[Vision2020] [Norton AntiSpam] Re: Mass Slaughter in Vietnam?

Fri Dec 15 13:05:27 PST 2006

It was stated a few years ago and remains valid today:

"We are not in Iraq because of the terrorists.  The terrorists are in Iraq
because of us."

We are now heavily militarily involved in a theocratic civil war between the
Suunis and Shiites.  I feel that the Al-Qaeda, being dominantly Suuni, are
attracted to the Iraqi Suunis as they both have a common cause.

Iran does not want an unsettled Iraq any more than we do.  An unsettled Iraq
would result in a massive exodus of refugees into Iran.

We MUST sit down with Iran, Iraq, and Syria as we did with the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

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"Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of
uncertainty and fear -- with such a realization that the future is obscure
and that survival is not assured."

- Edward R. Murrow

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From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of Nick Gier
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 12:51 PM
To: Mark Solomon
Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [Vision2020] Mass Slaughter in Vietnam?

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your comments.  I am aware of some of these facts, but did not
know that Sihanouk has resigned.  I hold no brief for him (his past cozy
relations with Beijing was nauseating) or the current leader.  

All that I'm saying is that the U.S. is very much responsible for the chaos
that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and nothing you've said disputes
that.

Nick

At 12:37 PM 12/15/2006 -0800, you wrote:

Nick,

Cambodia has been changing rapidly, for the worse, in the past few years.
Sihanouk resigned as King in an attempt to force political reform. He has
been replaced as King by one of his sons who spent most of his life in Paris
and is a creature of the Prime Minister. The PM, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer
Rouge thug who "saw the light" as the Vietnamese Armies were crossing the
border and switched allegiances. As partial payback for being given a
country to own, Hun Sen recently "negotiated" a new border with Vietnam
which of course gives a good chunk of the highlands where the Montagnard
tribe lives to Vietnam. Needless to say, given the Montagnard/American
history of the Vietnam War, the Montagnards are in deep #$@%. The
theoretical democracy is only that, a theory. Hun Sen rules with absolute
power, including its corollary, absolute corruption. Opposition political
leaders either are in exile or dead at Hun Sen's hand. Until the foreign
donor countries that prop up Hun Sen pull the foreign aid plug, it will only
get worse. China and Vietnam are now the largest donor countries followed by
the EU.

It's very sad. I spent several months there two years ago working/teaching
metal sculpture techniques to Khmer artists using decommissioned weapons,
mostly AK47s, for our raw material. A life changing experience for them, and
me.

The best in-country source of news I know of is Khmer Intelligence:
http://www.khmerintelligence.org/3Q2004.html

the website is only sporadically maintained but you can subscribe to their
yahoo news group for periodic messages of the low down in Cambodia. Link to
subscribe from their website.

Mark S.

At 10:17 AM -0800 12/15/06, <nickgier at adelphia.net> wrote:

Greetings:

Some more really wild claims from down the hill, this time about Vietnam.
Where is the evidence for mass slaughter in Vietnam after we left?  Yes,
many were sent to reeducation camps, and many of those fleeing lost their
lives to pirates in the South China Sea.

More people are being killed, maimed, and born malformed by leftover
munitions and Agent Orange than ever lost their lives at the hands of the
Communist regime.  I would also hazard to guess that we killed more
Vietnamese (at least one million) than the Viet Cong ever would have killed
if we had not intervened.

Before we invaded Cambodia, the country was stable and ruled by Prince
Sihanouk, who, along with his wife, are now King and Queen of Cambodia.
(When I was there in 2002, their pictures were everywhere.) Our invasion,
plus support for right-wing thugs, alienated the people and forced them
right into the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

The Killing Fields are just as much our responsibility as theirs.  The great
irony of course is that Communist Vietnamese troops defeated the Khmer
Rouge, and the UN had one of greatest successes in making elections possible
there.

The Johns Hopkins report on Iraqi causalities, which looked at every single
death certificate (90 percent of households surveyed produced one), showed
that a majority of deaths occurred by coalition air strikes.  This survey
was done before the upsurge in sectarian killings, mainly in Baghdad.
Taking the low end of their estimates at 400,000 dead, it would take Shias
and Sunnis a very long time to top Bush's slaughter.

Yours for accurate history,

Nick Gier

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"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human
affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
 --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by
itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." --Max
Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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