A Quote by Henry Kissinger
The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.
Related Quotes
Most of us who were opposed to the war, especially in the early '60's - the war we were opposed to was the war on South Vietnam which destroyed South Vietnam's rural society. The South was devastated. But now anyone who opposed this atrocity is regarded as having defended North Vietnam. And that's part of the effort to present the war as if it were a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam with the United States helping the South. Of course it's fabrication. But it's "official truth" now.
The first half of Vietnam was fought to win the war, and the second half of Vietnam was soldiers going haywire without a mission, getting further and further towards our friend, Captain Kurtz and our friends at 'Apocalypse Now.'
I think that the war on drugs is domestic Vietnam. And didn't we learn from Vietnam that, at a certain point in the war, we should stop and rethink our strategy, ask ``Why are we here, what are we doing, what's succeeded, what's failed?'' And we ought to do that with the domestic Vietnam, which is the war on drugs.
On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.
The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."
When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.
American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.
We sit at our consoles and play "Gears of War", but we don't see images from war. We don't turn on the news and see the evidence of war, the result of war. Maybe twice a year, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, we'll go out, we'll hang our flags, we'll try to inculcate in our children some sense of national honor for the fallen. But really, we don't see it. We just don't see the pictures. There's no drive-by on the freeway of death up close. So we don't really see bravery.
What happened in Kosovo was the exact reversal of what happened in 'Fortress Europe' in 1943-45. Let me explain. Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris used to say that 'Fortress Europe' was a fortress without a roof, since the Allies had air supremacy. Now, if we look at the Kosovo War, what do we see? We see a fortress without walls but with a roof! Isn't that disappearance extraordinary?!
I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.
My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
we ought to realize by now (see Korea, see Vietnam, see Afghanistan, see Iraq, see Iran) that deploying the US military, or dealing billions of dollars a year of arms to our ally of the moment that can serve as a regional rival to our enemy of the moment, is not always the best way to make threats go away. Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.
It's a tragedy. It was tragedy for Freddie Gray and the family. It was a tragedy for the city. And we're still trying to figure out how it happened and why it happened.
Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.
For many Americans, 'Vietnam' is a word associated with war and the extraordinarily complex history between our countries. But since normalization began, the U.S. and Vietnam have steadily built bonds of partnership, demonstrating that we can recognize history without being imprisoned by it.
The U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late '50's the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh - which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam.
Related Authors
Angela Merkel Quotes
German
Statesman
Bashar al-Assad Quotes
Syrian
Statesman
Colin Powell Quotes
American
Statesman
Condoleezza Rice Quotes
American
Statesman
Edmund Burke Quotes
Irish
Statesman
Fidel Castro Quotes
Cuban
Statesman
Indira Gandhi Quotes
Indian
Statesman
Kofi Annan Quotes
Ghanaian
Statesman
Lucius Annaeus Seneca Quotes
Roman
Statesman
Madeleine Albright Quotes
American
Statesman
Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
Roman
Statesman
Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes
French
Statesman
Nelson Mandela Quotes
South African
Statesman
Thabo Mbeki Quotes
South African
Statesman
Tony Blair Quotes
English
Statesman
Winston Churchill Quotes
British
Statesman