Most of our readers are too young to remember the Vietnam War of a half-century ago, but those of us holding draft cards classifying us as 1A have a more personal perspective. In 1971, when I received my low draft number, all I could think was that perhaps I, too, would have to participate in the horror that was combat in that wicked war.
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973—signed a month after I took my military physical—ended direct US involvement, although the US government continued to aid the South Vietnamese until their government and armed forces completely collapsed in April 1975. Today, Vietnam and the US are at peace with each other, but even today, unexploded US bombs continue to blow up and kill innocent people.
Samuel Johnson wrote in 1758:
Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
To put it another way, war breeds lies. Lies gave us Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Ukraine War. Like it has done with so many wars that have US involvement, the New York Times has first promoted the conflicts it later claims to abhor, and Ukraine is no exception. Popular columnist David French—who has never seen a US war he didn’t support—two years ago visited Ukraine and gushed about the “valor” he saw with the Ukraine people:
This is primarily a Ukrainian story, of course. We know from bitter experience that we can supply “allies” with billions of dollars of American weapons, only to watch them collapse in the face of a determined attack. But Ukrainian valor and resolve are breathtaking. Most Ukrainians I’ve talked to since arriving don’t say “after the war”; they say “after the victory.” But this is also an American story, and at the risk of sounding a bit corny, when I watched the air defenses we helped build intercept Russian hypersonic missiles above Kyiv, I felt proud to be an American.
With the Donald Trump administration now trying to broker a peace, French is not as “proud to be an American” as he was before January 20, and his rage-filled columns are aimed at either Trump or evangelical Christians that don’t share French’s political views. However, even French’s employer is now admitting that President Joe Biden and others in his administration were lying all along about the war, its progress, and the extent of US involvement:
But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
The war in Ukraine was very profitable for the biden crime family.