Category — Vietnam

If this doesn’t sound familiar your name’s been in the obits.

Markdown of dong, the Vietnamese currency, seen as act of desperation

Vietnam lurched closer to a currency crisis yesterday as the Government cut the official exchange rate to a record low. UBS analysts said that the country’s economic profile was more extreme than that of Thailand on the eve of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

As well as severe concerns over prospects for the dong, some observers see signs that Vietnam faces the growing risk of a banking crisis. They say that investors should be aware of a potentially drastic blow to sentiment when views on the entire region are fragile.

Edward Teather, UBS economist, said that if Vietnam were to unravel, investor sentiment and financial markets in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia could all take a knock. [snip]

Analysts said that the rising risk of a sudden and crippling depreciation comes as the cracks in Vietnam’s vaunted “economic miracle” have grown too large to ignore. Only 18 months since Vietnam entered the World Trade Organisation, inflation is running above 26 per cent and the country is facing a swollen trade deficit that dwarfs those of its SouthEast Asian neighbours. [snip]

Investors have deserted Vietnamese shares, sending the benchmark index down more than 60 per cent since January and giving it the status of the world’s worst performer in the past year. Soaring commodity inflation, particularly in food and fuel prices, has hit Vietnam many times more fiercely than it has the rest of Asia. Now, Vietnamese lured from villages by the promise of work in booming new factories are finding the pay inadequate and are striking for better salaries.

In the above para, change Vietnam to the United States. Sometime, from August to next April the food and fuel inflation will hit hard. If the GOP keeps control of the Senate it’s going to be bad, if the Democrats win it will be ruinous.

Well, you’re here, aren’t you?

When you need just the right word….

..and when you need a few frontpage laughs from the depths of  liberal journalism.

When you need to understand The VET…

…or need a walk down memory lane

…or need to laugh at banalities, and the pretentious

We are being pushed out of the southern and western Pacific slowly by China’s aggressive entry into our former sphere of influence. 8 helicopters does not constitute a takeover, however the service of these is an entrance to more expansion. Some of our more secret materiel still operating from those fields could be compromised.

China offers to sell military choppers to Manila

China has offered to sell 8 utility helicopters to the Philippine military as it seeks to replace its Vietnam War-era aircraft, a Philippine air force official said on Wednesday.

Defence ties between China and the Philippines — a longtime U.S. ally — have grown steadily since 2004 when the two sides launched an annual security dialogue.

Beijing has since donated $2.5 million worth of engineering equipment to the military to help it carry out development projects in areas where communist and Muslim rebels operate. On Monday it promised another $2 million in military aid. [snip]

I do not see the Chicoms helping defeat the communist insurgency, the Muzzies are fair game since any religion is inimical to Red China.

At some point we are going to be head to head with the Chinks. Maybe over Taiwan, maybe the Spratley Islands (claimed by the Philippines), or over a stink about lead paint. Trading with them isn’t the same as trading with a democratic government. The Middle Kingdom believes it is above all others.

They have trashed patent and copyright laws, stolen and produced trademarked goods and generally been a bad trading partner. Where is the upside?

Does this sound different from North Vietnam and Victor Charley?

Iran fighting ‘proxy war in Iraq’

Washington - Iran is fighting a “proxy war” through Shi’a militias against the Iraqi state and United States-led forces in the war-torn nation, US war commander General David Petraeus said on Monday.

“It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds force, seeks to turn the Iraqi special groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq,” Petraeus said.

Petraeus was testifying at a crucial hearing of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees seen as a key moment for US strategy on Iraq.

Samo-samo stuff! Another proxy war, we give sanctuary to opponents where they take R&R. Once more, we’re battling another states cat’s paw. Syria and Iran deserve some serious pain. Any state offering client services and hospitality needs to get an intro course in “War, our way-101” with section 102 available for imbeciles.

Petraeus hearing starts with Democratic criticism

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus appeared before the U.S. Congress on Monday to give testimony in which he was expected to argue against withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq for now.

Appearing with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Petraeus listened to deep skepticism from the Democrats who seized control of Congress last year largely because of the profound discontent with the war among American voters.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, began the hearing by telling Petraeus the Iraq war had left the United States unable to confront other challenges.

“The troops in Iraq are not available for other missions; to go into Afghanistan to pursue Osama bin Laden” whose al Qaeda militant group attacked the United States six years ago on Tuesday, Skelton said. [snip]

I never knew we had so many Congressmen of Flag Grade capable of running a war. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, Donk-CA is now on the tube expounding upon what the country needs to do, to wit: CUT & RUN. She must be a real terror in the card game “War.”
All the antiwar bloviators know is get out. Nothing of the consequences that follow makes any difference. The dhimmi position appeals to them; groveling is their natural state.

MoveOn.org Ad Takes Aim at Petraeus

[snip] In addition to liberal activist groups such as MoveOn.org, Democrats in both the House and Senate have impugned Petraeus’ testimony today…[snip]

Per usual, the moonbats try theater. Since large puppet heads don’t reach enough people, they fall back to the NY Rag, which cheerfully took their money! Killing the messenger does not alter the message.

          BELDAR TO KERRY…..”Sue me!  I’ll even pay your filing fee!”

The little-known and obscure Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, one-time Democrat Party Presidential candidate, is the subject of an offer by law blogger Beldar (Aug 26, 2007).  The little-known and obscure Senator Kerry made muted news recently with his bitter, tearful, and articulate denunciation of the re-education camps established in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.  On CSPAN July 19, 2007, Kerry said of the camps:

….they weren’t pretty, and, you know, nobody, you know, likes that kind of outcome. But on the other hand, I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those re-education camps, who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.

The little-known and obscure Kerry was stymied in his Presidential bid by a group of Vietnam veterans who questioned Kerry’s account of his Naval service in Vietnam.  The group became known as The Swiftvets, so-called because of their service in the aptly-named Swift Boats used in The Mekong Delta and rivers of Vietnam.

Rumors circulated widely in the gossip press that the little-known and obscure Kerry would prepare and file a defamation suit against John O’Neil and Jerome Corsi, co-authors of the book “Unfit For Command”.   The book’s account of  the little- known and obscure Kerry’s  Vietnam service differed widely from Kerry’s accounts.

Since 2004, the Statutes of Limitations for defamation have lapsed in all three states where suits could have been filed, the last being Massachusetts.  Law blogger BELDAR has graciously offered the little-known and obscure Kerry the opportunity to continue his defamation claims by suing BELDAR because Beldar published charges from the Swiftvets’ book on his blog.

Beldar posted his gallant offer to the little-known and obscure Kerry in these words:  

You have a standing offer from me:  Just sue me here in Houston for  defamation….I’ll waive any Statute of Limitations defense.  I’ll waive service of process.  Hell, I’ll meet you at the federal courthouse doors for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division (you have diversity jurisdiction) and I’ll even pay your filing fee!

…let’s just you and me tangle one on one, both of us pro se….Just me at my table, and you at yours, and then a set of jurors good and true in the jury box. (I may need a napkin though, or maybe even a drool bucket, because the very notion of going one-on-one with you in court is causing me to salivate.)…As long as there’s a judge who can make you shut up each time your turn is over, and who’ll then give me a fair turn, I’ll be satisfied.

…Everything that’s uncovered in pre-trial discovery has to become part of the public record without delay.  We’ll put it all on the internet via a neutral host (say the WaPo).  We’ll do the pre-trial depos on video, too, and jointly move the court to permit TV coverage of the trial, so that the public (and the jury eventually) can see who sweats under oath under the bright lights.

Doesn’t that sound like fun, Senator?  Gosh, it does to me.

The little-known and obscure Senator Kerry has not responded to Beldar’s charitable offer.

The Number of Americans Moving to Canada in 2006 Hit a 30-Year High

Blame Canada!

It may seem like a quiet country where not much happens besides ice hockey, curling and beer drinking. But our neighbor to the north is proving to be quite the draw for thousands of disgruntled Americans. [snip]

“During the mid-70s, Canada admitted between 22,000 and 26,000 Americans a year, most of whom were draft dodgers from the Vietnam War.” The current increase appears to be fueled largely by social and political reasons, says Jedwab, based on anecdotal evidence. [snip]

Thanks to Carter, they’re back here. One can only hope they’ll leave again.

One recent immigrant is Tom Kertes, a 34-year-old labor organizer who moved from Seattle to Toronto in April. [snip]

Not that Kertes doesn’t get homesick every once in a while. “I have no intention of giving up my citizenship. [snip]

Here’s the fly in the ointment. If Canada is Xanadu north, take the Canadian citizenship and vote there.

 Jo Davenport, who wrote “The Canadian Way,” moved from Atlanta to Nova Scotia in December 2001. She also cites political reasons for her move, saying that she disagreed with the Bush administration’s decisions after 9/11.

“Things are totally different here because they care about their people here,” she says, explaining that she’s only been back home once or twice.

Why come back so often?

Blame Canada? Not a chance, how many more will Canada take, and how soon! Sounds like these are the very ones we want out of the country, the oh-so liberal and sensitive, the Kos kidz type.

John Kerry, July 19, 2007 on CSPAN, responding to a question about  a “bloodbath in Vietnam”.  The questioner wondered if withdrawal from Iraq would produce the same result….

Kerry:  “Let me just say to the first part of your question with respect to boat people and killing, everybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam.  There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietnam.  There were reeducation camps, and they weren’t pretty and, you know, nobody, you know, likes that kind of outcome. But on the other hand, I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those reeducation camps, who are thriving in the Vietnam of today”.

What?

A little digression is necessary.  An old Marine Corps friend of mine described a ritual observed by his training unit at Parris Island in the early 1960’s.  Recruits judged unfit or unable to  complete Basic, were out-processed, dressed in outlandish clothing, given a paper bag for their possessions and required to grin foolishly, and march backwards out of one of the post gates while waving repeatedly to the assembled unit.   Cruel, indeed, and involuntary.  And it fixes the image of an inept fool.  But no other image is suitable for John Kerry, who is voluntarily determined to practice this old custom  as he marches backwards through the sally port of history into well-deserved obscurity.

The first indication, to me,  of Kerry’s deterioration is a  an amnesiac neglect of context. He was stating on July 19th that the human product of forced reeducation (which killed an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese, mostly soldiers) could testify objectively about his reeducation.  The goal of reeducation is coerced right thinking, and Kerry regards this coerced right thinking as some kind of truth.  This pushes Kerry’s range of stupidity beyond its usual frontier, into a new and wind-swept mental wilderness.

The second indication is the weight of Kerry’s northeastern liberalism, which leans as heavily upon his head and tongue as any 19th century sexual repression.   Reeducation camps “weren’t pretty…nobody….likes that kind of outcome”.  In part, these tight-lipped, eternal virgin locutions are probably there to uphold the seemless skein of deception that this nattering clown has woven around his past since he reached the age of Reason.  Kerry glimpsed the bare ankle of reeducation. It sent him into a pool of cerebral and verbal concrete, where he could freeze the impressions of a real wrongdoing, reeducation, and come away with a description that might serve as a description of adolescent acne.   

What about re-education?  What about refugees and boat people?  Figures vary, but about two million people left South Vietnam by land or sea, or were pushed into reeducation camps.  Perhaps a million died at sea, if Wickipedia and other sources can be believed.  750,000 left the country, some to The Killing Fields, and another quarter million into the camps.  Nobody likes this kind of outcome?

Let’s be clear about The Killing Fields.  Conservatives who claim that it was the result of US withdrawal are wrong.  Liberals who claim that it was the result of the Cambodian incursion and bombing are wrong.  It was a complicated result of Viet Minh and NVA meddling, and the ascendance of the Khmer Rouge.    This in no way lets Kerry off the hook.

I find it problematical in my personal life to leave a job uncompleted. There is a righteous obligation to see tasks to the end, disdaining a poorly finished job.

Personified by original New Englanders as well as the rest of the colonials, this work ethic built this state, this country into what it is yesterday. Hardy woodchucks created the farms and woodlots that became Vermont and New Hampshire. Seafarers from ports in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut generated trade and wealth.

From the French and Indian War to Korea, we remained stalwart with those that fought at our side. We terminated the first rapacious jihadists, when Jefferson subdued the Barbary pirates. Through the pains of war, we kept the faith and stayed the path

In the mid 1960’s, America changed when the first spoiled generation came of age. They coveted material items, bought with others’ labor, rather than strive for them as in previous times. Never tempered in the forge of maturation, they believe in birthright and have a concomitant deficiency in sense of community. They became the me generation.

Vietnam showed this absence in an obtrusive fashion. Whether we should have or not fought there is moot. This generation demanded the politicos cut and run from there, acquiescence sold the people who worked with us into re-education and labor camps. Those who fought with the Arvin now get nothing except slum housing and pedicab work…if they’re lucky. This precipitated the slaughter in Cambodia for no reason except to exterminate the educated class. Our esteemed officials cared less; those with us paid and are paying the price.

Today, the left is executing the same nefarious diligence with Iraq. The Democrats want to cut and run immediately. Sell out to the heathens; care nothing for the Iraqis working with us. Once more, the boomer generation shows a repellent indifference for our obligations to the Middle East.

The Iraqi citizens, who assumed we would keep our word, acquire death sentences. Al Qaeda avows beheadings as soon as they ensnare those who accepted our word. That is fine with our culture of sensitivity advocates; they extend nothing to anyone adjudged a friend of the US.

Is it to be a bloodbath in Iraq? Shall we allow the leftists to isolate us from any association with other countries save Israel? They wish them destroyed. The message is the same for us.

When the wolves start eating sheep, they save the judas goat for dessert. It isn’t an honor.

The time has come.  It’s lost.  What we’ve believed up until now about this enterprise, this risky mission, is tragically and desperately wrong.  We look into the eyes of our leaders and see nothing but a swarm of bats.  The morbid futility, the evil of burying repeated failure under lofty rhetoric, the fruitless planning, the incompetence on the ground.  The toxic ugliness spreading through the ranks can only lead to more loss of American prestige here and abroad.  The daily drain on American good will and the human cost are too great.

We hoped that simpletons could be transformed by fire into simple patriots, that a valid government would flourish.    We were wrong.  The cold figures of support for the mission, according to a June Gallup poll cited in Time magazine online (June 27th) have falled to 14%.  It’s the lowest level of support for….Congress….in 34 years, near the proximate end of the Vietnam War.   It’s hopeless.  Go home, House and Senate.  Serve the Republic.  Depart your places and howl into your pillows at home. 

 We long for heroes and we get Harry Reid, the rope man in every sepia tintype of Old West lynch mobs.  We long for the success and the distaff perspective of a powerful woman; a woman to confirm the first principles of feminism, and we we get Nancy Pelosi, the tooth-grinding Uber Grandma with a switchblade in her apron pocket.  We long for illumination, maybe a spark of brilliance, and we get the lightless Jack-o-Lantern head of Dick Durbin.  Kennedy, Kerry, Specter and Warner.  Warm doorstops.

 Spare us the blue blazer and cowpie hair of Trent Lott, the boy goon repugnance of Lindsey Graham, the horrifying post-mortem pallor of John McCain, the silver sharkskin suit and glistening pomade of Robert Byrd.  Send Schumer to Speaker’s Corner…in London.  Send Harkin and Hagel to sort cans from bottles.  The list is too long.  Start fresh.  Maybe without these shards of glass under the national saddle, we won’t be galloping off to nowhere every day.  And for laughs, give us a few days of Yosemite Howard Dean, a little shooting and shrieking for diversion.  Anything is better than this.

The first matter in this introduction is to thank my host at New England Republican for the opportunity to contribute to his blog.  He’s taking a risk.  I’ve commented here promiscuously for about four years under the foreshortened given name with the Celtic “H” (Rhod), and now NER is allowing me in the door without patting me down.

It’s been said here that I’m a knuckle-dragger.  My ear is pressed to the radio, pencil in hand, recording my talking points from Limbaugh.  I’m an “unpatriotic right-wing hooligan”, a “despicable winger”, and a drug-addled, baby-killing villain from the Vietnam War.  There’s more, but these are just a few of my favorites.  Still,  it hasn’t been all fun.

I plan to divorce that careless entity Rhod from the responsible contributor I plan to be, with the grand conceit of calling myself “Hotspur”.  Hotspur is one of Shakespeare’s most interesting characters.  He’s not a good guy in every way, but I like the ring of the name.  That other guy can live down to his reputation elsewhere.

I was born a long time ago, into a Scots-English New England family of carnival-mirror Republicans.   We had so many ideological distortions, I still don’t know if we were conservatives, liberals, or something else.  Furiously anti-FDR, derisively anti-Eisenhower, sniffily anti-JFK, vaguely pro-Stevenson, peace-loving, pro-military flag wavers, business owning foundrymen, clannish and skeptical civil rights supporters, church-going without piety; that kind of stuff.  It’s impossible to rebel in such a family.  You can’t ditch one set of parental values without projecting its approved opposite.

As a child I lived for long periods in the pre-integration South as well as in industrial Connecticut, and will never vilify either region for unenlightened racialism or smokestack landscapes.  America is wonderful in countless ways, with nothing that is permanently sullied by our mistakes.

An early 1950’s summer morning on Georgia’s Route 17 can’t be made vile by segregation.  And the smell of burning coke (vacuum-burned coal) and the tunes of a forge and train whistle at night in Connecticut, are evocative of strength, purpose and hard work.  This country is the sum of its parts, and the bad things are washed away by the dazzling light of the good.

Between 1962 and 1971, I obtained a college degree, served in Vietnam as a combat radio operator; worked at a series of white, blue and gray collar jobs, two of which called upon similar resources.  School teacher and clown.  I prospered more as a clown, and I’m still contemplating the intelligence I gained the very day I gave up that job.  A nasty little boy of about four years of age snarled at me and said “You’re not a REAL clown, you’re just a man in a clown suit!”

Barely past the simian stage of boyhood, that kid was on to something important.  Even if there’s no such thing as final truth, we need to assert the nearly real and spurn the fake, the fantastic and the imitative.  The greasepaints of self-deception, of untruth and prejudice coat and smear our insights.  Our first responsibility is to be REAL clowns.

 Today I’m self-employed.  I live in the lower Connecticut River Valley, am married and have three sons in the military, all of whom are combat veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  One is a paratrooper, an airborne combat engineer; another is a Cavalry Scout turned Ranger currently in Special Forces training, and the third is involved with security and judicial matters for figures like the very dead Saddam Hussein and the temporarily alive Chemical Ali.  We have all been fortunate beyond measure. 

As a MA taxpayer, this article just makes my blood boil. Governor Patrick is proposing that MA community colleges charge no tuition. But it’s not enough for some people:

Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal to make the state’s community colleges tuition free for high school graduates is unlikely to alleviate the financial burdens of many low-income students who must hold down full-time jobs and support a family while they go to school, educators say.

“It’s not a cure-all, and I don’t think it’s going to benefit who they think it’s going to benefit,” said Susan Sullivan, director of financial aid at Bunker Hill Community College. “It will help kids who go to school while they live with mom and dad. But it isn’t going to help with the problems our students have, because they can’t just give up their jobs.”

Tuition is just one cost of college. It also includes housing, health and child care, books and other classroom materials, and transportation.

Greedy liberal pigs can never get enough. Does Susan Sullivan understand that taxpayers support families too? Does she understand that we pay for health insurance? Does she understand we don’t live with our parents either? But free tuition isn’t enough. Ms. Sullivan wants a special welfare system for people attending community college.

And where did this crazy notion people deserve free college educations come from anyway? I served my country for 5 years in the US Air Force in return for my college tuition. My brother went to night school for 7 ½ years on the GI benefits he got from his service during Vietnam (talk about sacrifice). My wife has more student loan bills than I can count. But today, it’s ok if the law abiding, taxpaying citizens’ families get to go without, so the “poor” community college students can drop out of the workforce to attend college.

It’s just sickening, and yet another example of why the gainfully employed flee this state.

Male U.S. veterans have higher suicide risk

WASHINGTON - Male U.S. veterans are twice as likely to die by suicide than people with no military service, and are more likely to kill themselves with a gun than others who commit suicide, researchers said on Monday. [snip]

The study tracked 320,890 U.S. men, about a third of whom served in the U.S. military between 1917 and 1994. The rest had no military background.

Those with military service committed suicide at a rate 2.13 times higher than the other men, but did not have a higher risk of dying from disease, accidental causes or murder, the study found. [snip]

Of the veterans, about 29 percent served in the Vietnam War, 28 percent in World War Two, 16 percent in the Korean War and the rest in other conflicts up through the 1991 Gulf War. [snip]

Those who committed suicide were more likely to have been white, better educated and older than the other men, the researchers found. The most acute risk was among veterans with some sort of a health problem that made them unable to participate fully in home, work or leisure activities. [snip]

The researchers said unlike some previous studies on suicides among U.S. military veterans, theirs did not focus on Vietnam War-era veterans or veterans who get health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs system. They said three-quarters of veterans do not receive health care through VA facilities. [snip]

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

I’m trying to make sense of this study and have a hard time with several points:

1. There is no input for the non-vets. What are their backgrounds and ages?
2. How did NIMH get the vet group? They had to exclude VA treated vets during the group formation, which would skew the results.
3. They state their vet group does not get VA care. Does that mean no care? This is unstated.
4. The 2.13 higher rate is not a large number. I would think injury and health problems are greater with vets, particularly those who experienced combat or close support.
5. “… are more likely to kill themselves with a gun…” Nothing in this report proves guns are the choice of death. I do know that NIMH is virulently anti-gun; they have contributed one-sided data to several national gun control groups to spin positions.

Anyone have more input? I’d like to hear it. More on this in the future.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post at Salon.com where he challenges conservatives’s (he likes the term right-wing) repudiation of the Bush presidency. His theory is conservatives are disavowing President Bush because they are trying to distance themselves from the Bush administration’s failures. He points to conservative support for Bush’s two victorious presidential campaigns and previously glowing conservative commentary upon Dubya’s early efforts. He ends by taking the media to task for participating in this “con”.

Mr. Greenwald’s analysis is fatally flawed for a couple of reasons though. First, how could any serious analysis of the Bush presidency fail to mention 9/11 or terrorism? In fact, somewhat mystifyingly, the War on Terror is never mentioned. Next, he never analyzes the President’s policies; however, he claims conservatives are covering up our policy failures by walking away. If this were true, I’d expect some heavy duty analysis of the president’s conservative policies and how they failed. Ironically, the major conservative policy plank the president implemented—tax cuts—have been extremely successful.

The truth is when conservatives were highest on the Bush presidency, so was the rest of America. 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror gave the president unprecedented political capital. Conservatives weren’t the only people standing silent as several current Democratic presidential candidates didn’t dare vote against the Iraq War much to their current chagrin.

It’s against the backdrop of this national tragedy that you have to judge conservative support for the president. We continued to support President Bush through No Child Left Behind, prescription drugs for seniors, explosive government growth, and other unconservative actions because national security trumped all. Additionally, Democrats gave the Bush campaign a tremendous gift in the form of John Kerry whose anti-war activities during Vietnam and weak Cold War record made him a tough sell when terrorism was at the forefront of people’s minds.

Saying that conservatives are walking away now due to the failures of the Bush presidency in an attempt to cover conservative policy failures without placing events in their historical context (9/11, War on Terror) and no substantive policy analysis is a pretty weak argument. I don’t hear anyone making the argument that Dubya followed a conservative agenda and pointing to conservative support doesn’t make the case there’s a con going on here.

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

George Orwell, Polemic, May 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”

The Democratic plan:

Clinton calls for end to Iraq war authorization

In her most dramatic statement on the Iraq war since officially entering the 2008 presidential race, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) called for ending the 2002 authorization resolution for the war. [snip]

Sounds like a rehash of the plan used in Vietnam. Why not, it worked before. I haven’t heard any new ideas from that side of the spectrum. Unless “Cut and Run” is considered new.