing was a strong that road, the camel's bat. Okay, I think McNurra gave it his all in Vietnam for years. He risked his reputation. He probably risked like a lot of his

moral, he probably compromised a lot of his, a lot of his moral commitments, too, frankly. I'm not going to sit here and make a martyr out of him. He took the job. And I mean, if you're a secretary of defense, I mean, you're, you're dealing with the deaths of human beings. You've got to be okay with it. But, um, the, you know, he, for, for, for, this is what he did for, for seven years, almost. And, uh, when, when he, when he, when he approached his commander in chief and said, like, this is a situation as it stands.

Uh, I mean, Johnson base just, like, waved him off, like dismissed him. You know, I mean, I, and I'm not saying that Magnumara quit because, you know, on grounds like mass healing ego or something at all. But I can't even imagine being in that role, particularly to consider what was underway in the country. You know, and your secretary of defense, like literally the man who, you know, who you rely upon more than any singular figure.

I mean, in that administration, you know, to give you the straight story on the strategic situation, like he tells you exactly that. You know, and exactly what, what, you know, what, what, what, what, what, what the, what your options are as, as commander-in-chief, you know, and you simply dismiss him because, like, that, that doesn't comport with, like, your own conceptual prejudices. I mean, it's incredible, but, um, and LBJ was just a terrible person and a terrible chief executive, you know, it's, um, but that, that doesn't need to be rehashed, but who succeeded, who succeeded McNamara was Clark Clifford. very briefly. That's not like a Yaley like old America

like name. I don't know what it is. But he was kind of a placeholder. The true successor to McNamara was a guy named Melvin Laird. He's kind of forgotten to history. But Melvin Laird loomed really large over the late Cold War. His deputy

uh, what was no word about Clifford was what of his, one of his chief, like, assistance was Paul Nitz. You know, and Paul Nitzza was, you know, he was the co-founder of Team B. And, you know, until he was, like, quite elderly. Like, he, like, he, uh, like, Nitsa was even, like, he was, he was, he was drafting, he was, he was drafting, um, policy statements, uh, on behalf of, uh, the project for New American century. You know, like, is, is, as late as the early 2000s, you know, like he, he's, he's, he's, he's one of these, he's, he's, he's, he's one of these, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's one of

he's one of these kinds of i mean not to sound old dramatic he's one of these nitzel was kind of one of these shadowy figures um of the defense establishment you know who who really was uh you know who really was kind of like a hidden eminence but uh that's really all that's remarkable about cliford laird uh laird was interesting and um there was uh how long how long we've been going here i don't know if i should um i don't know i should dive into i don't know i should dive into i don't know i should dive into, yeah, we'll get started on Melvin Laird, and then we'll begin the Nixon doctrine, and then, like, we'll, like, deep dive properly into, like, Nixon's war next episode, if that's cool. Because it requires, uh, I'm not intently dragging this out,

but it, there's just, like, a lot here. But, Melvin Laird, uh, some people, some people talk about it, like, it was a hands-off, secretary defense, either willing to, you know, Nixon being an imperial executive who bullied his cabinet, like, that's, that's complete nonsense. Other people cast Laird as this guy who you know in deliberate effort to strike a contrast to McNamara you know

was averse to you know setting a policy course in a like you know in its own right emergent from the Secretary of Defense's office it's not I know

those things are correct Laird actually was was very much much engaged in the course of policy. And he very much became an enemy of Nixon and Kissinger. And this said implications for Watergate, which in my opinion was, you know, just a coup against Nixon. But what we view today is the deep state.

You know, there certainly was a kind of shadow government in those days. You broke up there. You broke up there for a second. And were you referring to it as you said that the people who would have carried out Watergate would have been comparable to today what we call the deep state? Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's just that the, like, the government was different in the Cold War in certain key ways. But I mean, I'm not, I mean, yeah, okay, we get, I mean, if we want to talk about it in linear terms, like, yeah, we can, we can look at it as in, it's kind of.

you know, the phenomena in common. But the, but Laird, yeah. The, I think Laird's hostility to Nixon and Kissinger, it took on a very personal tenor, which is strange. I mean, I think. It, uh, but in pure policy terms, Laird's vision, I think he was wrong, but it, it, he wasn't totally off base.

If you, if you, he viewed Vietnam as essentially, the United States. Not just in material terms, but he said that, you know, essentially he's like, you got a war-weary country now, you know, then, like, that they're now being 1996.

You know, he's like, if a general war broke out, you know, broke out with Warsaw Pact tomorrow, you know, uh, you know, with the country really have the political will, you know, to fight,

the fight the Soviet Union worse up in Central Europe you know, it's sacrificed like a million and a half young people you know, on the heels of what we've already endured in the Southeast Asia. Secondly, he's like, you know, the

the Soviet Union was advantaged as we talked about before in terms of the fact that, you know, it basically had pre-existing cadres on the ground throughout the third world. Oh, we're in a large part, you know, to kind of the anti-colonial movement and other things, and like a basic

hostility, you know, to the West in profound terms, not just superficial ones. And, but also, like, a lot of these movements, like including the National Liberation Front itself, you know, they'd been engaged in combat either against the Axis or, you know, against the, or against the Portuguese, the French or the English or any of these fading, you know, any of these fading, you know, colonial powers. The Soviet Union was able to really kind of spare its own blood and treasure. Meanwhile, it really kind of had the United States' number in terms of its war-fighting doctrine,

in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. You know, and while America was, you know, Well, America was taking heavy casualties in Vietnam, you know, and uh, and, um, and, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, uh, and, and, and, uh, and, and, and, uh, and, learn, it had done so without, you know, like, paying any cost in blood. And, uh, Laird had a good point there. And this became very evident post-de-tant, I think. And that's one of the reasons why when Reagan took the oath of office, you know, a decade later,

there really was a sense that Warsaw Pact constituted a clear and present danger. That wasn't just propaganda or, you know, a precursor to war fever or something. or an iteration of war fever, what have you. What Learred did do was, he said, you know, his big thing, where he and Nixon converged, he said that, you know, we've got to be more assertive in foreign affairs. We got to strengthen, you know, US influence, you know, over what was then the European community, you know, because the EU didn't exist yet.

you know he's like we've got to consolidate um we we've got to consolidate you know the hold we have on japan and korea you know to make sure that's permanent um you know and uh and uh he said that you know absolutely a credible nuclear deterrence is essential to the essential the essential sound foreign policy but he said that strong conventional defense is is is just as important you know and the uh he came back to this point again and again like I said, he's like, you know, you're, you're going to basically turn people against the military establishment that were constantly engaged in these brushfire wars. And I understand that point, but I don't accept it. But it, you know, my point is, like I said, like it wasn't, it wasn't some crazy idea.

It's, uh, the Vietnamization regime, you know, Nixon's policy of disengagement with the South, you know, well, while buttressing its forces in being, you know, in material terms, as well as in terms of morale, and, you know, transform the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and it is something combat capable. That very much,

that policy course very much came from Nixon, but Melvin Lear, with the rubber, met the road, you know, kind of, uh, saw to it being implemented. So he deserves props for that. Um, the uh one of the early riffs between laird and and and and and and and and and and Nixon and

kisinger i mean basically the entire like executive basically entire executive national security staff of the white house like you know other than himself um and 69 um that's when the secret bombing of cambodia um began you know cambodia was officially neutral i mean they were engaged in their own like bloody civil war there was all kinds of intrigues there and what's fascinating is that is the center of Soviet split kind of set in there was very much a proxy war

between the Soviet Union and red China in Cambodia you know between the between the Soviet client North Vietnamese later just you know the Vietnamese army and the Khmer Rouge but that

makes an increasingly sidelined Laird in these key decisions. And there's an interesting parallel with Iran contra there, which, which, uh, warn't's mentioned. I won't deep dive into that now because obviously would be here all afternoon. But it's, um,

Laird, uh, Laird understood, Laird said basically looked like this wasn't a matter of pride. You know, it's not a matter of me being affronted that, you know, despite the fact of the secretary of defense, I'm being left out of these decisions. but he said there's going to be an inevitable

public disclosure of these bombings and public outrage authentic or not, cultivated or not by hostile elements is going to harm the harm wrought by that is going to neutralize any tactical advantage

by hitting these North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. And Laird was actually right about that. And again, I mean, what was the anti-war movement and was its focus on these discrete policy decisions, you know, like the secret bombing of Cambodia? Was that, like, authentic outrage? I don't, no. Okay, not at all. It was the, it was the 1968 equivalent of Soros, Inc. You know, color revolutioning the American Street against Mr. Nixon and the Vietnam War.

with, of course, the help of Warsaw Pacted intelligence agencies, but that didn't matter. The point is, that's what it would be a catalyst for. And, of course, I mean, the, you can almost hear the Nixon rebuttal of that of, you know, we're not, we're not going to let these, like, we're not going to let some, like, Tommy Coxuckers in Berkeley, like, dictate, like, the course of policy, particularly not, you know, the course of war and peace decisions, because, you know,

bombing nominally neutral states that are actually communist sanctuaries is bad PR. but Laird was absolutely right. Okay. And, you know, you, if you're the President of the United States, you know, you're presiding over the political culture that you're presiding over. And this guy as it may be, you know, like comically improper as it may be, you know, you are dealing with a hostile media if you're a Mr. Nixon or Mr. Trump. That's going to do everything in his power to remove you from office. and these things must be considered. Now, that does not mean that you refrain from assaulting Cambodia

if it's a, if it's a tactical necessity. What it does mean is that you finesse it the right way. And you don't do it in secret and cut the Secretary of defense out of the equation. But that really kind of, that really, that really was kind of the nail in the cooperative of the relationship between Laird and Nixon and Kissinger. And later, when it was disclosed, when the bombing in Cambodia was disclosed, and these mass protests broke out, which were the precursor to the Kent State tragedy, which I don't know people, I didn't know that until fairly recently. I mean, I knew when the Cambodia bombies occurred.

I knew when Kent State happened. I didn't realize that at least the nominal pretext for the big protest was the bombing of Cambodia. But when this was disclosed in media, Nixon, through Kissinger, very publicly accused Laird of leaking it, you know, just, which is a pretty serious allegation. I haven't deep-dived into the issue. I can't really comment on that. I would have been surprised if that was the case. Laird was a serious guy, however you or I feel, about his politics. He wouldn't have compromised.

A guy like Laird wouldn't have compromised an active war effort to stick it to Mr. Nixon or to score points with Woodward and Bernstein types. I just can't see that happening. but be as it may um this was yet another um i mean this this was even another dysfunction of the nixon white house i mean don't get me wrong i think nixon was actually fighting the vietnam war um to win it um and uh next episode we'll also get into the man of crayton abrams general creton abrams who's exceeded Westmoreland. And I think a

Westmoreland almost almost like a McClellan of his era, you know, like very much, very much, very much a bean counter or like a lesser, or like a middle level executive and a particularly innovative company, you know, in, in, in, in an army uniform. how Westmoreland advanced the way he did.

It remains a mystery, but again, I don't... There's obviously not a hell of a lot I can add. There's obviously not a hell of a lot of insight I have into the U.S. military culture, and, I mean, having not seen it from within. But the... We'll wrap up here in a minute so that... because the next kind of subtop I'm going to get into is huge. But the, if there's a legacy to Laird,

I think he was very much the last, kind of like Secretary of Defense that had any real independence in policy matters. Not because he was such an incredible dynamic guy, but because subsequent presidents did not make a mistake that Nixon did. Your Secretary of Defense during the Cold War, in my opinion, was arguably as important. as one's selection for attorney general. But that's a, that could be, I guess they could be arguing a number of different ways.

But I think this might be kind of a natural stopping point. Okay. You can do your plugs. You can also announce that Twitter is being Twitter again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm under seven. I'm on my seventh or eighth account, you know. I was suspended from Twitter the week Elon took over.

It's just bizarre. And like, they suspended him and Ace is a legit guy. He's afraid to speak his mind. Like, what, he doesn't, he has, he like blogs about, I mean, he's, he's like kind of a mega guy, but what the hell is he dropping that's offensive to Twitter? You know, like it's just totally random. Except his love for a docking back for the attack. That's the only thing that really loves me.

But it, like, makes no sense. Like, even, like, the things that even usually throw, like, their triggers, like, he, or whatever, like, he, like, why bad him? But it, um, but the, but yeah, I mean, and it's, I, I, I, but who people not, every time, this has happened literally a dozen times. It happens, like every several weeks. Every time happens to people act like I die or something. It's like, I do a lot of just, like, goofy shit posting on Twitter. I drop some serious stuff there, too. but that's like it's kind of a big nothing man like i use it to promote what we're doing so that our

people can find us you know and tune in for like the stuff we're doing here but this idea that it's like this awesome platform that we need we don't fucking need that shit like i built my brand when i was on no social media at all okay i do have an account there that is active um but i i'm gonna be low-key about it because, like, I don't know who the hell knows, like, what they're, you know, what the kind of, um, one can never tell like what, what the lay of the land

is in terms of, you know, the, I mean, who can predict arbitrary and capricious action, which is by definition is arbitrary and capricious, but, um, I'm transitioning to YouTube, um, that's like my primary platform. I'm going to back it up on Odyssey and stuff.

Yes, I realize YouTube is censorious as well, but, um, I mean, I mean, we're kind of, we're kind of leaving Twitter behind anyway, but yeah, so I don't want people acting like this is like the end of the fucking world. Like it just, it bothers me when people act that way. But the, what the, yeah, I mean, find me at Substack, Real Thomas 777. That substack.com. I'm on Instagram. Just at like number seven, H-W-B-S-777.

The YouTube channel is launching at the end of the month, like I said. I'm very excited about it. like I really am. There's a lot of potential there. And I think people will be very happy with it. And I've got, I'm very blessed to have some really great people

helping me produce it. Because I certainly would be pissing into the wind on the production side or not for them. But yeah, and Steelstorm 2 is available at Imperium Press. That's the second installment in my science fiction series.

So yeah, please check it out. if you're a fan of my work product and or science fiction. And that's all I got. Well, once again, thank you. And until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyanez show, Part 9 of the Cold War series. How you doing, Thomas?

I'm very well, thanks. Today, I wanted to talk about something that's sort of a forgotten addendum to the Vietnam War. And like I raised before we went live, there's some pretty haunting things about Vietnam. I don't understand how dramatic. And I don't mean in the way that is presented in most court history narratives.

But there's a lot of dishonesty about the conflict, particularly among, you know, in the accounts of men who served in the executive branch. Now, if you go to the Vietnam War Memorial, you know, the wall in Washington, D.C. And I didn't notice this until 2005. You know, these, the black marble or granite, whatever it is. I'm not a big fan of Memorial, honestly, like the way it's designed.

I think it's kind of morbid, but as it may. Each section is designated by conflict year. You know, so it's like all the men who died in 1967 and hostile action. You know, they'll be like their names. the final panel is 1975. So I figured, okay, that's probably, I didn't think there are any casualties of the embassy Marines or whatever. During an operation, I think it was enduring wind. The evacuation of Saigon, but I noticed there's like 38 or some names on it.

And I'm like, that's not right. and lo and behold the men who died on the Battle of Kotang, the Battle of Koteng Island against the Khmer Rouge were just kind of as an afterthought tacked down to the Vietnam War wall which doesn't make any sense.

The Battle of Kotang was not the final battle of the Vietnam War. It was against an entire it was against, you know, it was waged against an entirely different regime in an entirely different country for totally unrelated reasons. And I found that to be kind of grotesque.

But some years later, Rumsfeld wrote a couple of books. He wrote his autobiography, and then he wrote his memoirs. And Rumsfeld really cut his teeth in government as the White House chief of staff from the Ford administration. And he talked about the Battle of Kotang. like it was this great operation and you know there's only i think you said there's only three casualties which is perverse and we'll get into why um it was just like an out and out lie and this disturbed me i mean i suppose the rebuttal would be well you know rumsfeld is recalling things then

that were you know 35 years in the past rumsfeld had a photographic memory he used to brag about that and uh my dad made the point when my dad got out of the army uh he went to work for mcgues George Bundy. And they developed kind of a rapport, you know, and my dad used to drive him around and stuff like that. And my dad met Rumsfeld during his tenure with Bundy. You know, my dad was just like a nobody, you know, so there was no reason for Rumsfeld to remember him.

And then decades later, my dad ran to Rumsfeld at some like CFR thing, and Rumsfeld addressed him by his first name. because he just that's the way the guy is. So Rumsfeld, what I'm getting is, Rumsfeld did not forget what the casualties were at Kotang

and he didn't just get confused about, you know, what actually happened there. Nor do I believe that somebody ghost wrote the book and Rumsfeld didn't fact check it. So, I mean, that's, I guess what kind of jumped out of me is that this was still being kind of swept under the rug

like decades later. So what was the Mayaegas incident and why is it important? Well, on May 12, 975, an American cargo ship, S.S. Mayagus, that a crew at 39. It was off the territorial coast of Cambodia, you know, which was then, which was then rolled by the Khmer Rouge, you know, weeks before it had conquered the capital. they got captured the Khmer Rouge claimed that they were in territorial waters

the captain of the Mayagas subsequently claimed they were fired upon by T. By PT boats and you know, corralled into Cambodian territory regardless this whole crew was seized this had echoes of when the North Koreans had seized the Pueblo,

which was a Navy intelligence vessel in 1968, and the North Koreans grabbed the Pueblo at the height of the Tet Offensive. And being that it was an intelligence ship, the North Koreans were able to seize encryption equipment, and it's believed that John Walker, not John Walker, wind, a different John Walker, who became associated with infamy in treason. He was this naval officer who, as it turned out, was spying for the Soviet Union for decades. And it's believed that, you know, the North Koreans conveyed this naval encryption equipment to Moscow.

Walker then provided Moscow with like the, with the ciphers so that they could, you know, that the Soviets could decode, you know, the encrypted language. So, I mean, this was a big deal, you know, and it, it, it, and it, you know, it, you know, even if Johnson had a stronger mandate and even if the Vietnam War was going better, the United States wasn't really in a position, you know, opened up another front in Asia and, you know, wage war with North Korea. But there's evidence that in part the North Koreans, the Chinese were very much trying to facilitate that.

But that's a little bit outside the scope. But in any event, Ford was not going to allow a repeat of the Pueblo incident. So immediately, obviously, you know, the National Security Council convened Secretary of Defense, which at the time was Schlesinger, who I've got nothing more. nice to say about people who remember him at all generally remember him for some incredibly slanderous things that he said about president nixon but he uh you know nixon played musical chairs with his cabinet um kind of like mr trump did although there was obviously there was more kind of rhyme and a reason to to uh nixon's um staff decisions but uh slessinger had succeeded

Elliot Richardson, Elliot Richardson had succeeded Melvin Laird. Like, none of these men, like, serve for more than several months, okay? But he was the holdover from the NICS administration, for better or worse. So is Kissinger, who is Secretary of State at the time. And what's important to keep in mind during this time is that there was no special operations command. U.S. military was kind of a mess. You know, this was only, this was less than a year and a half after the draft had ended.

The all-volunteer force was being implemented. There was a drawdown in the number of division-sized combat-capable formations. So basically, the Cold War flashpoints in Europe and in Asia were really being manned by a skeleton crew as it were and there was not just like rapid deployment capability and there was no special operations command

so you know the kind of instinctive response people have in reading out the Mayagas is like well why didn't you know why didn't Socom or its predecessor just like deploy Navy SEALs or something like that infrastructure didn't exist and also So, and as the crow flies, I think the closest combat capable force to Cambodia would have been located in Okinawa, in 1975. Okay, like, this was, this was, this was, this was high to the Cold War. You know, this was not, America did not have, you know, forward deployments all over this planet, you know, that, and it didn't have the command of control. um nor the force isn't being you know to respond to something like this instantaneously

what i mean it seems short-sighted i guess the people today but that's history in the rearview mirror like this was not this kind of thing was not really within a contemplation of of of the department of defense either it was not it was not the kind of exigencies that were emergent in 1975 in any in any kind of regular or predictable capacity but uh Be as in May, like we talked about, like we talked about last couple of episodes. Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge was absolutely a client regime of the people's Republic of China. This created some strange intrigues as, you know, Beijing was decoupled from Moscow in a real way. and this was solidified by the efforts of Nixon and Kissinger.

America had to tread somewhat lightly too in order to preserve that. Just an immediate kind of broad spectrum assault on Cameroge, Cambodia, which they were calling Democratic Campuchia. That would have caused real problems. And that wouldn't have, the, the sinusoviet split by that point was the chasm was too great, proverbially. That wouldn't have driven the Chinese back into the arms of Warsaw Pact, but it definitely would have generated momentum in that direction. Okay. So that's kind of the subtext of this.

And that's one of the reasons why I think it's an important, it's not just, you know, like a footnote of history. It's something that deserves to be talked about, not just because the men that were lost there, and the three of them in particular, suffering an utterly horrible fate that we'll get into. But it's imperative to understand, you know, how complicated and how strange the late Cold War became. and obviously later you know in 1979 the Hanoy government quite literally went to war with China

and concomitantly you know the Vietnamese assaulted into Cambodia deposed the Khmer Rouge and this you know decades long conflict ensued you know between the Vietnamese occupied

and the Khmer Rouge have been driven off into the bush, which was very much a proxy war between the people's public of China and the Soviet Union, which, I mean, not to be flippant about it because, I mean, you know, this, the cost in human suffering was immense, but creating, generating that conflict was kind of a masterstroke of the Nixon White House and subsequent administrations who continued to cultivate that divide and conquer. strategy but um there's some uh there's some evidence uh if one knows what to look for the chinese had absolutely no interest in sabotaging the kind of strategic alliance with america which was then still pretty fresh but at the same time um you know china was not america's friend and they were just as prone to intrigues as uh as ever I believe that the Chinese probably directed the Khmer Rouge to seize the Mayegas, or at least once it happened, you know, they endorsed that move. And I think the long game for Peking was that they could intervene as like negotiator.

It would be a way to kind of bloody Uncle Sam's nose in terms of global credibility, you know, cast China. as a you know kind of a the arbiter of uh of um of war and peace affairs in the orient and uh plus it would generate goodwill at least in peaking's mind with uh you know whatever government replaced the fort administration and that sounds totally backwards and strange but that's the way that the chinese think and thought. It is. It's an arguable. Examples are myriad. If people think I'm just,

you know, kind of mouthing off, they don't like the Chinese or whatever. But this was a delicate situation is what I'm getting at. You know, beyond the obvious fact that any kind of hostage rescue operation

is kind of the worst possible in operational terms, circumstance to emerge. You know, one doesn't need to be some high-speed military type to recognize that. But the way it played out in operational terms was for, it was in form of the seizure of the Mayegas at his morning briefing. on the 16th. Like I said, the National Security Council was convened.

Brent Skowcroft, who, as I'm sure people, will recognize, you know, later went on to play a major role in the Reagan administration, particularly Reagan's first term. You know, he basically, early on in the crisis, was the one who, you know, convened what ultimately became. you know, the parties who determined what the operational response would be for better or worse. The big concern, I mean, obviously aside from the

issues I just indicated, relating to the U.S. Chinese relations and everything else, America had a major credibility problem. And like we talked owing to the fall of Saigon, And as we talked about, I think, last episode, I'm not just overstating that because it's kind of my peculiar emphasis as a revisionist. This was in the Cold War, particularly as a strategic parody set in, which in the later Brezhnavera was, I mean, was kind of the, you know, was the height of that kind of paradigm shift.

the United States enjoying credibility and its ability to project power successfully in the third world that's basically what the entire Truman Doctrine hinged upon and

the entire American Cold War strategy in military terms hinged on the Truman Doctrine okay so coming off of a defeat in

Saigon despite you know however much that had been mitigated by the Senate Soviet split in pure military and strategic terms, if America had proven unable or lacking in the will to respond to the seizure that Mayegas and its crew in military operational terms, that would have had real world consequences. And that's really what was on the minds of Ford himself. and everybody in his national security cabinet. Ford immediately issued a statement declaring that the seizure of the vessel was an act of piracy, which is interesting language, which wasn't really precedented.

And the context to understand that statement within, it wasn't just him, it wasn't just the president relying upon, you know, kind of cringe polemic. What he was saying was, I mean, this was the era when people were banning that, you know, the president had to have approval from Congress before he acted in the article two commander in chief role

and like nonsense like the War Powers Act was being floated okay I don't want to start a constitutional debate but that kind of stuff was emerging from the hangover over the Vietnam conflict that does not have a leg to stand on

according to the letter of the Constitution but because that was the tenor of discourse afforded to send some kind of message that he was not going to he was not going to await some kind of congressional debate and whether or not he was authorized he was forced against the Khmer Rouge

he was saying like this is outside of the bounds of ordinary international relations and you know I'm going to respond to where I see fit that's reading between the lines I find that very interesting I can't think of a more unenviable position to be in

Then, you know, the American president in the aftermath of Watergate being faced with, you know, a kind of asymmetrical national security crisis like this that calls for, you know, immediate decisive action. That, I mean, that's never a particularly desirable situation to find oneself in. But in that era, and specifically in that moment, you know, weeks after the fall of Saigon, like, I can't even. imagine. But Secretary of State Schlesinger, what he did immediately was he directed the Joint Chiefs to order

their people in theater to locate the Mayegas and at all cost prevent the vessels movement to mainland Cambodia. Employing all necessary munitions required to do that, but obviously taking care or not to

harm, you know, the hostage crew. Kissinger, and this was fascinating, immediately went into action, but he didn't contact the Khmer Rouge or attempt to. What he did was he contacted the Chinese liaison office in Washington,

and he immediately demanded to release the Mayegas and to convey that message to the Khmer Rouge on the ground. Whoever the formal diplomatic representative of Beijing was refused to accept the note saying basically

I can't take responsibility for this Gissinger then tapped George Herbert Walker Bush who at that time was leading the counterpart liaison office in in Beijing he delivered the note personally to the Chinese foreign ministry

and he according to Bush himself and I don't see why he would lie about this he conveyed orally that if there was not you know if the immediate release of the meagas crew was not um you know was not realized that uh the commier rouge be held responsible um collectively and there'd be a massive shock and awe assault on pen And again, this wasn't just diplomatic protocol that both Kissinger and then Bush approached China. I mean, it goes to show you what was underway behind the scenes and that this obviously, the most charitable view to take of it is that, well, you know, the Camer Rouge, they were paranoid psychos,

and it was this kind of backwards revolutionary regime. They grabbed them a Jagas just because they were paranoid. Then when they realized, you know, that it was a U.S. flight vessel, they felt. freaked out and didn't know what to do. The most kind of punitive view of it is that, you know, what I, the possibility I raised a moment ago was that the Chinese orchestrated this as, you know, part of a Machiavellian kind of intrigue drama, which they've done in the past, frankly, and continue to do so today, albeit and was punctuated in violent terms.

But regardless, Washington obviously was aware that, you know, China was either responsible. possible for this in approximate causal terms or had the power to force a resolution and that tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the Soviet Union, China

and the United States. Subsequently, the Khmer Rouge tried to do exactly that. Release the Mayagus crew unharmed which we'll see and I think that further substantiates you know my kind of

spitball analysis, but like I said, I'm not just speculating or conspiracy theorizing. I think anyone who spends time with the factual record and, you know, kind of read between the lines of American diplomacy speak, I think this becomes clear, okay?

Back to the kind of practical operational side of it, though. The it was on the the following day it was confirmed that the Miyagas was off the coast of Kotang which is an island

in Cambodian territorial waters which the Khmer Rouge had fortified after they're after Phnom Pen fell which it later became clear that they'd done so in anticipation of a Vietnamese naval assault because their big fear was that

it would be used as a staging ground you know to assault the mainland presumably as you know a secondary theater to divert commierro's forces and being from you know whatever across border um loca I had been the

you know the the the the chair punk does it were of the potential Vietnamese assault um I can't speak to how problem that would have been because I mean who knows but it wasn't It was entirely reasonable to, you know, anticipate that at the time and with what was underway. And, I mean, ultimately, the Vietnamese did, I mean, that's what deposed of Khmer Rouge was a Vietnamese attack. So, I mean, this was not just an alibi of the regime, whatever else we can say about it and its credibility.

The absence of combat cable American forces in theater, again, was the big problem. the closest truly convocatable element was the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines who were then engaged in a training exercise on Okinawa and on the night of the 13th of May which was the day after the the seizure of the vessel itself they were ordered to return to camp and prepare for departure by air on May 14th it uh the problem was um this was a heavy um i mean this is this this was not this is this is the proverbial operation where one needs to go into light i mean like again these days it we would think of it as like

a seal team six or like a delta force kind of operation um and uh this is not really what people were training for at that time and there was in it by nineteen seventy five there was there was a handful of officers, with 2nd Battalion 9th Marines, who had been under fire in Vietnam, but virtually none of the enlisted matter NCOs had. You know, the idea taken, I mean, however tough these guys were, and I'm sure that they were like a hard dudes, taking a Marine element

that had not been in combat before and, you know, kind of breaking their proverbial sherry, you know, by having them assault, ship that had been taken hostage in a kind of anti-counterrorist operation, like that seems like a recipe for disaster. Would ultimately put the kibosh on that

planned operation was a guy named General Burns. Yeah, Burns. He was commander of the 7th Air Force. He weighed in and said, look, you know, it's very possible that, you know, the crew has already been, you know,

taken land side either on Kotang itself or as being shuttled to the mainland. Regardless, he's like, you're going to need more firepower than just, you know, then, then, you know, can be, you know, can be brought to bear, you know, by dropping, by dropping by dropping Marines by chopper onto the vessel itself

you know with kind of like light covering fire from whatever these I assume like I assume like Huey, I don't know if Huey Cobras were fielded then yet

but yeah, yeah, they would have been but I mean point being you know it burns to his credit was thinking ahead and his idea was bring to bear Air Force gunships and choppers to be able to saturate the island with firepower if need be. And the, you know, the hostage rescue element, he suggested the 56th security police squadron.

these are like the Air Force guys who like guard air bases at that time that's what they were like these days the Air Force has like a high speed like like spec war

like element but in those days they basically had these guys were somewhat like more high speed like MPs you know and again like that's not really that's not really you know the element you want for something like this

but his view at least was more kind of in line with what was to develop than that which was floated previously and this operation was actually implemented and

the Utapo Air Base and Thailand which I believe is still in use like the idea was that these gunships and these and these Air Force MPs, you know, who are the hostage rescue element, they're going to be shuttled from the Philippines to Utapo in Thailand to be outfitted for sting. And then from there, they were going to assault Kotang.

On the way to Thailand, there was a chopper crash, and like 18 of their number were killed. So as you can see this It was 18 the security police and five crewmen So I mean as as you can see They're just getting like more and more Fubarb by the moment In operational terms It sounds like trying to go into Iran and get the hostages Yeah exactly and yeah no that's that you're exactly right

And this coupled with Desert 1 And um you know we're forced to the aborted Iranian rescue mission and the lack of integrated command and control at Grenada, that's really what created Socom, you know, because the need for it became recognized. Well, there was only one lost in Grenada, right? Was there one...

What's that? I think there was only one casualty in Grenada, right? No, there was a number, and what happened was these Navy SEALs who were, there was a bunch, there was a few, there was like, you know, there's an army command element, a Marine command element, and then there was these seals

who ended up somehow dropped in the wrong place and then they ended up drowning because they weren't retrieved. Oh, geez. Yeah, it was a whole mess. And like it had to do, it was literally totally avoidable

when it was like a command and control. 19 dead, 19 dead 150 wounded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, grenade is, we'll get into a grenade in one of the later episodes because it's in political terms of it bore directly on

the, the Sandin Easter Revolution. There was North Koreans on the ground there. I mean, obviously, it was the Cuban element. There was a couple of East Germans. Like, it's fascinating. And it very much, it very much is what the, I mean, however anybody feels about the Reagan administration and, you know,

some of its alleged overreach. The Grenada actually was, it was, it was being purposed to rapidly reinforce Nicaragua and friendly proxies, like in theater. You know, that was the, you know, the only thing to building renata was an airstrip for that purpose and that's exactly what they were building but um be as it may um after this after this after this uh out of this uh after this uh disaster with um you know in uh at uh utapo for it can meet another national security council meeting um on uh on may 14th um the uh a communication link had been established

with the 7th Air Force elements that had departed from Hawaii and were then circling Kotang and in these, in those days, those are close you get to like real-time communications. I mean, that's another thing we take for granted today, but obviously then, like, you were, there was quite literally like blindness and theater.

If you were the command element in the White House, you know, trying to direct military operations to the joint chiefs of staff. And then they, in turn, you know, any, any data they were getting from, the battle space was, you know, minutes, at least minutes and probably hours out of date. The, uh, these fighters, uh, they were trying to, what they didn't realize was that the crew by this time of the Mayagas had been shuttled to this fishing boat. Um, which was then, uh, attempting to transport them to, uh, the mainland, this coastal city called Campong Somme.

these guys, their credit, these pilots who were circling in theater, they recognized that probably was going on. They requested permission to try to shoot the rudders off of the ship that was conveying them and to, like, assault the PT boats that were escorting it. Ford intervened and said that, you know, the use of those kinds of munitions would be, would present too great a risk to the crew. So he put the gabash on that. at the same time, the National Security Council, they got word back that the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing had refused to pass any kind of formal communication on to Khmer Rouge. But Bois said that in his, but Bois said that he could all but guarantee that the Chinese are putting pressure on the Khmer Rouge to comply with whatever American demands were. I mean, like I said, I've got my own theory on this, that this was very much orchestrated by Peking.

But whether it was or not, obviously the situation was rapidly, you know, spiraling out of control. And Bush, whatever, whether you have you of it's charitable or whether it's, you know, not particularly so. Bush was a serious guy and he very much understood the Chinese and had a rapport with them. And I mean, he was a career intelligence, man. If he relayed that in my belief, you know, this has been conveyed and this is what's happening. I think, you know, that was, I think, I think, I think, I think that was as good as gold. But the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a guy named, was a guy named David Jones. what he presented, and this was ultimately followed through

in operational terms, he presented a range of military opposite the National Security Council, and he said, you know, look, like, we're not even sure where the Mayagas crew is at this point, you know, whether they're shipboard, whether they're land side, and if they're land side where they're actually located. And he's like, obviously, like, they are, you know,

rescuing them on harm needs to be a priority. But he's like, we basically got to, like, waste the Khmer Rouge because, like, we can't just, like, let this slide. You know, he's like, we've got to, this is a credibility issue above all else. You know, aside, you know, obviously, you know, we're not going to disregard the lives of our people. But, you know, we've got to, we've got to lay as much hurt on the Khmer Rouge as we can. And from that point forward, that was basically accepted by the White House. it came down to three possibilities some intelligence suggested that they were still on the mayegas

some suggested they were on kotang island others suggested that they were on the fishing boat itself route onbound for the mainland and the coastal city of kampong som which is what these air force pilots were laid which turned out to be true incidentally but what was ultimately decided guided was National Security Council decided to deploy

the Marines to take the Mayagas itself, assault Kotang Island, and together the mass of assault on Cambodia itself, particularly its shipping and its shipping infrastructure, any of all like naval military

targets, and escalating to Penhent itself, you know, and like any other kind of like counter value targets of opportunity. that presented themselves, you know, if within, you know, 24 or 36 hours or whatever, you know, there wasn't resolution to the crisis. The fishing boat on which the Mayagus crew actually was, and it did arrive at Kampong Somme. The Khmer Rouge commander at Kampong Sama, either, he had either been, either the Chinese had gotten to him or he just understood what was underwent.

way. He should have known to his men, like, you know, I don't know, you know, do not harm these hostages, you know, under any circumstances, you know, he asked these hostages, you know, he's like, you know, I mean, by that point of an established, obviously, it was an American flagship, you know, and he, uh, he asked him if their radio equipment was, was operable, you know, so they could, yeah, he's like, look, we're releasing you, you know, like, can you call off this assault. And it turned out the radio equipment was not operable,

but the, as it turned out later, like one of the, one of the guys later just closed, he's like, he's like, I didn't know if we'd be able to reach, like, any of the aircraft in the air, but he's like, by that point,

like, I wanted, he's like, I wanted to commit rules get their ass kicked. So he's like, I, you know, he's like, I wouldn't have transmitted it anyway, which frankly was the right call. I think. but that's um but by that point uh the die was cast um the uh the um it was at uh the um it was that uh around

just past dawn on uh may 16th cotang itself was assaulted but as it uh as it turned out intel Intel suggested that there was only about 20 or 30 Khmer Rouge fighters on the island. It turned out that there's over 100. And again, they had a lot of heavy machine guns among them and, like, and crew served, like squad weapons because, you know, like we talked about a moment ago, they'd fortified the island and anticipation of a Vietnamese assault, which never came. but um you know these uh the camere rouge uh whatever you can say about um these guys were were incredibly game fighters um this pitched battle ensued between the marines and the

camere rouge um the uh the um the the um the the crew of the maegas was safely conveyed uh back from this fishing boat like back to meagas itself and uh and and they were they were they were were safely conveyed away from the battle space. But when it became clear that the crew had been released and was safe, the Marines were ordered to withdraw, and they began affecting a tactical withdrawal, like a fighting retreat, as it were. But the Marine commander on the ground,

there's two beachheads. At the the commander of the eastern most operational area, he conveyed, like, look, unless we're rapidly reinforced, like, we're going to be overrun.

So, the reinforcements that have been called off, were then directed back to Kotang to reinforce the Marines on the ground. You know, this in this kind of chaotic

withdrawal that ensued there was a machine gun team of three Marines that in this kind of craggy in this kind of craggy area like on the beach itself like just outside of the ever kind of shrinking perimeter

you know they'd set up an ad hoc machine gun nest and they'd been left behind in the wake of the withdrawal. And one of the, um, one of these guys, platoon mates had said,

aboard the chopper, like, you know, there's at least three men on the ground there. Um, for some reason this wasn't, um, this wasn't abided. Um, and I realized, like, in the middle of a hot LZ,

like in the midst of a firefight. I mean, I, I'm sure things are confused, but this uh as it happened um these guys were left behind managed to radio a passing u.s naval vessel and um apparently uh some intelligence officers said well it's probably like a commere ruse trick in their like i mean it seems ridiculous it seems like something like a corny old movie like some Camar Rouge saying like, Yo, G.I. Joe, you'll send more. You'll send more Marine.

I mean, like, I would, I mean, that's, I'm not making a light of a horrible situation, but that, um, it seems to me by that point, probably, um, everybody was looking to cover their own ass. It became clear that, you know,

they're, like, their head, probably been men left behind. These three guys are left behind. Um, this became, this, like, enduring kind of myth almost. And I remember, before I knew anything about the Mayegas, before I'd like, I mean, I was always fancy by

Vietnam and I mean, ever since I could read, I was reading about, you know, about the Cold War and things, but I knew this guy in the early 90s. He was kind of a sad guy. You know, he's kind of like the troubled Vietnam bed of myth and lore, you know, like he had a drug problem and stuff. But he, he became pretty tight because we worked together.

Like, we delivered pizzas together. You know, and he, um, he'd see, I talked about Vietnam and he was really, into the P-O-WMIA movement, you know, and I kind of just looked at it. It was like a sad guy who was troubled by the war and other things, but he kept coming back to Kotang and saying, you know, they left guys behind, you know, in Cambodia, you know, that means they left other guys behind. And like, I'm not saying he was right about all these things he claimed, but he wasn't just like talking shit, you know, like, and he, um, that's a, this, as it turns out,

the, uh, these guys were abandoned on Kotang that, that fed a lot of the speculation that the that the kind of POW movement you know derived their claims from but it came out years later these three guys and they were just kids I think like I think they were like 18, 19,

and 21 respectively they were on the island for a week and the Camer Rouge realized that like some of their rice stores had gone missing and that you know boot prints that obviously weren't you know Camer Rouge sandals

were found. The Camerreras tracked these guys and they found them. They were shuttled in the mainland. You know, I mean, God knows what they were subjected to do by Cameruroy's torturers. But after several days, they were, according to this, their jailers, they were beaten the death with the butt end of a B-40 rocket launcher. I mean, I can't even imagine that, man. like being being abandoned by your own forces and then falling into the hands of the Camer Rouge like literally on this like God forsaken island. I mean, that's beyond, a lot of stuff frightens me.

Like at my age and frankly, I've had some kind of awful experiences, but that, I mean, I find that just like horrifying even to think about, you know. And they're kids, man. They should, they're kids. They should be home in the driveway working on a car they just thought. Yeah, yeah, man. And it's like, of all people, being captured by the Commodore is the one of the horrifying thing I can think of of.

Because, like, it's not just, like, the Commit Rouge really were animals. Like, it's not, I mean, like, it's not, like, it's not, it's not, it's not some just, like, bullshit propaganda or something. Like, I mean, there's a lot of cases where, you know, if you're, if you're, if you surrender, if you're captured at war, I mean, you're, you're dealing with an opponent. You're dealing with an op for that are just guys like you. Like, in the case of the Commit Rouge, like these, these, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, These guys were fucking barbarians. But the, uh,

yeah, they, they seem like the, um, the descendants of the, the, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Yeah,

they, yeah, and there's just, there's like horrible stuff. Like the, there actually were like, dog of an instance and says, like cannibalism,

just like terrorized people and stuff. And like they, you know, they, it's one of the few witnesses again, we're kind of the truth is, the truth is worse than a lot of the propaganda that came out. But it,

um, But it's also, too, like, I think a lot of this was suppressed for the reasons I said. It was like this, it was this bizarre, like, messy, political and diplomatic situation, relating to the, you know, the intrigues incident to the son of Soviet split. You know, a lot of the ongoing hangover, as it were, from the Vietnam conflict. And, you know, like I said, just even the way it's treated is bizarre, think it's having the fact. like this was just uh this was just uh you know it's just kind of like as an afterthought like slapped on uh to the vietnam war memorial was oh and this was you know that this happened sort of in theater and sort of you know within the same decade so you know why not just uh you know why not just treat it's part of like the same uh part of the same kind of like nucleus of uh of um of conflict events but it yeah i that's the uh that's the uh

That's the, um, that's, that's the story of Kotank, man. And that's the, uh, and that's the time, that's the, uh, I believe, and I mean, I've written about this in my fiction. Like, I believe that, uh, I believe the U.S. engaged, I believe U.S. forces engaged that can be a Rouge, like, fairly regularly. I don't see how they could not have. Like, they were, you know, they were running around Cambodia, um, for years, um, prior to 1970. And then in the aftermath, um, you know, even, uh, even when, um, even when the U.S. in China, like, came to terms

and the U.S. began cultivating the Khmer Rouge against, you know, the pro-Vietnamese element. There's no way that, there's no way that American soldiers did not engage the Khmer Rouge in hostile action and theater. But,

this is the only time of having above board. I mean, this was like a real fireflight, you know, and it, that's, um, you know, like I said, that I try to raise the people because I think as a historical writer, I think it's important to honor the memory of people like these guys who were there. But it's also, it shows you how it shows you how strange the Cold War got really after 69, 70, 71, when it became really like a three-way kind of contest with the United States,

kind of nominally allied with China in strategic terms. terms, you know, in pursuing the kind of interdependence, the results of which, you know, we kind of see today in the globalist structure. But it's, it was far from, it was far from some kind of like clean alliance. And, you know, the way, what the Chinese view as kind of sound policy in terms of how to intrigue against others is incredibly weird. You know, like, and I'm telling you, like, creating this incident. for the sake of trying to exploit the ensuing chaos

for some kind of political and diplomatic cachet. That might seem crazy to like the Western mind, but that's exactly the way the Chinese think. If you read about the pointless border war that Mao provoked with Moscow, Mao basically risked a nuclear war with the Soviet Union said he could go around

humiliating Brezhnev you know, for a few weeks and acting like he'd scored some kind of victory so that domestically like, you know, he could shore up his kind of fledging personality

cult credibility. And like no, like, even a totally unhinged Western you know, tyrant, like, wouldn't think that way or wouldn't do that. But that's, that's the kind of stuff of characteristic

of the regime. And from, I mean, in the lifetime of people like me and yourself. I mean, yeah, the kind of chaos of Mao and the aftermath is something we didn't experience firsthand. But even, even, even, even, even, even, it's kind of credit as like this great reformer and this kind of moderating influence. I mean, the, the stuff that he would orchestrate in order to, in order to do a advantage

himself or advantage, you know, Peking in his eyes vis-a-vis the West, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. So that's kind of last tragic chapter in the history of what was into China. There's, I mean, there was, there was the Chinese, there was the, there was the, there was the, there was the, again, too, there was the, there was the occupation of, uh, of Cambodia, you know, from a 79 until, until the wall came down. China, Chinese and Vietnamese four. fired on each other like four years ago yeah yeah no and that's why one of the really interesting things uh you know Obama was one of the last things he did in office was uh he um he lifted any remaining uh restrictions on uh

on military tech transfers to vietnam um like the the people in the pentagon who aren't conceptually illiterate and there's very few of them who aren't uh they're like literally fucking morons but the um they uh they realize that vietnam's like an essential hedge against the people's republic and it is and um and vietnam's got a real comic capability i mean they're hard people they've got a real military and vietnam's a comparatively huge country it's got like 60 million people you know like people think it's not like people think it's like americans they think all these countries like the size of albania or something like a vietnam's in a as a as a geotrategic hedge yeah vietnam's incredibly important and uh an alliance that would make sense.

And now that would alleviate some of the pressure of America having to kind of play between Tokyo and Seoul, which is increasingly, you know, causing consternation in relations with both countries, as well as their relationship to China. Like what would be intelligent would be to cultivate countries like Vietnam and some kind of like American, version of what the Russians

are trying to accomplish with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Like, not only is NATO, like, destabilizing and pointless, but it solves as not how you structure military alliances in the 24th century. It's, like, structurally obsolescent as well as politically

anachronistic. That's kind of a subject to another show, but I hope I didn't, um, I didn't like bore people with just kind of like relaying the Battle of Kotang. Like I said, I... That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And I, what next time what I want, I want to get into President Carter's modernization of the command and control aspect of

American Strategic Nuclear Forces and how, you know, the advent of AI as well as, you know, the onset of strategic parity where in the window of decision making, you know, was reduced in some cases, you know, to five to eight minutes or something. it had just been accepted for a time that the president would die immediately in a event of nuclear war. So strategic air command would be acting as the article two executive. I mean, that's patently unconstitutional, number one. Number two, it's just like ethically, that's not right. You don't like the United States Air Force and, you know, strategic air commands that then existed. They don't, they don't get to decide, you know,

like who lives and who dies. They don't, they don't get to decide, you know, when and how we wait war but also it raised a fascinating issue and what was telling people too like guys like harlan ellison you know when they were you know harlan ellison actually came over the idea for skynet and like james cameron like ripped them off like cameron rips off everything but this wasn't just like some kind of horror movie trope um the the removal of human decision makers um from strategic nuclear war fighting, that was a real thing. And by the 1980s, it was becoming, and when there's, when,

when launching even on warning, when the window of decision making, temporally speaking, it becomes so narrow that even launching on warning is too late, like, what do you do? It's like, well, you know, you defend yourself by fighting ways to code variables, that indicate, you know, that indicate imminent assault.

Like before though, you know, before there's even like conventional, like launch indicators and mobilization indicators. But then it's like, okay, but then like when do you attack? When there's like a 10% probability of assault, when there's like a 50%, anything over 50%, when there's 90%, when there's anything over 1%, you know, and it's, um, you know, that's a kind of like machine thinking that becomes inevitable, you know, when technology, it becomes, totally just positive of outcomes, but also the amount of data

that has to be managed in a strategic landscape like that, like humans can't do it. So we were looking at a situation where the Cold War endured like machines would have been the decision maker, you know, and

you'd have to hope that, you know, the coded indicators, you know, were correct, or at least like couldn't be spoofed. you know, by by man or by fate. But that, yeah, that's, I,

I'll save it for the, when we get into that, but that's, that's, that's, that's kind of the, that's kind of the key feature the Carter presidency, I think. And I mean, I, I'm a lot friendlier to Carter. And, uh, you know,

the way I, I view the, his epoch and most people. So, well, we'll get into some of these strategic nuclear command and control issues. Some of these war tech issues and, um, And we'll deal with like Carter the man himself in the next episode. And like again, I really, really appreciate people supporting the series.

And I wanted to give Kotang it's due. And the, you know, the men who were there, it's due. Because like I said, it's something nobody really talks about. And that's part of the reason for these series is that we can deep dive into stuff that people don't really talk about and more mainstream sources. So that's all I got. And thank you, Pete. Yeah, of course. I'm too quick plugs.

Yeah. You can find me on Twitter that probably, that'll probably change in the next few weeks, but I'm on there again. You can find me at Real underscore Thomas 777. I'm recording

for my YouTube channel on Friday with my dear friend Kerry and I'm going to upload that next week sometime. So I'll make sure to hype it so everybody knows. My YouTube channel, there's nothing there yet, but there will be is Thomas TV.

You can find on Substack, which is kind of like permanent home. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I'm going to relaunch a Telegram channel because everybody who supports us, they really like Telegram. I mean, Telegram really treated me badly, so I wasn't real keen to doing business with them again. But I will launch a channel for the sake of the subscribers and our friends. but I'm going to do that sometime this weekend and I'll plug that when we're back on there

but right now I just have like a private channel but I'm going to relaunch a public one that's all I got. Awesome man. So the next time. Thank you, Thomas. Today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords which ended the Vietnam War

and we couldn't think of anyone better to have on to talk about that than somebody that is gracing me with his presence on my podcast and going through a Cold War series right now. So how you don't know? I'm doing well. Thank you. Well, I appreciate you inviting me.

Here's the first question I wanted to ask because I was writing questions on the last episode we did. And I realized the episodes were for the end. So did public opinion help in ending the war? I mean, yeah, because the internal situation in any state, in any modern state, I mean, whether you're talking about a nominal, you know, multi-party democracy, I mean, the terms that that signifier was utilizing the Cold War, or whether you're talking about, you know, the communist states, the Eastern Bloc. in a state in a general mobilization especially but in any in any any any any policy ongoing policy initiative or structure that directly affects the population um like public opinion is impactful on on that policy you know no despite the kind of mythology of democratic peace theory or whatever there are not states that exist that are just totally at odds of the body politic not any

government in existence, nor has there been in the modern era that just has absolutely no mandate. You know, it's completely immune to public opinion. There's not anything to work. But what I was saying a moment ago, and I'm going somewhere with this, it's not just like a old guy tangent. I'm listening to Michael Savage, and he's got Colonel McGregor on. I know that people don't, I know some people are talking to him or Greger either. That's not the point.

Savage kept on talking about the Russians kind of foibles in Ukraine and saying, this is like Vietnam when, you know, the Pentagon just wouldn't really fight the war. And McGregor, to his credit corrected, savage. McGregor was like, look, man, like, Vietnam's a fucking scalp hunt. We killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam. It was not this, like, pussy footing around, like, hey, we want to be, you know, we got a, placate world opinion. We don't want to, like, kill any Vietnamese.

It was, I mean, pardon my language, it was a fucking gooked scalp hunts, okay? But you don't win wars just by going out and killing as many people as possible. You don't win wars by, you know, manufacturing dead people. If you did, I think throughout 19402, the Vermaq had something like a 15-to-one burn rate and, like, major engagement with the Red Army. Okay, I mean, does the greater German Reich exist today? Did it win the war? It killed a whole lot of people in Russia? No.

But the issue with public opinion was that it wasn't so much, like, the court history is two things. It's what Michael Savage said. It said, oh, America wasn't really fighting the Vietnam War, you know, Orr was doing brutal things, but, you know, these things were, you know, not, the war there wasn't a general mobilization in place, and, you know, America wasn't really applying force the way it should. That's part of the narrative. The other part is, well, the Vietnam War was wrong, so all these people rose up

and just forced, you know, evil Mr. Nixon to stop what he was doing. Like, nothing like that happened. And, you know, 70% of combat infantry, men and nom were guys who enlisted, you know, and the remaining 30% probably, you know, there was some truth of the fact that there was like a poverty draft, you know, when when the standards were kind of lessened on, you know, who would be, you know, considered. I can't remember what the classification scheme was, but, I mean, there was some truth to that, but this idea that there was either this draft revolt or America just became like a country

of peacemix and that ended the war. But what it did do, I mean, Johnson was in fact lying to the American people. And what he was saying was not being any sense. And he was getting on TV directly concentrating McNamara. On top of that, unlike, you know, the New Dealers War, where Roosevelt would literally have you arrested if you were a media guy who criticized him, his policy, or you engaged in defeatism, which constantly everything from saying, maybe the war is not a great idea to reporting on, you know,

America actually, like, losing in the field. I mean, I'm not meaning this up. Like, this is, it comparing the, comparing the view of, or the orientation of the executive branch, you know, in 941 to 45, and from 96, 5 to 73, it's like night and day. You know, like, if you think Roosevelt

would have tolerated, you know, Abby Hoffman, or some counterpart, like, Dudley Peli, you know, holding a hundred, thousand ban protests waving national socialist flags in Washington like you're dead fucking wrong. Like why this was allowed

and like why this kind of nonsense, you know, why Kronkite was allowed to be embedded at I-Corps and at Longbin when you know, LF like Sappers were assaulting it. I mean, that's a whole other issue, but people didn't realize something was wrong.

There was major attrition in Vietnam, like young Americans were dying in large numbers. And it was clear that it was clear that Johnson was lying. Okay. Nixon, who swept the country, as we've talked about, and Creighton Abrams to replace Westmoreland, Nixon was in fact winning the war, I believe, in military terms. I mean, the political side of it was totally different, both in country as well as domestically in his regard to the internal situation in the United States. Nixon did do some foolish things, however.

Like we talked about in our last episode, you know, how Kissinger and Nixon, they kind of wades his personal war on Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, and that's not what you do if you're the president. And then they went to you with publicly layered of, like, leaking the secret bombing of Cambodia. First of all, why are you admitting to that? Because that's terrible PR. Secondly, why are you having this knockdown, drag out fight in public with Melvin Laird? Like, how does that look?

Okay, so even people were enthusiastic about, you know, kind of the policy shift of Nixon, Creighton Abrams, and all of that, they're like, okay, why are all these conspiratorial intrigues happening? What exactly is going on? You know, and then the media really, you know, I'm sorry if this seems scattershot, but I'm trying to present a linear narrative the best I can. You know, the Kent state, maybe a lot of people know this, I don't think they do. though. You know, the Kent State shooting of those students on the National Guard. That was a protest of the assault on Cambodia. Okay, you know, late in the war in 1970, there is my people freaked out about the assault in Cambodia because to them it indicated a wider war. In a sense, it was, but Nixon was not lying. Vietnamization was well underway. There was an active disengagement. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam was taking on

the brunt of combat duties. And Cambodia was key, and we'll get into that if, you know, you're willing to get the time. Nixon really kind of neutralized the strategic game of Warsaw Pact in Vietnam by affecting the Senate of Soviet split, wherein China and their proxy, the Khmer Rouge came to be totally at odds with the Soviet Union and Hanoi. and an active proxy war between communist superpowers developed, you know, between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. I mean, whether Khmer Rouge were evil or not, I mean, that's another issue. But point being, there was complexities to widening the war in Cambodia that couldn't really be finessed in PR terms.

And the fact Nixon, what had been going on with him, Kizger and Laird, it seemed rotten. these things kind of conspired to really turn public opinion against what was underway. So, yeah, I mean, I realized I was long-winded and some of a scattershot, but yes, there was a huge impact. It was one part, the anti-war movement, which was in part, I mean, it was a fifth column regardless, but in part it actually was funded and organized by agents of Warsaw Pacted Intelligence Services. there was a hostile media apparatus. Even those aspects of national media that weren't hostile, Johnson, who did a lot of incredibly stupid and kind of incomprehensible things,

allowing media to truly be embedded in the field with combat elements in a war like Vietnam, with free fire zones. I mean, that's literally insane. You know, it was inevitable, even if something like Milai hadn't broken, at some point, some newsmen would have had raw footage of GIs, like, wasting, like, women and kids. I'm not saying as American troops are evil or something at all. I'm saying, like, that's what happens in a free fire zone, okay? And in good wars, like World War I and two, that happened also.

But in Vietnam, going to the peculiar nuances of the strategic environment, that kind of thing happened in alarming earnest. if that makes any sense. But point being, yeah, so some of this was, some of this was self-sabotaged. Some of this was kind of like the peculiar, some of it was people not really understanding.

Like, I mean, TV was still new then, basically. I mean, part of it was, you know, especially Johnson,

you know, who was a guy who was, like, born in the early 20th century, like not really understanding things. Part of it was Johnson was fucking insane. Part of it was, um,

you know, the, you had a, you know, you had a, you had a, You had a domestic situation that had been actively subverted, which was literally the opposite of, you know, the situation the new dealers confronted, you know, when they mobilized for war. I mean, it was, on top of that, too, I mean, there was, there was incredibly dangerous things afoot.

You know, 62 was the Cuba crisis. 73 was the next major crisis in the Middle East, which I think in some ways was more dangerous than able archery. three. Okay, but in the interim, you know, you had, there was 5,000 Soviet military personnel on the ground in North Vietnam. You know, intelligence types, you know, some of these guys are training the North Vietnamese on Sam missiles and things. But there's, you know, there's the constant fear, you know, during these operations like linebacker, are we going to kill a bunch of Russians? And then, you know, are we going to, is what the fuck's the Kremlin going to do? then. Maybe nothing or maybe they're going to treat it as an act of war. This is like incredibly dangerous stuff. And there's the ongoing, you know, issue in Europe where, you know, you had,

um, you know, you had, uh, you know, you literally had 300,000 U.S. troops, uh, nose and those and the Red Army at the full of gap and then the return plane. I mean, and saying nothing of, you know, occupied Berlin like it. People don't realize, uh, I mean, people don't realize, uh, I mean, people don't realized how, I mean, you remember because you're old enough, and I do, I mean, I didn't live through Vietnam, but, you know, I do remember vividly the early 80s and being afraid of, uh,

of nuclear war. I mean, people don't realize, like, how tense things were. And in a daily capacity, you know, that was strewn with people's lives. And even, even people who basically were patriotic, according to the terms of, you know, the era, and even

people who weren't particularly anti-government, there was a certain, like, weirdness of the Cold War sinking in. It's like, okay, like, you know, even people who didn't have, you know, teenage kids, at least some kid on their blog had gotten blown away in Nam or some relative of theirs. You know, they got this constant fear of like nuclear attack, you know, it, uh, the economy was going to shit. Like, despite what people like Oliver Stone tell you, like, Vietnam didn't like make everybody rich. Like, yeah, there's always war profiteers and Zelensky types. Like, there were 500 years ago, there were 5,000 years ago, there were in 96th or a day. Yeah, there were a guy.

were profiting from the Vietnam War, but the Vietnam War was killing the American economy. You know, I mean, like, it was, these were not like good times, okay? That's one of the, and America didn't really write itself until Reagan's second term, honestly. I mean, there's other contributing factors, you know, like the energy crisis and the need to, like, restructure, like, certain aspects of America's, of America's consumption, the energy consumption, in order to account for new realities. But it literally took like a decade and a half for like America to like unfuck itself from Vietnam, like in terms of, you know, the national economic profile.

But somebody was all of those things. The big, the big issue with the Paris peace agreements is people. Well, let me just, let me just say. You were talking about the economy. and they were almost literally doing two wars because not only are they paying for Vietnam, but now they have this war on poverty, that they're having to print money over,

and so you, of course, you're going, things are going to go to shit, because these new social programs come in. You're also throwing millions upon millions by millions of dollars to develop, you know, ICBM systems, can be super hardened to withstand first strike. You know, like, you know, keeping

B-52s constantly in the air like with nuclear payloads, keeping 300,000 men in West Germany, you know, keeping developing and maintaining like a fleet of Minutemen missiles as a you know, as the primary deterrent.

You know, keeping nuclear capable submarines in the water. Like, this is unbelievably expensive. You know, like, one of the reasons why, like, Reagan went all into win the Cold War. It wasn't just because, you know, he, you know, he had, like, balls or something or because he, you know, he, you know, he wasn't like a pussy like Carter or whatever, like, dumb things people think today.

And, like, America could wage the colder longer than Ivan, but America was running out of money to fucking do it, too. You know, you can't, you cannot sustain that indefinitely. You're either going to go to war or you're going to face some kind of structural crisis. like the Soviets did, and then the odds of war happening becomes exponentially more likely. I mean, you know, that this idea somehow like

America, like it definitely, you know, maintains like a 600 ship Navy, you know, could have continuously, like, fielded, like, you know, newer and war weapons, you know, like the B2 platform and, you know,

and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, which would have become necessary. I know people used to like to talk about it. It's like something of a pipe dream. You know, people like, you know, Mr. Ted Kennedy and the epoch, but it wasn't. Like Jerry Pornel said, like, orbital space, had the Cold War endured in the 1990s. Like, orbital space had to become what naval warfare platforms were to strategic nuclear planning in the 80s.

I mean, at some point, the money would have run out. You know, like, again, they can't. Well, that's also. that's also why President Nixon ended Bretton Woods I mean it makes it easier if you get off the gold standard and you can

you know accelerate the money supply too yeah very much so but it's also too he was genuinely worried he was genuinely worried about about a run on the gold reserves I mean it was like a real that was a real prospect especially because

it's like outside the scope and we can talk about this another episode, and I'm not an economist, but I do know, I am something of an economic historian, and that I, I, I, like, a basic conceptual picture of, uh, of other, of other structure of, uh, American economic policy changed and just,

like how globalism kind of gradually became a reality, you know, and how the kind of information age, you know, change the way financial markets function, or whatever meets the road. And, um, aside of all these things, you and I just raised, um, the

1970s, that was the dawn of, the true dawn of the information age. Okay, I mean, you could say that, like, the kind of machines, that, like, touring machines were, I don't mean like that. I mean, like, the digital age, I guess I should say, that the dawn of that was in the 1970s, and things, from the 1970s to now, things changed just rapidly, you know, and that, that was altering the way business has done and the way, like,

money is conceptualized, in my opinion, for better and for worse. I mean, it was, it was not all negative. although there aren't any negatives, but you know, these kinds of punctuated, um, these kinds of punctuated,

changes are, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,

they, they, they, they, they, they, they make, they make crises more probable of all sorts.

So yeah, it, uh, you know, but the, um, the main, uh,

what I kind of wanted to emphasize, size on, you know, I mean, like all things related to Vietnam, even today, even though kind of the, like, the taboo is no longer around the Vietnam War, obviously, as it was for, you know, when I was a kid, like when you were a teenager, I'm sure. But people still, like, ill understood. So this is the idea of the Paris peace talks, like, guys in kind of the mainstream right, even some guys, like, on the dissident right, they do it as like, oh, well, Congress screwed Nixon over and just, you know, cut off the money supply and, you know,

the tangible military aid to the Republic of Vietnam, you know, so the South couldn't defend itself. And, you know, Hanoi was just rubbing its hands together and never meant to, like, abide the rules of the, or the material, express conditions of the peace agreement. It's not really true. You know, and then there's, like, other people who, you know, people on the left and kind of, like, major historians, they just claim that, like, well, Nixon was just making, you know, make a fool the American people and like pretending to accomplish peace. That's not true either.

This was kind of a, if you, the view from Nixon and Kissinger and, uh, and across the aisle, you know, Jop and, and, and, and the Hanoy leadership, like the central committee, the Communist Party of Vietnam,

there's like a lack of shared premises real large. And if you read the statements, uh, what Hanoy was saying to Cosvin, Cosvin, COS, that's an acronym. It's for central offices South Vietnam. There was the anglicized acronym for what amounts to the Central Committee of the Viet Cong, based in South Vietnam.

And what they communicated to them was that, in their view, what the ceasefire meant, what the peace agreement meant was that America would disengage that communist in South Vietnam, like former party members, Viet Cong suspects, you know, sympathizes all in sundry,

would no longer be treated as enemy combatants. A roadmap would be implemented, as it were, for what was supposed to be implemented in 1954,

you know, which was eventually, you know, like countrywide elections, which never actually happened in part because of the constantly, you know,

the constantly changing regime in Saigon, never allowed to happen. Like, that is true. And they wouldn't allow it to happen because Vietnam would have gone red. So I understand that completely. But the two regime in Saigon,

immediately after, like, the ink was dry, basically, like, a major push happened in key areas, especially border territories, like, with Cambodia, as well as the Quang Trade province. You know, key, key operational areas of communist

control that were strategically essential for them to be able to bargain from a position of strength

and in advent of hostilities access logistically what they needed to in Cambodia and when it became

clear that the South was going to continue to trying to annihilate what remained of the

Viet Cong the North responded with conventional means. And their reasoning was always South Vietnam is not a sovereign country. There are not two Vietnams. The North never accepted that. So their notion was, well, kind of like the provisional IRA

and you can say this is in bad faith, their view was always, you know, we're going to lay down our arms, but you've basically got to allow, like, you know, full representation of the Communist Party. And, you know, you've got to give our people, you know, equality of status at the polls. And, you know, added to that, too, obviously,

there's a pistomological problem with communism because they claim that they're practicing a kind of science. And if you refuse to abide, what they claim is the inevitable science of history, you know, which is, like, advancing socialism. You know, you're basically engaged in, in some kind of oppression of humanity in general. Like quite literally, this is like what they'd say.

You know, whether you're talking about East Berlin, whether you're talking about Moscow, whether you're talking about Prague, where you're talking about Vietnam. So there's like added, just kind of like this added, like, inability to come to terms that, like, framed, like, uh,

Hanoy's conceptual horizon. However, um, Nixon basically puts Saigon on as good as stead as, could have been in terms of political legitimacy and in terms of bolstering their case in the court of world opinion, which actually mattered then and the way it didn't, it doesn't now. And the 972 offensive colloquially called the Easterative by like, you know, military geeks and like historians on sundry, that was stopped in its tracks. I mean, American air power devastated Northfield.

him these armoured columns, but the Army of Republic of Vietnam actually stood and fought. And, like, I think I made the point some weeks back that they get a bad rap, you know, because they're always kind of panned as, like, this cowardly forest are, like, crooks. And, like, I don't even if he's a little jaggett the only time he's see the Arvin on screen, and some Arvin captain, and he's wearing, like, some faggity, like, fucking silk scarf. And he's literally pimping some girl to the Marines. Like, hey, you want to, boom, boom. And, like, you literally never see a portrayal of them as, like,

anything but like scumbed eggs or like pooties and like that's not fair um i mean i'm not a vietnam veterans so like i'm sure those guys had their own axe to grind with them people but i'm talking about historical record just like as a dude who like writes about historical topics um there's nothing else like the 72 offensive and the fact that it was stopped and its tracks like acquits the army of the republic of vietnam okay that's not all air power okay so yeah there's that. But that's kind of the way to understand the Paris Peace Agreement. It wasn't just Kissinger being duplicitous or Nixon

being a snake. I mean, what would Nixon gain from that anyway? If anyone knows anything, anyone knows Nixon's a guy who, like, he's a rare American who lived historically in absolute terms. Like, all Nixon never thought about was his contribution to history. Like, Nixon never, ever, ever would have just like it just like you know

pulls some kind of ruse and said like to hell with thigon, I don't care. You know, this is, I'm just gonna, you know, this is how I'm gonna like try and shore up my cred like in the Watergate, like that, this nonsense. But it, but it's also, you know, the Sino-Soviet split,

Nixon, if you read what Nixon wrote after the war, and post-Watergate, Nixon disappeared for about five years. But then he made a comeback, because at best-selling author. And as the Cold War heated up again, you know, people became very thirsty for serious analysis on geo-strategic things. And Nixon really had the Soviet Union's number in a way of remarkable. And he wrote a lot about why he went to China. And he said, like, look, you know,

I basically realized in 1953, you know, as the stalemate Korea set in, like, we had to decouple pay King from Moscow at all costs. I mean, yeah, we have to make compromises there. Like, yeah, you know, a lot of people would suffer in places like Cambodia because of that. You know, you could say it's callous, but Nixon was totally open about that. But had that not happened, the communists would have won the Cold War, absolutely. You know, you'd have a communist world in America, it'd be this kind of garrisoned state that existed. You know, and it had an ability to project power kind of like in 19th century terms, like, you know, throughout like the Western Hemisphere, probably as far as Greenland or something.

But it would, you know, it would basically be this kind of like an island amidst, like a hostile like Red World. Okay. And that was a very real possibility. Had things not developed what they did. But in the more immediate capacity, Nixon realized he had to court now when he did because that neutralized. they neutralized the strategic advantage of Soviet victory by proxy in Vietnam because you literally had a communist super state on the border of like, you know, their client in Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge would stand with China no matter what.

You know, it didn't matter that, you know, they, it didn't matter that they clicked up with the Soviets and the Chinese and the national liberation. Front and Hanoi to fight the Americans. When the Khmer never liked the Vietnamese anyway, and when things went bad between Hanoi or between Moscow and Peking, the Khmer Rouge would always be all in with China and its will. So you had Nixon managed, you know, what did the Soviets really gain in Vietnam? I was like, okay, yeah, like we talked about, Vietnam was, that was where, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, when, when, when the free world, as it was called, you know, like, fought, you know, the communists, um, in open combat. It didn't matter. It could have been anywhere, but that's just where it was. It was a political fight. It wasn't a struggle for resources and territory. Um, and yeah, the Congress won that, but it's like, okay. So, uh, now, you know, the Soviets had basically, like, this kind of,

They've got this appendage beleaguered by, you know, hostile Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, and, like, hostile, you know, communist China to its north. And that is really interesting, too, because obviously this,

at that time, the trifecta that truly ruled the Soviet Union, in my opinion, was Usenov and drop off and Grameko. And, you know,

the Soviets hedge, against China was India. You know, that's unlike true military and independence of all between Moscow and India. And that's when Kissinger went all in with Pakistan. You know, and the Indo-Pakistan

was very much a Cold War proxy resultant directly from the writing on the wall the Soviet detected from what was happening with Nixon and China. And then when that, I mean, that was all incredibly brutally. And then the Soviets pushed

in Angola. That's why the focus shifted to Africa. As they're going to Africa, we can win. You know, like, what's the West have? You know, they've got Rhodesia, but Rhodesia's going down. They got South Africa. South Africa is a pariah.

You know, and plus, like, they wanted to fight the South Africans, you know, and that 50,000 Cubans showed up to fight the SADF. You know, and it was, hey, we're, you know, look at this racist oppressor state. You know, like we're, you know, the Warsaw Pact, you know, believes in liberating people, you know, in the global south

or the colored world take your pick with that I mean always these things are just these things are just incidental which is approximately caused by Vietnam and it's approximately caused by the fact that Nixon and Kissinger

were able to decouple Paking from Moscow like in absolute terms you know I mean I you know and it the point that that risk could never be repaired I mean that that's remarkable there would have been

I mean along to the Vagery's a Mao and I think just things are intrusive to the Chinese national and cultural character, as well as just kind of racial differences and geostrategic issues. I think the Sino-Soviet alliance would have been problematic going forward, but it definitely would have held together until at least, you know, America slash NATO was like vanquished within, you know, the Eurasian landmass. and the Soviets and the Chicago's going to handle their inses later.

It all was entirely to Nixon and Kissinger that the Senate of Soviet split was that fractured and that permanent. I firmly believe that. If that was like two kind of like wide widely off topic and wanted to focus more specifically

and concretely in a piece of them, sorry, but I thought it was important to make Well, here's one thing I wanted to bring up about the Accords. Yeah. Most, I would say a lot of mainstream historians would say that South Vietnam was basically pressured into accepting an agreement that basically ensured that it was going to collapse. I mean, I think there's a political problem here. Like, we're used to, we're not in the wrong way to characterize it.

We're accustomed to the Department of State just kind of issuing these ridiculous statements that nobody could possibly derive anything from but, like, gross offense. I mean, in terms of, like, you know, the foreign regimes are directed at. Like, in the case of Vietnam, it was a very delicate minuet. I mean, first of all, I mean, like I said, at the outset of this discussion, you know, we killed a huge amount of people in North Vietnam. I mean, and the South, but particularly, I mean, we, these were not people who had warm feelings towards America. You know, I mean, this was a brutal war with racial overtones, frankly, okay? Secondly, like I said, this wasn't clear cut. I mean, arguably, it's always ambiguous if you're talking about national frontiers.

And, you know, like, I know people talk like, you know, the borders of Ukraine are, like, absolutely sacred, you know, and, like, more holy than, You know, like some prom queen's virginity or something, or that like, you know, the state of Poland is a sacred thing. I mean, but aside from like the garbage of that, the status of Vietnam actually was genuinely ambiguous, you know, and the succession of governments, America really kind of mishandled that. You know, it's like, okay, you know, you had a guy like DM who straight, you know, who straight up whacked because it was pretty clear he was just going to go all in. say like, hey, look, I'll allow a national election, you know, basically, and I think him being in the kind of hustler that he was was looking to carve out some kind of space in the regime, you know, for him and those like himself, you know, but he, obviously, you know, America wasn't going to tolerate that, but, you know, their successors, you know, he had a guy like two

who was going to completely a hard line on the communists, but that, that was a lot of the wasn't reasonable either. They had to come to term somehow, and I believe Nixon's reasoning was, you know, just strictly like in theater in terms of the military situation and how it impacted the delicate politics. As I said, if there'd been a normal political situation in America, and if you'd had, you know, If there hadn't been quite literally a coup against Nixon, if you hadn't had a Congress that, you know,

full of people who were essentially campaigning on, you know, building a career on, you know, condemning the purported evil of Vietnam War, had the Truman Doctrine but abide it as intended. I think South Vietnam could have basically held off a Northern assault indefinitely. And as perverse as the logic that Biden can't was, particularly as realized, you know,

North Vietnam had been at war. for decades. And they, speaking of the burn rate, they were losing a huge amount of military-aged males. I mean,

at some point, the Normandy is would not have been able sustain that. You know, at some point, unless you're talking about some, unless you're talking about

some crazy situation, like the FARC in Cambodia, where you're literally talking about dudes like living in the jungle, not metaphorically, literally, you know, who are like running,

running cocaine and dope and, you know, carrying on some alleged insurgency for 50 years, which probably more than anything, it's kind of like a cover for their little like narco trade and their bizarre kind of, you know, anarcho-primitivist existence.

Like you can't just carry on, you know, a revolutionary campaign for decades on decades. And we're not talking about a low-intensity campaign like the PIRA in Belfast. I mean, even that is difficult, but, you know, we're talking about, you know, the North Korea's army was, is actually a crack army.

And we're talking about combined arms assaults, you know, where mass numbers of men are dying, you know, where, you know, you're assaulting with, you're assaulting with columns of T-54 tanks.

They have to be fueled. You know, they're being, they're getting close air support from MIG-17s that, you know, with pilots, they have to be trained extensively.

And when they die, it's hard to replace them. You know, um, you're purely, periodically, you know, your capital city is periodically getting, like, bombed into the fucking Stone Age. You know what I mean? Like, this does take its toll at one time.

You know what I mean? And it, uh, I don't, um, the Vietnamese initially thought it would probably take them until about 1979, 1990 to win the war, like Hanoy, I mean. And there is interesting talk because obviously, anyone who spoke in the, on the Central Committee, like, picked their language carefully, you know, as people do in government. but particularly governments at war, and especially, you know, the communist regimes, the Cold War, you could tell these guys were nervous,

like military and civilian alike. Like, look, basically beyond 1980, all bets are off. Like, translated and really, in the lines, like, we can't sustain this indefinitely. You know, so there is that. But what I think I did want to raise, I made the point that, in my opinion, and I'm not a criminologist, I don't speak wrong,

but I do know something about the Soviet Union. And I believe firmly that the Soviet Union was at Zenith when the Shadow Executive was this trifect of Usunov, Grimiko, and Dropoff. And Dropoff really, really had the United States as a number. Okay, and he under, in a way that most Russians don't, and the way, frankly, most Eastern bloc types didn't. And that's one of the reasons why he was so effective. and he very much understood that if you can really, really fuck with, you know, the internal situation of America

and carve out a genuine, like, single-issue opposition on a matter of war and peace, you can really, really foobar their system. You know, that's kind of like America's weak point. Just like solidarity was like the weak point of these Iron Curtain regimes. And like in similar, you know, similarly structured. things, you know, solidarity, of course, was, uh, it was like, it was basically a Catholic social teaching movement that was at base, you know, like, uh, a labor union, you know, that was demanding what the party was, was always promising, but never delivering on.

And that was like kryptonite to the, you know, Mars's Leninist cadres that ruled. You know, um, it, uh, so, yeah, there was, it's kind of a perfect storm of things that made you know made the situation untenable vis-a-vis South Vietnam but I also I mean

and again I want to widen the discussion just a bit I got to make the point again again because people I act with Vietnam's weird anomaly

or this like unique and remarkable evil you know like we talked about the reason I raised this with CETO South East Asia Treaty organization

the 1954 dual accords of Korea and Indochina and the Truman Doctrine like this was entirely congruous with U.S. policy after the Second World War. Like, the

cost of waiting the Second World War, among other things, was when these primitive as hell third world nations, which are those they truly were primitive, like people living in huts, when they come under assault by Ivan, you go defend them, and your kids go defend

them, and your tax dollars go defend them, and you lose those things. I mean, this was very well understood. You know, that was the Cold War. That came to an end, in part because Washington realized it wasn't tenable. Part of it was the Revolution in Military Affairs. But part of it was just, it took 30 years for the damage brought by World War II to be repaired and for these states like Korea to be built into like functional client states

with a convict capability their own. I mean, that's, you know, I don't really see what America could have done. Within the, I'm not, I don't think World War II had been fought, obviously, but within about irrationality, if I'm, if I'm Kennedy, or if I'm McNamara,

or if I'm Nixon in February 69, you go to the office, like, what am I for doing in Saudi States? I say, okay, the Truman Doctrine's off, the Cold War's off, We're not going to defend Vietnam. We're not going to create commitments. You know, we may not even defend West Berlin.

I don't know because war is bad and just people don't like it and it's messy and people die. I mean, like, what do you have other people think should have been done? You know, I mean, that's arguably, that's why it was incredibly, aside of the fact, don't genocide your own civilization, it was incredibly stupid to wage World War II because this was the result. You know, I mean, okay, well, now you get, now, now you get to fight ISIS, for the rest of the planet. I mean,

you know, and that's what happened. So this, um, I was like, nobody really explained to me. It's like, it was good to incinerate,

you know, it was good to incinerate, you know, 150,000 people at Dresden, but the most evil thing ever was, other than, you know, the quote of Holocaust

was like blowing away, like, Vietnamese villagers at Mili. I'm not trying to be flipping, because that's, that's fucking horrible. Okay, like,

both of those things are horrible. But nobody can tell me, like why the latter is like, you know, the day America lost its innocence, but the forum was just like something like had to be done. You know, like it doesn't there's a lot of dishonesty about Vietnam. You know,

it's kind of like, it's kind of like the dishonesty of World War II in reverse. You know, like and this is faded because it's faded of a historical memory, but I mean, you remember because you're a little just a little more than me. Like, Vietnam was presented as like the worst war ever waged for like

reasons no one could articulate. You know, like why. Yeah, and the whole thing was very, was very, very cynical and ideologically driven, but yeah. Well, is that because everything after Nuremberg has to have a moral component to it? If you apply to a moral component to anything, then if you start with morality, it's a good war, it's a bad war,

then you can, I mean, you're basically pulling at the heartstrings of middle America, of Protestant America, churchgoing America, and you don't leave them around like a dog. Of course, but my point is it was arbitrary. You know, and it's like the,

like it was, I realized why people were doing this, and I realized why this fifth column, developed the way it did, and why they focused on Vietnam, but in absolute terms, like, that doesn't make any sense.

You know, and like I said, Vietnam's exceptionalized. Like people, you know, the narrative presented by, you know, people like Ron Kovic, people like Oliver Stone, you know, people in the era like Abby Hoffman, was that this is like kind of conspiratorial design. It's like, look, man, like the Truman Doctrine was very clear. Like America deployed in pretty much exactly the same way in Korea and the Dominican Republic in 65. in Bolivia, a run down Shagwevar up, decades later in Nicaragua and El Salvador,

although obviously those weren't, you know, those weren't deep deployments. Like, does it not, like, America abiding the Truman doctrine and, you know, realizing it had to fight a Soviet client regime to maintain credibility amidst, as the era of strategic parity was imminent, like it's not some like weird thing. You're like hard to like difficult to decipher. Like I, you know.

And again, like nobody can explain to me why like, why like annihilating Europe and sacrificing your son is like on Guadalcanal is like awesome. But, you know, like losing your son at Ayadran or Ksson is like this grave evil like when America lost its innocence. Like it's just stupid. And, you know, it's beyond stupid. It's, you know. Well, they just said that it, it just really became a, a trope that it, this wasn't the war to fight,

that there was nothing good about this war. 68, you know, even Kronkite is saying that the war can't be won. Well, yeah, and again, too, like imagine, I mean, there are, but think about this. Like, imagine in 1943, imagine after, you know, the United, the US Army didn't meet the Vermeck in combat until, 43 and they got their asses kicked, the Cassarine pass. Like, imagine if Walter Winschall had gone on the radio and said, Mr. Roosevelt's a liar, World War II can't be won, you know, victory of the Axis is imminent.

Like, dude would have been arrested if not disappeared. You know, I mean, like, it's a joke. Well, you can't make this up. You know, like people acting just some like normal occurrence or just like sound journalism. And again, I mean, Americans are this weird idea. said the two are kind of most puzzling miss to me because it's otherwise like

intelligent people, you know, who present these things I'm about to raise. You know, it's not just like dumb people repeating moral troops they've heard. It's like the guys to say what Michael Savage did, I mean, Savage isn't smart, but their arts market to say it's like, oh, America was like just pussy-footing around in Vietnam. And we killed him like three million people and it was literally like a fucking scalp

hunt. Yeah, yeah, I'm not like to say that, but shade on the Vietnam Army. I've got a lot of respect for them guys. and um i but i mean look man it's be real like we we killed a fucking huge amount of those people and we were being like we were we were being like we were doing like cowboy shit around it's you know like so it's like don't pretend that like you know don't pretend like killing millions of these fucking people with like firepower that was purpose to fight the soviet union like it was like some like low-key thing that was like not not real war but also the um like when people claim

like well Vietnam was just like a stupid war it's like look I mean like I said even part ways with Mirzheimer on this you know like you don't I you know you don't fight you didn't fight wars in 1968 you know to like

have access to like more like grain reserves you know or like you know control the ability to like you know ship like silk out of out of the fucking you know out of China back to Europe or something you know like it didn't matter where Vietnam

was, you know, that's where the line to say it was drawn, that's where the Reds pushed. You know, and if you're going to win the Cold War, like, wherever the Reds pushed, it might be Bolivia, it might be Iran, it might be Vietnam, it might be Angola, like, it might be, West Berlin, like, that's where you fight them. You know, like, the issue is, like,

who's going to, you know, the Cold War was fought in every, in every aspect of conceptual, political life. You know, like, economically, like culturally, like technologically and militarily. You know, you know, you can't like picking shoes, like where you fight. You know, and that's, plus like war is like, like we talk about, war arrives like the seasons.

I mean, that's, that's the problem with Klausowitz's victims, like, take into kind of this sort of like, like, like, logical extreme. It becomes like irrational. Like, you know, like, you don't just, like, go to war to, like, affect, like, policy ambitions by other means. You know, like, war arrives, like the seasons. And there's a bounded rationality to warfare, absolutely. and war for the rational process the way that's fought. But, like, you don't just go to war because it's like, I, you know, I can't, I don't like the, I don't like the trade arrangements that I have a country wide. I know, I'm going to launch a massive assault on them.

Like, that's not how things work. And that'd be like I said, like, I want to sell you my house. Maybe if I go to your house and, like, beat the shit out of you, like, that'll help me, like, get a better deal. I mean, it's like not, that's not what people think. you know like it's not like things are done you know like it and it's not I realize that sounds silly but you know the uh you know

this is a very important point and that's one of the things that's why that race Sorrell it's not just because I mean like his ideas on aesthetics and things and the way like people view like labor and the way um identitarian things in in political life I mean he deals with those things in intelligent ways

that's giving it to people like us but it's like ontological view of like conflict like this is something that happens. Like, it's not this rational thing it arrives. Like, it's like why you find like a girl attractive. It's like why it's like why certain symbols like take root like during cultural epochs.

It's like it's like why winter comes. We're at war now. You know, war arrives. I mean, that I realize I was a bit far afield. Yeah, I think that's important. I mean, and that is in regards to Vietnam, but in the case of Vietnam, it's particularly kind of like neglected. You know, yeah. But go out. I'm sorry.

Oh, no problem. Well, we're coming up on the hour, so let me end with this, because I know you can probably go on a little bit about this. The common trope, even till today, is that the United States lost the Vietnam War. What is your opinion? When you hear somebody say that, what thoughts come into your mind? I mean, I agree with John Paul Van. For those that don't know, Van was a really interesting guy and a very troubled guy. He had kind of like a horrible upbrain.

Like his mom was literally like an alcoholic prostitute, like didn't know his father. He joins the Army Air Corps. He gets trained as a pilot. World War II ends before he sees action. When the Air Force had an independent service, he wanted to stay in the Army. So he became an infantry officer. Long story short, he commanded a company and then a ranger. battalion in Korea

and David Hackworth, a young David Hagg was under his command, and Van became his total badass, okay? He had problems with alcohol, he got into such shit with an underage girl. I mean, typical, like, warrior type, who was his own worst enemy, but, like, a really brilliant soldier. And when he left the service, before his last kind of role in uniform, he was one of the first guys deployed the MacaV.

military citizens command Vietnam in 1962. And the reasoning there that we talked about was very much a special forces war. You know, counterinsurgency, direct action, identifying cadres, and eliminating them.

Okay. 64, after two years at MacV, Colonel Van retires. He becomes as independent, like defense consultant. Now, lo and behold, the year later this massive buildup happens.

And Van is like, what the hell are you doing? And Van Seller of these friends in the Pentagon, so he was able to get back to Vietnam as a civilian. And he ultimately died in 1972 in a chopper crash. But he, Van wrote a book on a bright, shining lie. And this kind of put the Vietnam War in perspective for me in terms. And I was a kid. And I highly recommend it to anybody.

Van said basically What I stated at the outset of this discussion I was basically borrowing from Van Look, you don't like win wars War's not a kind of to see how many people you can kill You know, you don't like win a war by like ranking up the biggest body counts Or by winning all the battles You know you win wars by

By annihilating the enemy's ability to fight You know by destroying his infrastructure And his, you know And his ability to reconstitute and continue to wage war, and by breaking his political will to wage war, in any number of ways, and some consolation of those things,

like wins the war. So, no, America lost the Vietnam War, but Americans look at this like a football game or something, like, hey, we killed more of those people. Like, okay, great, man. Like, like, again, the Vermacht killed something like,

their burn ratio was something like 15 to 1. I'm not exaggerating. Okay, I mean, does that mean, like, I mean, the German Reich won World War II because they killed 20 million Russians. I mean, it, you know, and it's not, it's not a football game, like saying like, hey, at Iya

Drain, like, we kicked more the nonbs. They didn't really win, or like, whatever Westmoreland's Coke was. It, you know, um, the, uh, and Van was absolutely right. The problem with America is that it

obsessed with firepower. That's something that America borrowed from the German general staff of old. but without the kind of tactical flexibility and intelligence of the German general staff, it's like the American notion is that firepower solves all problems. It doesn't matter what it is. If you throw in a firepower at it, it's going to be defeated. Nothing can stand up to a mirror and combine arms.

That's not true. I mean, yeah, I guess there's no, if you threw it a firepower in Vietnam, you would continue to kill huge numbers of people. You could probably turn it into like a non-functional country. I mean, especially you had one resorted to nuclear and biological weapons, but that's not, you don't wage war to just annihilie countries. You know, that's why the Carthaginian piece has become like this mythological thing. I mean, I assume I'm not in general, but I do know something.

So no, I mean, America, America lost the Vietnam War because it was, I mean, again, too, it's like, what's your victory metric? I mean, like, the minute the minute those guys, those little yellow guys with red stars on their pith helmets, were running into Saigon with their

clanshanikoff, they looked too big for them. And these guys were running, they were double-timing. These guys, they've been wore for 30 years. Think about that. I mean, that's when Hanoi won that war. Okay? I mean, it... So the

the um you know i i i look at that and then if you look at man when i see that because again they got it's like some pride thing or something like i'm making fun of their favorite football team or something you know and like i said i've got i've got all i've got huge respect for the vietnam army you know just because that's like my dad's generation but they're like fascinating guys and like that's when the u.s army was like at its best and plus it was just like cool you had like there's the only time we're like weird old in the army too you had like weird like long hair guys and like, and like weird rednecky guys. And like,

and like crazy ass. Like, dude, like, huge afro. Like, fucking, I'm, like, being silly, but, like, not, you know, I'm like, I'm really playing about a trope. But I'm the last person who's going to, like, say anything nasty about, like, the Vietnam Army. Like, those guys are, like, the best.

They were, like, legit, like, was cool about America. Like, legit, you know. But going around saying, and it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't their fault. Like, they, those guys didn't, those guys, thought splenely. Like, they performed very, very well. But, no, Mary Gapsey didn't

not win to be in that war. No. All right, well, let's end it there. Thomas, please give your plugs. And yeah, yeah, man. You can find me on Substack, which is kind of like my permanent home. It's real Thomas

777.7.7.com. I'd back on Twitter again, but I get fucking nude new from there, like, all the time. But, I mean, if you look for me, like, you'll find me there, but it's, don't be, like, sad if, like, you look for me and I'm gone. I literally get banned from there, like, every, like, several weeks. I'm at real, capital, R-E-A-L underscore Thomas 777 on Twitter.

I am watching my YouTube channel, man. Like, and I talk to my long-suffering editor and, like, production guy, and he's ready to go. So this weekend, I've got to record more with Mr. Pete here, and I've got to record for my own pod. And I've got to record with a couple of dear friends of mine for the channel content. That's going to go to my editor, and then it's going to launch. So you can find my channel at Thomas TV on YouTube. I'll, I link it on my substack, and I link it on my Twitter if you can't find it. But there's nothing there yet, but there will be in, like, a week.

like literally in a week. Like right around the first of a right on the first week during the first week in February. But that's what I got. Oh, and my second book in my Steelstorm series

just dropped. You should get that at Imperium Press. It's Imperiumpress.org. The book is Steelstorm 2. It's the second one of five. It's, it's Frank Herbert style science fiction. And I think

I've gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on it. I wouldn't keep writing them. so yeah and thank you for that everybody and really really really I'm honored by that but yeah that's all I got man