GOP Swift Boat Dead in the Water

One thing you can say about the anti-Kerry swift boat veterans: They don’t give up and leave the field when they're  defeated.

They just got clobbered on their first set of anti-Kerry ads (the ones going after his combat decorations), and unfazed,  they  just keep right on coming. This  time they've again taken another  low road. How low, you might ask?

Well, just check out the new ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ,  a group not interested in truth, by the way, just unfair and downright partisan attacks against Sen. Kerry

Case in point.

John Kerry’s anti-war congressional testimony of 1971.

Remember 1971?

The Vietnam war was then going full bore with no end in sight. John Kerry, then a discharged veteran,  presented some testimony to a congressional committee. John Kerry was,  at the time  disgusted and disillusioned  with the war. So too, were many other Americans.

During his testimony to Congress, Kerry repeated reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians. John Kerry did in fact point out that he had not witnessed any atrocities, but that he was simply reporting stories that were circulating at the time. 

The  anti-Kerry vets are unhappy with the way  John Kerry spoke his mind about the Vietnam war.  

Somehow or another, the anti-Kerry vets say that by  by speaking out against the war, Kerry  “betrayed” those who were still fighting in Vietnam (and who would continue to fight for at least another two years). 

He did this, they say,  by appearing before a congressional committee and pointing certain unpleasant facts of about the Vietnam War. Facts such as among other things, the My Lai incident and the use of free fire zones.

Remember My Lai? That was a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers.

Remember "free fire" zones? During the Vietnam War, anyone in a free fire zone was considered an enemy and therefore a legitimate target. 

The anti-Kerry veterans are going around acting like American soldiers never committed any atrocities or abused Vietnamese civilians. But of course atrocities did happen and free fire zones were used, along with a lot of other nasty things  against the more or less defenseless Vietnamese civilian population. 

Sen. Kerry, much to his credit, let people in America know what was happening, in Vietnam, what  was being done in there and how the war was demoralizing everyone, including the soldiers in the field.

The truth of the matter is, that as of 1971 when John Kerry gave his testimony, 44,000 men and women had been killed in Vietnam. They had  started dying in southeast asia,  as far back as 1961.

They died, basically, in support of a neo-colonial foreign policy vision.  This doctrine, was meant to make  the US take the  place of the French, so as to establish  an anti-Communist enclave in Southeast Asia. This would be a puppet government more or less under the control of the US.   This was not done in defense of freedom, but merely in support a despotism some US politicians happened to admire at the time.

Thirty-five years ago, John Kerry told is like it was.  He tried, in his own way, to put an end to the slaughter. Sadly, he did not succeed.

Before it was all over, the US effort  in Vietnam cost the lives of 58,000 men and women, with thousands more injured, and  many of those  still suffering the long term effects of their combat experience.

Today the US is engaged in another neo-colonialist effort in Iraq. 

Hopefully, if elected,  John Kerry as president, will be more successful in ending the current  experiment in neo-colonialism, than he was as a discharged veteran.  

John Kerry deserves praise for his testimony back in 1971, not criticism.

Punditwalla--