I'm John Batcher. Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs is here as my colleague and friend,

and Gregory and Arnold old enough to have lived through something that's suggestive in the

standoff that we see in the Gulf right now. And that is Vietnam. Vietnam, because it was

all of the country divided at first and then finally united in rejecting the war aims in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.

However, it didn't start that way.

It started straightforwardly as a Marine Expeditionary Unit landing at Danang Air Base in March of 1965 to protect the aircraft

from mortaring by the Viet Cong, who were understood as doing the bidding of Moscow and Beijing,

the Communist Party looking to take over South Vietnam. This was a nation that had been divided since the French had left in the early 50s,

and the U.S. had absorbed up the role of guarding what was left of,

we argued, to be a democracy.

It was not.

It was very much a plutocracy from the south, Saigon.

The north, Hanoi passed into the hands of men who were

educated by communist dictators and saw themselves in league with Moscow and Beijing. That was the

condition that America confronted when Linnon Johnson, who inherited the presidency from

Jack Kennedy after the assassination,

Linne Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, made the decision to deceive the

Congress and the American people and win the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August of 1964.

The re-election happened, and then Johnson committed himself in March of that next year to sending what we now call ground troops on the ground in Vietnam.

That's the first steps of what became a catastrophe. Are there lessons here, Gregory, that we

can draw on before the U.S. commits ground troops

to the Straits of our moves?

...