Pentagon campaign to recruit Vietnam as military ally against China exposed delusions of US war strategy
GARETH PORTER·APRIL 8, 2021
After convincing itself Vietnam would grant it access for missile bases against China, the Pentagon got a hard dose of reality.
When the Pentagon began gearing up for a future war with China in 2018, Defense Department officials quickly realized that they needed access to Vietnamese territory for troops armed with missiles to hit Chinese ships in a US-China conflict. So they initiated an aggressive campaign to lobby the Vietnamese government, and even Communist Party officials, in the hope that they would eventually support an agreement to provide them the permission.
But a Grayzone investigation of the Pentagon’s lobbying push in Vietnam shows what a delusional exercise it was from its inception. In a fit of self-deception that highlighted the desperation behind the bid, the US military ignored abundant evidence that Vietnam had no intention of giving up its longstanding, firmly grounded policy of equidistance between the United States and China.
Vietnam as a key base in US war strategy
Between 2010 and 2017, China developed intermediate-range missiles capable of hitting American bases in Japan and South Korea. To counter that threat, the Pentagon and military services began working on a new strategy in which US Marines, accompanied by an array of missiles, would spread out over a network of small, rudimentary bases and move continuously from one base to another.
Vietnam was the logical choice for such sites. Australia and the Philippines publicly ruled out hosting US missiles capable of hitting China, and South Korea was considered unlikely to agree. Indonesia and Singapore were too economically dependent on China to be interested.
But as Chris Dougherty, the former Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development who had written large parts of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, told the Military Times last September, “Vietnam has some wonderful geography. You can have good external lines against the Chinese.” Pentagon strategists also knew that Vietnam had soundly defeate https://www.instagram.com/p/CNblhfvlCH5/?igshid=1aw2afu7aiq85
If socialism is so terrible why does the USA have to keep overthrowing democratically elected socialist governments and replacing them with right wing dictators?
On this day, 25 October 1983, the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada. The stated justification of the invasion was to “protect” US citizens. However, the real reason was very different. In the wake of their defeat in Vietnam, the US was keen to demonstrate its military and political might, and as a senior US official told New York Times journalist Bernard Gwertzman, “What good manoeuvres and shows of force, if you never use it?” Scores of people were killed in the invasion, with hundreds wounded, as the US government toppled the left-wing government which had been established after independence from Britain. 18 civilians were killed when US aircraft missiles hit a psychiatric hospital. The new, pro-US government which was subsequently set up, established October 25 as a national holiday called “Thanksgiving Day” to commemorate the invasion. Political scientist Stephen Shalom subsequently pointed out the hypocrisy of the invasion. While no US citizens were at risk in Grenada, in some other countries in the region, some US citizens really were in danger. For example the four US nuns who were murdered by death squads in El Salvador. Historian Howard Zinn pointed out: “there was no US intervention there, no Marine landings, no protective bombing raids. Instead Washington provided aid and bombs to the right wing government”
That’s funny bc in the same state inside the capital city you need a license to beg on the side of the road so yeah quite literally it is a crime to be poor
Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation.
This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it. This is despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”
The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on.
News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis. A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable.
Fright-Rags has made its My Bloody Valentine design by Justin Osbourn available on T-shirts ($28), baseball tees ($38), and zip-up hoodies ($48) through Sunday, February 14.
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