John Kerry’s Return to Vietnam He ends his political career as he began it: wrong about everything. J Matthew Vadum
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265478/john-kerrys-return-vietnam-matthew-vadum
With mere days remaining in office, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry returned to Southeast Asia to reminisce with his Communist friends and ideological soulmates in Vietnam.
He was welcomed with open arms in Vietnam, still a Communist dictatorship after all these decades. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s one of the reasons the United States lost the war there.
Kerry’s vicious lies about the behavior of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War launched a thousand draft-card burning ceremonies.
It’s a wonder he wasn’t awarded the Vietnamese equivalent of America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to Vietnamese Communism.
Throughout his adult life, Kerry has instinctively sided with America’s enemies. After serving in the Vietnam War, Kerry made a long, profitable career out of bashing America, insulting and belittling U.S. troops – even going as far as promoting false stories about them committing war atrocities, and aiding hostile foreign powers.
In 2005, Kerry falsely accused U.S. forces of “terrorizing” the Iraqi people. He Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation”: “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women…”
A liar and a useful idiot whose Botox obsession has turned his face into a Halloween mask, Kerry is the man who sent American singer James Taylor to France to sing soothing songs to the French people after brutal Muslim terrorist attacks while refusing to acknowledge the attackers were Muslim.
In addition to being a booster of Vietnam and the now-defunct Soviet Union, Kerry has long been an enemy of Israel and a friend of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear weapons development program, as well as a friend of Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada.
So a final, nostalgic trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at U.S. taxpayer expense only seems appropriate.
The former presidential candidate, Democrat senator from Massachusetts, and long-time America-hater just visited the Bay Hap River in search of the location where his actions won him a Silver Star medal for bravery as a young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. He shook hands with Vo Ban Tam, now a 70-year-old shrimp farmer in the Mekong delta, who had been his adversary on Feb. 28, 1969.
Kerry was on patrol that day as skipper of Swift boat PCF-94, when his troops were ambushed by Viet Cong soldier Vo Ban Tam and others. Reacting quickly to the danger, Kerry beached the boat, grabbed an M-16 rifle, chased down a rocket launcher-bearing guerrilla, and killed him, preventing the Viet Cong from counterattacking and saving his crew.
But that was probably the only patriotic thing Kerry ever did.
Alongside Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Kerry managed to become a symbol of anti-war hysteria and anti-American anger after he returned to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1970. He effectively became an enemy propagandist as he maligned his brothers-in-arms publicly, accusing them of horrible war crimes. He spoke and organized for the radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
In May 1970 he violated U.S. law by conducting his own peace negotiations with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the government of the North Vietnamese communists) and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PVR, which was an arm of the DRV that included the Vietcong) while National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was trying to negotiate formally with the enemy on behalf of the Nixon administration. Kerry’s peace proposal included the U.S. paying reparations and asking for Vietnamese forgiveness.
VVAW went as far as signing a “People’s Peace Treaty” that was reportedly drafted in Communist East Germany in December 1970). The nine points were all taken from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war. Kerry backed the treaty.
From Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, 1971, Kerry took part in a piece of left-wing political theater called the “Winter Soldier Investigation” in Detroit. There more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians claimed U.S. troops had regularly, and as a matter of official policy, committed atrocities—including rape, arson, torture, and murder—against innocent civilians in South Vietnam. The idea behind the “Winter Soldier” name was to portray these disloyal veterans as the true patriots, the people who refused to desert the noble ideals of their country even under fire. Soon after Kerry explained “the term ‘winter soldier’ is a play on words of Thomas Paine’s in 1776, when he spoke of the ‘sunshine patriots, and ‘summertime soldiers’ who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.”
On April 22, 1971, Kerry testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Kerry testified that at the so-called investigation “many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.” What they described “were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
He continued:
They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Perhaps Kerry accurately described the previous testimony of his fellow veterans but what they themselves described was untrue. Kerry knew he was promoting lies that hurt America and the war effort.
He gave voice to the leftist worldview of a racist America that was no better than its Communist enemy: “We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties.”
That racism wasn’t directed at blacks alone, he said. “We learned the meaning of free-fire zones—shooting anything that moves—and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.”
He added, “We cannot fight Communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.”
Similarly, nowadays Kerry, like the rest of the Obama administration, refuses to take the threat posed by Islamic terrorists today seriously.
He blames Israel for the rise of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIL, ISIS, Daesh) and claims in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Islamic State’s ideology “has nothing to do with Islam.”
In 2014 Kerry said Islamic State was composed of “cold-blooded killers marauding across the Middle East making a mockery of a peaceful religion.” He said at the time that planned U.S. air strikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria, were not “just about taking out an enemy on the battlefield; it’s about taking out a network, decimating and discrediting a militant cult masquerading as a religious movement…. We must continue to repudiate the gross distortion of Islam that ISIL is spreading.”
John Kerry ends his career this week in public service as he began it: wrong about absolutely everything.
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