Was it really that hard to understand, Folktruther?

But if it was, maybe this will help clarify it (see link below)

-http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/120508dntexlbjaudio.2dd019ec.html

I don’t get it, gemantel.  What are you hinting?

“War Is The Health Of The State”:
( http://www.bigeye.com/warstate.htm )

But I would say, war is the state.

One can’t reasonably say that capitalism is the cause of war, however, since war preceded capitalism by many millennia.  (It has been reported that even chimpanzees conduct wars.)  Rather, capitalism fits itself into the war-state system; it is a phase of the system.  It may even mitigate it somewhat, since direct violence is replaced by greed and contests over property; property is maintained by force, but it is mostly implicit or threatened force rather than its overt exercise.  On the other hand, because capitalism is so creative and productive, when contests of force do break out they are much more destructive and terrifying than those of pre-capitalist days.

You don’t seem particularly gullible to me.

I agree, Anarcissie, that there certainly is a Kennedy whitewash machine that even extends to Boobie Kennedy.  And that he did increase the number of advisers. 

But, given that I don’t know the ins and outs of it, he did appear to resist his military and intelligence advisors which Paul Dale Scott thinks is the reason for his assassination.

For example, he did not implement the false flag operation Northwoods unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to arouse oppinion to invade Cuba.  And he did appear to want to take some ‘advisors’ out of Vietnam.

But I am very gullible and you may be right.

Folktruther, I fear you’re being taken in by the Kennedy monarchical whitewash machine.  I didn’t know it was still running, but there it is.  The king can do no wrong….

Eisenhower had at most 1100 military people in Vietnam.  (The web sites I read today say 800.)  They were really advisors.  In fact, Diem and company were unwilling to let them get anywhere near operational forces; Diem distrusted American involvement (with good reason, as it would turn out later).  In any case, Eisenhower was extremely dubious about war on the famous Asian land mass.  One of Kennedy’s campaign promises was to “get America moving again.”  The war in Vietnam was one example of what he meant.  I don’t think he intended to abandon it.  Since the war turned out badly, however, the ruling-class intelligentsia have gone to great effort to revise history in favor of their hero.

Even, granted that you are right about the number of Advisers in Vietnam, Anarcissie, the fact that there is evidence that he wanted to take some out indicates what he was thinking. 

He asked Mike Mansfield, the former majority leader of the Senate, and later ambassodor to Japan, to write an analysis of the options and Mansfield decided that there was no way to win.  No matter how many troops the US put in, Vietnam could match them.  Also Kennedy was really pissed by the military and intelligence advice he got in invading Cuba.

I am not saying he was not an imperialist, or even a militarist.  But the evidence suggests that he didn’t want to fight in Vietnam, a war that Ike handed off to him.

’... The facts are that on the day Kennedy was killed there were 4000 troops in Viet Nam. ...’

Wikipedia gives the number as 16,300.  Elsewhere I have read other figures ranging from 14,000 to 17,000.

Despite the copious disclaimers, the implicit underlying assumption here, as in more hawkish quarters, is that the U.S. should reign supreme in the world and the “debate” is confined largely to “soft power” vs. “force projection”. This
has been going on for many decades, at least since JFK, it’s essentially what the Democratic and Republican wings of America’s duopoly one-party state tussle over - how best to manage the
empire. Using JFK as a ‘role model’ takes quite a bit of revisionist reworking for some of the reasons cited in the other comments above. Describing Vietnam in the brief Kennedy era as a"disintegrating situation” is a telling indicator of this twisted
rationale. Disintegrating only in the sense that it could no longer be managed effectively by successive Western colonial powers, using handpicked local puppet regimes. If this were clearly and forthrightly explained or acknowledged to the wider American public outside of the elite sectors, they would likely have little trouble accepting it. By the time the bloodbath in S.E.Asia was in full swing - commenced by the real JFK, regardless of
what the academic “virtual” one would do - the “resistance to military solutions” among the public was widespread. In fact, they didn’t need any Democratic/Republican power broker from among the
elites to “explain” this to them. Rather it was the other way around.  Then as now, popular opinion is subject to dangerous manipulation, even demagoguery, but it may not always be as bellicose as those of the elites. Suppose that some “top scholars” were to do a “path-breaking” “thought experiment” on a “virtual public” better informed and without being subjected to the same blandishments of media disinformation and official propaganda. All existing in a “virtual America” with a direct democracy not a detached one-party monolith. Under such conditions, maybe we wouldn’t have to rely so much on the whims and temperament of those entrusted with too much concentrated power. As was rightly noted, no one can be “certain Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam”, but the fact that costly conferences are convened to rehash such questions says alot about the underlying lack of democracy in the society and the way people are trained to trust their fate, including war and peace, to remote political potentates. To make an even greater leap in the purely hypothetical by coloring it with the quasi-historical, and investing Obama with all the virtual virtues that the researcher longs for and painting his adversary with all the qualities of the shameful past is substantively insupportable. McCain may be an unpalatable warmonger but Obama too has indicated his willingness to use force against Iran and expand the size of the military and deepen involvement in a “quagmire” in Afghanistan, etc., so as to make him almost as suspect.  You don’t have to agree with all of Bacevich’s views to recognize that he and many others are right to believe the system is broken. Instead of creating “virtual” worlds of idealized presidents to save us, we need to create a more viable popular democracy.

The question to be shortly answered is will Obama be more like Kennedy or Carter?  Time will tell.  One thing certain is the incoming administration will receive little cooperation from the outgoing and will do much to make the transition more difficult.  Obama is going to have one hell of a situation on his hands both domestically and internationally——he may have to be more like Roosevelt than anybody else.

But one thing is certain, no matter what Obama does Limbaugh and Hannity will rip him apart, but it is good for the ratings!

On the contrary, war is the essence of the politics of the state.  The problem is not that political ends cannot be achieved by military means, but that the political ends are often contradictory and at odds with the official narrative (which is quite important).  Both Iraq and Vietnam could have been subjugated by using much larger forces and completely destroying the social order and physical plant of the countries, as the Nazis or the Romans might have. However, this could not have been done on the cheap, nor would it have gone along with the theoretical purpose of the invasions.

The narrative and purpose of the war in Vietnam was important in Kennedy’s case because he also had to fight another kind of war, the political struggle with his domestic competitors.  Americans were not yet tired of the war in 1963.  In fact, they had hardly begun to think about it; when they did think about it, they were generally enthusiastic.  (De Tocqueville remarked of the Americans that there was no people so willing to start a war, and so unwilling to fight it.)  Getting out scot-free in 1963 would have been quite a difficult trick, especially after botching the Bay of Pigs and leading the country through the wringer of the Cuban missile crisis.  Of course later it would become much more difficult.  I think Johnson and Kennedy were on the same page with respect to Vietnam, and as you observe Kennedy’s advisors were all very fond of the war (at the time).

My thoughts about this subject are thus:
1) Presidents, notwithstanding any prior military service, are professional politicians, NOT military commanders. Civilians typically do not understand this. Consider this: Is it logical to assume that a professional politician, someone who has spent years and years practicing politics, is suddenly going to make a good military commander of U.S. Armed Forces? Absolutely not! The title of Commander-In-Chief is conferred upon the winner of a political contest. It is not earned by demonstrating high military aptitude for commanding military forces. Therefore, presidents make very poor military decisions when required to do so. They typically further compound the problem by putting the Secretay of Defense, another civilian, in charge of the Pentagon. The Secretary of Defense then selects Generals who will kow-tow to him, instead of doing what they know to be the correct military thing to do. This is why the USA is always attempting to accomplish a political objective using military might. Real Generals know that in the long-term, it is not possible to accomplish a political objective using military might; especially if that political objective is democracy (as in Vietnam & Iraq, for examples).

2) I have reason to believe that President Kennedy probably would have escalated the Vietnam Conflict much the way LBJ did. How so? Well, he’s the one who hired the the “Big Three”: Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, in the first place. Presidents don’t typically hire advisors that they constantly disagree with. Eventually, he probably would have followed their advice to “win the war”. Additionally, the U.S. was involved in the Cold War, and President Kennedy probably bought into the Domino Theory. Even as a Senator, Kennedy argued the importance of the West defending Southeast Asia from Communism, after returning from a fact-finding tour to the Middle and Far East.

The political cost for ‘losing’Vietnam would not be unacceptable if you weren’t going to run again.  that’s the difference betweeen Kennedy’s second term and Johnson’s first full term.  Paul Dale Scott, such a fanatical researcher that the U of Cal publishes his assissination theories, maintains that Kennedy made too many enemies, both by his lack of militarism in Vietnam and Cuba.

And his assassination is one reason why people still are facinated by him.  the blatant lies and evasions of the Warren commission, like that of the 9/11 comminssion, make it impossible to bury historical events while the truth is obviously still covered up.

  The most effective deception of the American people is done by the pseudo-progressives (alright, pseudo-leftists) to interpret the historical truth in ways that provide damage control for the Amereican power system.  Just as the regulation of American industry is done by industry representatives, so the progressive truth about Amereican power is covered up by pseudo-leftists protecting the American power system.

This is why marxism (and real anarchism) has been repressed in the US.  As Francis Conors Saunders, a British historian, has documented, the liberal and socialist left during the Cold War was funded by the CIA and other Foundations to be anti-communist and anti-marxist.  The covering up of the assassinations was part of this Cold War damage control. 

And this led directly to the covering up of the false flag operation of 9/11-anthrax.  The evidence is hidden in plain sight but leftists like Cockburn and Chomsky denigrate anyone pointing it out.  People will keep digging at history until the truth is finally acknowledged, which is one of the reasons for the facination with the Kennedys.

All right; then I hope Obama, if he is elected, will be like your Kennedy, and not like my Kennedy, if he can’t do any better than that.

I don’t see much reason to believe that Kennedy was preparing to withdraw from Vietnam; the U.S. knew from the battle of Ap Bac that the South Vietnamese regime was not going to survive on its own, and the domestic political cost for “losing Vietnam” would have been unacceptable.  And perhaps the foreign political cost as well.  The correct imperial plan for Vietnam would have been for the U.S. leadership to seduce Ho Chi Minh away from his Soviet and Chinese allies, as they did Tito.  I am not sure why this was deemed impossible, but I suppose it may have something to do with Vietnam’s previous colonial status.

It is discouraging to observe that we are still not done with the hagiography of the Kennedys.

Although the US is committed to a war trajectory, Anarcissie, which both Obiden and McCain will pursue, the writers do have a point about Kennedy.  He was a warmonger but he exercised restraint, both in the Cuba war and confrontation, and in Vietnam. 

McNaumara, in his book IN RETROSPECT, hints distantly and deniably that Kennedy was assassinated because he had begun to withdraw advisers from Vietnam.  These advisers were in fact plane and helicopter pilots who actually flew with native pretend pilots, but the distinction between advisers and military troops was still an important one.

Johnson was a militarist like McCain (and Biden) and didn’t want to lose.  With McCain, one would have as president a man who spent his whole career as a fighter pilot, and who has a bad temper. A man trained to be reflexsive not reflective. In a crucial situation, Obama would have a cooler head than McCain.  This is one real reason for progressives voting for him, the other, having an African-American president.

Since, however, in both California and New York, Obama is ahead by 20+ points in the last poll I saw, I suggest voting for McKinney

The sad, material fact is that when Kennedy entered office, there were about 1100 American military people in Vietnam and on the day he died there were 17,000.  It was only after the Vietnam adventure turned sour that one began to see assertions that, had he lived, he would have withdrawn this force.  Kennedy’s chosen servants, his cabinet and other advisors, pushed Johnson further into the war.  Kennedy’s numerous, monarchistic sycophants among the intelligentsia don’t want to believe their hero had feet of clay, yet he did—covered with blood.  But no amount of whitewash will cover up the facts about Vietnam or its harbinger, the Bay of Pigs.

I already know McCain is an enthusiastic warmonger; I can only hope that if Obama becomes president, he will not be like Kennedy.

Any thinking and compassionate person knows that Sarah Palin and John McCain are buttheads extraordinaire who would only steer the country further into an already dark abyss.

Go to:  http://www.buttheadpolice.com

Vote for them, and other buttheads like Bush, to get asses stamped on their heasd.  All in good fun, but makes a wicked statement.  Spread the word!!  Buttheads will roll!!