So let’s stop blaming and underestimating the American public. They get it.

They watch Bush rub Merkel's shoulders and Condi go to Rome.

Too bad the American public's newly discovered IR sophistication isn't likely to help us Democrats. 

Assuming this is not sarcasm, I would disagree. Its amazing to me that the American people have any faith at all in the administration given their record. The amazing statistic to me is that 51% of the public approve of the conduct of the war on terror? What does that mean anyway?

Yes, it is all too reminiscent of accusations that to be against this war meant you didn't support the troops, or were soft on terror, or didn't believe America had a role in the world, or believed that in every case the United States needed to consult the allies before action.

Well in my view none of that is a fair assessment of where Kos, or Gilliard or Billmon took their departure. It certainly wasn't where I was starting from.

When the Chief of Staff of the Army publically testified in what he probably knows will be a career ending move that it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to occupy Iraq, he was effectively testifying that it could not be done at all. And of course he was right all along. As were the French. As was General Zinni when he gave his assessment at the CDI Dinner in May 2004 10 mistakes . Shinseki, and Zinni and I suspect Kos, Billmon and Gilliard, and certainly me happen to prefer an American foreign policy that is backed up by an fully functioning Army and Marine Corps trained, armed, equipped and able to deploy anywhere in the world to fight any adversary that fundamentally threatens American interests. We no longer have that, our combat force is for the most part fully committed to one small country and is being ground to bits both in terms of equipment and troops.

This war would not have been worth the cost to date even if it had worked, which it didn't - and from all we have seen to date - won't. Avoiding this war would have meant paying attention to people who actually knew what combat operations would mean, and ignoring some power mad fools who drew up their campaign for world conquest at the Project for the New American Century in the mid nineties, at least those parts they didn't bring from the Reagan Administration to start with.

I support the troops, always did. I support a robust policy of engagement around the world, always did. I opposed a war that was destined to get those troops killed and ruin any chance the US had for constructive engagement around the world.

What does that make me. Well not a cheese-eating surrender monkey. More like a guy that listened to Villepin and thought "that makes sense". Which it did and does.

The hardest lesson for the pro-war cattle herd to absorb is that the French were right all along, and me recognizing that in real time is no failure at all, either in patriotism or judgement. The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield plan was a predictable disaster. How do I know that? Because the people who predicted disaster and explained why that was likely were all proved correct.

When I was a kid I crashed a car. My parents gave me a second chance and then I crashed the other car. My parents took away my license.

Well the Bush Administration has crashed too many cars, that the American people are asking that the next time it drives any foreign policy car that is has some adult supervision is simple recognition that this administration can't be trusted to make the right decisions. I know it maddens people out of their mind that some of those adult supervisors have French accents. Too bad.

OK, I checked BevD's comments history and I think we can safely assume she is joking. Whew!! Had my brain twisted there for a second.

It's amazing that from the reality of global warming to raising taxes to pay for a decaying infrastructure, the polls reveal an American public on a much different page than their representatives in Washington. Not surprising actually given that those representatives must answer only to their creditors, that amorphous 2% of 280,000,000 constiuents. Whether to call America a plutocracy or an oligarchy is arguable, what is very arguable is to call it a democracy.

Most of us can agree that the United States should take the opinions of its allies into consideration when formulating policy. It appears as if the only problem with this is that our allies appear to lack any sort of understanding of what to do; at least in terms of Middle Eastern issues. Asking for a cease-fire does not constitute much. What we need are their honest proposals if they even have any to offer.

Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have all denounced the Israeli offensive and called for a cessation of hostilities yet they have offered nothing specifically on how to achieve such an agreeable end.

My question is, how can the U.S. go about taking its allies opinions to heart when its allies seem to have no opinion?

Americans are simply victims of the false promises fed to them. They are too isolationist! They don't want to bother to learn much of anything about foreign cultures or evaluate foreign opinion before it is filtered by FOX News. They understand Socical Security. They don't have enough information to evaluate foreign policy. Bush offered them global war on the cheap with the promise of perpetual unilateral hegemony and universal adoration. It won't work out that way polls or no polls.

The international papers provided views and vistas not seen in the US.

The bells kept clanging in my head when I would try to grasp the concept of using humvees and tanks to go after people who had walked into airports and hijacked airplanes using boxcutters. And, we were going to do so in a country that had produced none of the hijackers.

The idea that al-Qaeda went to Saddam Hussein for terrorist training seemed ludicrous. Why would an organization who had successfully stunned the world with its 20 man attack against the lone Superpower go to the man who used chemical weapons and had the help of the US, but still couldn't militarily win a 9 year war with his neighboring country?

The only thing missing was the porridge and the 3 bears. Or was it Humpty Dumpty?

"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." GWB, 4/10/2002

There's also the entirely plausible explanations that not all proposals and negotiations are being made public. France and Turkey, for example, both have issues to work out from colonial days or with relations to Muslims. Incidentally, both have some very fine troops for a mission such as this one.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

American voters have very little influence over this country's foreign policy, so what do these polls matter anyway? They are just another example of fake democracy. Allowing people to express their opinion is just a way of letting them blow off steam.

While I do not know whether the "COL" has any evidence to back up his claim of "protesters confronting soldiers returning from Southeast Asia" -- I assume this image is circa Vietnam War era --

If you are unfamiliar with Harry Summers, that really casts doubt on whether you have given serious study to the Viet Nam war. "COL" is a perfectly accepted abbreviation for full colonel. Are you unfamiliar with that as well, or mocking it?

I do know that the anti-war movement made a distinction between the nuke-the-slopes-over-there-so-we-don't-have-to-fight-them- on-the-beaches-here type of soldier who demanded koodoos for his "patriotism" and the soldier who was just doing his job.

Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember it, but I can remember standing in Washington National Airport, as soldiers returned, to be spit upon, to have what was called blood thrown on them, and to be generally cursed. It was a lot easier to do that than work on the Hill to change policy, to deal with even fair investigations of the Johnson administration, and to get accurate reporting.
Your distinction wasn't always followed. I can remember many times, not just at airports, where ordinary citizens, including those totally against the wall, would spontaneously form a line -- of witness? -- between the soldiers and the protesters.
I can also remember running an independent college news pool at the largest Pentagon demonstration in October 1967, carefully getting credentialed both by the New Mobilization Committee to End The War in Viet Nam, as well as the Department of Defense. That meant we got to stand between the lines. I won't forget one protester trying to smash my head into the concrete wall of the Pentagon. As far as I was concerned, he was trying to kill me, and, while there were no bodies found, I like to think he got a lifelong ache somewhere to remember that gratuitous violence, to people not in charge, can have consequences.
Are you speculating, or were you there?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I see. Great way to begin a discussion, by calling someone a liar. Incidentally, what is your experience with that period? Where were you at the time?

What would you consider verification, since these events took place before the Web, so you won't find online records, although you will find records of the October 1967 demonstrations.I have no idea of whether the Department of Defense still keeps records of the Washington Area Student News Pool, with members from American University (my school), University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and George Washington University. Each university library would have microfilms of the student newspapers; I don't know what other reference libraries would have them. You can probably find some bylined articles in the Washington Post in 1966-1967, when I was a science stringer covering those universities.

For some of this material, you might actually have to read books, and with an open mind. That you are unfamiliar with Harry Summers and that you either are unfamiliar with, or mock the normal abbreviation for colonel, does not suggest an overwhelming knowledge about politicomilitary affairs, although it does suggest contempt and prejudice. It may make you happy to learn of another Summers quote in which he told a North Vietnamese colonel, after the war, "we never lost a battle with you."

His counterpart, wise in the political, responded, "True, but irrelevant."

Shall I suggest other references, from all viewpoints, or is your mind sufficiently made up that you don't want to be confused with data that conflicts with your preconceptions?

I observe that you don't use your full name here, yet you challenge recollections -- where I use my real name, which easily could be used as a search reference for the news coverage. Care to treat as equals, and produce information about your experience at the time? No? I'm not really surprised. Snark is cheap.

Would you like my residences and employers during the war, so you can run some reference checks, of course at your expense?

In other words, with your demand

If you'd like to provide something a little more credible than the oral history of your heroic youth, I'll be pleased to reconsider your Napoleonic claims.

say now, specifically, what you would consider credible, so there's no opportunity to change your mind after the fact. Let the TPMcafe community judge if your requests are reasonable. Need my birth certificate?

I'm perfectly happy to provide a bibliography, both of the conditions in the Viet Nam period, and, if relevant, some of my own publications. In fact, ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS, I'll even include some bibliographies of Napoleon, so you might be a bit more accurate when calling things "Napoleonic claims". I'm a good deal taller than Napoleon, am neither Corsican or French, and have never been an emperor. I suppose I could give you some names of soldiers that you could use for at least topical epithets.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Are you deliberately not reading, or just ignoring? I'm sorry if things being not online is too hard for you, but, after all, we are talking about a time period before the Internet. There was the ARPANET, but it was invitational.

I repeat: get the American University Eagle for around October 22, 1967. It wasn't a daily, and I am utterly devastated by no longer remembering the publication dates. You can go to AU, or possibly get it on interlibrary loan. You'll find my articles.

I notice you don't even snark about your apparent lack of knowledge about military history, and ignored my nice offer to send you a reading list.

This seems repeating, since you ignored it: where were you during the Viet Nam war? Were you an adult at the time?

I offered records; you are inventing dog-ate-the-homework. Anyway, it would have been a cat. Again, I repeat: I challenge you to come up with a representative list of references, on which you can't backtrack. Of course, if you aren't sufficiently familiar with the literature of the period or the war to identify sources, that doesn't do much for your credibility as a snark, does it?

Symbolic attacks on returning soldiers were well reported in news media of the time. Just what do you expect? Indeed, you could get even better coverage from the counterculture press, such as the Berkeley Barb. The main such paper in DC at the time was, creatively, called the Underground. Tom de Baggio, one of the bravest human beings I know*, published it.

Go ahead. Offer something but snark.

*In later years, Tom de Baggio became a self-taught world authority on herb culture, especially rosemary. A sad few years ago, he developed early-onset Alzheimer's. With the assistance of friends and family, he desperately writes to save the knowledge of a lifetime; a Google or Amazon search will give an idea of his books.

Perhaps especially poignant is Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's.

Call this man a coward -- and he was violently antiwar -- and just hope you never meet me in person.

Exactly what anti-war groups were "credentialling" anyone?

The New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam, of which many of to-be Chicago Seven were major players. This was a useful and relevant credential for the week leading up to the actual demonstrations. The Committee was screening the less major media over concerns of what they consider infiltration. Once credentialed, it was, for example, it was possible to get detailed interviews with a Dave Dellinger or Jerry Rubin. It also gave limited access, during the demonstration, mostly by phones, to spokesmen for the demonstrators.
No more and no less. This credentialing had a completely different purpose than that of the military,which concerned access to the Pentagon and secured access around it, as well as having office space for telephone lines back to newsrooms -- no cell phones in those days.

And would cops or military security somehow give any credence to such credentials anyway?

They weren't giving any credence to the New Mobe credentials. They were giving credence to DoD-issued credentials valid only for the few days involved, during which even regular Pentagon press corps building passes were suspended. What is the difficulty in understand there were two sets of credentials for two separate purposes?

And how did that protestor get between the lines?

I don't know how well you know the physical layout of the Pentagon grounds, but I'll try to explain -- and it was a group of perhaps 60 to 100 fighting protesters, not a single individual.
At the time, there were two major and several minor ground-level entrances to the Pentagon. Most workers came into the bus concourse below the building, which has since been closed and converted to offices, and a bus and train pavilion located outside.
The demonstration was centered on the Mall side of the Pentagon, as opposed to the more ceremonial River entrance. To the left of the Mall entrance is a smaller door to Corridor 7, off of which the press suites are located, on the E and D rings left of te corridor.
There is a semicircular service road that curves in front of the Mall side. This road normally was blocked by military police. At a change of shift on Saturday afternoon, the military screwed up: during a shift change, doctrine calls for the relief shift to form line in front of the outgoing shift, and then the outgoing shift leaves without breaking the perimeter. For some reason, the outgoing shift started walking away before the relief shift was in position, leaving a 20-30 foot opening straight to the press entrance. That area had been kept clear of large numbers of troops, precisely because it was the press and public affairs area with a lot of legitimate movement.
This group of demonstrators spontaneously saw the opening and rushed it, with no guard force in position to block them. They attacked people in the press area and tried to force their way into the building. Other demonstrators threw rocks and bottles, and broke most windows on the E ring side of the press area. At least one nonmilitary-style tear gas grenade came in, and there was fear that Molotov cocktails might be used. The outside offices were evacuated. Until a reaction force came up from the basement, the Corridor 7 doors were barricaded, and both DoD-credentialed reporters and DoD press staff were trapped on the steps.

Moreover many reports have these soldiers coming back through commerical airports when in fact the practice was to bring them back by military or charter through military posts, after all they still had to process out.

So far, this is completely correct, but incomplete. Yes, out-processing troops tended to come into large military bases, on the charter planes they flew. Your point does not address two subcomponents of the problem:

1. After troops arrived from Viet Nam at a military base such as Mather AFB in California ,Dover AFB (yes, it was more than a mortuary) in Delaware, and other large installations, and even out-processed, they still often needed to get to airports near their homes, and either might not have civilian clothes or chose not to wear them. They might even ride cross-country military charter shuttles, but, in many cases,they eventually had to fly commercial to get to their home airport. There are two major airports in the DC area (BWI is really closer to Baltimore). National Airport is the usual destination for short-haul traffic, and, as the "city" airport, attracted demonstrators; it's only a short distance from the Pentagon
2. Not all soldiers were out-processing. Depending on the service and unit, there was often a 2-week or so leave at the midpoint of their Southeast Asia tour. Often, families met at some intermediate point such as Hawaii or Hong Kong, but that took money. Troops on leave were going as individuals, not units, and while they might or might not enter the country at a military base, they would still need individual travel to get home (or wherever they were going)

Is it so terribly impossible to understand that not all military personnel flew to a handful of bases and then needed transportation within the US?
The link you give is to an account by a self-described peace activist, rather than at least nominally nonpartisan media. There's a lot of "well I didn't find reports", but no research data on what he actually searched. Academic papers do tend to include such references.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Not even snarking off as well as you are, Ellen. I note that you've responded to no specific questions that I've posed, instead throwing out random one-liners. You apparently like to throw out rhetorical questions, but you don't like receiving any, or even worse, specific questions.

This isn't trollery, though. In general, trolls have enough energy to write more than a line at a time.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I was going to let this go but the narratologist in me rebeled.

You have one narrative taking place at National Airport, as soldiers (note the plural) deplane, in uniform, and oddly enough our humble narrator is standing there, I guess cause he had a lot of time on his hands to stand around the airport. As our hero is standing by he sees a series of people spitting, throwing blood and cursing out the troops. Now I don't know if this is supposed to be happening on the tarmac, in the concourse, or out in the parking lot, typically the story happens inside the terminal.

Now ignoring the fact that neither airport security (such as it was) or the cleaning crew would be happy with someone throwing blood inside the airport, we also have the visual of you just standing by. Which if true was pretty chicken-shit. At a minimum you could have gotten a cop.

Okay now the narrative shifts, and you are in some unspecified place where there are lines of soldiers being harassed, with another line of civilians in between. This part doesn't even make narrative sense at all.

Now the narrative abruptly shifts to an anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon where two sets of credentials allows you "between the lines" Which lines? The protestors and the civilians? The civilians and whoever was protecting the building? (Not likely to be active duty soldiers - a little violation of Posse Comitatus there). Security not particular good that day, at least one protestor making it right up to the wall to kill our hero only to be manfully repelled in a way that probably hurts to this day.

Okay lots of things happened at anti-war rallies, things were said, things were thrown, and though your narrative still doesn't quite add up I can believe you were at a protest. But how an organized protest by the New Mobilization Committe at the Pentagon somehow melds back into incidents at the airport is beyond me

And your defense of the airport story fails at several points. First of all who exactly didn't have civvies? What guy in his right mind would travel on leave in uniform? It cost money to maintain uniforms. And in your scenario the soldiers would be arriving in ones or twos, were protestors simply roaming the airport looking for them? Again why wouldn't security have thrown them out? And why did these guys simply sit there and take it? Spitting on an off-duty combat soldier and ruining his uniform is probably the best way to set yourself up for reconstructive dental surgery I can think of. And again why would you just stand by and let this all happen?

The link I gave was to an article by the guy wrote literally wrote the book on this. That book was to the best of my knowledge fully footnoted.

Face it. Its an urban legend. We were not born yesterday. I was born in 1957 and lived through the whole thing as a teenager. If you can find a single press account or court case (because either spitting or throwing blood would be assault and it would not have been difficult to find a sympathetic cop to take the guy) well bring it on. But the notion that this spitting in airports activity was routine is just not borne out by the facts. Sorry.

I don't disagree with that all. There's no question that the troops at Kent State were poorly trained, undisciplined, and not under tight control. Yes, people were throwing rocks, but they killed at least two people who clearly was not doing so.

It's not always remembered that rocks and bottles can be lethal weapons. The best explanation I've heard of the Kent State unit is that individuals panicked and fired individually. Post-analysis showed 29 of the 77 guardsmen fired 67 shots. Had there been a deliberate attempt to use coordinated unit firepower, the casualties would have been much higher -- certainly not desirable, but a point of reference.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*