Blog

Authored by William Anderson via The Mises Institute,

Most of our readers are too young to remember the Vietnam War of a half-century ago, but those of us alive who held draft cards classifying us as 1A have a more personal perspective. In 1971, when I received my low draft number, all I could think was that perhaps I, too, would have to participate in the horror that was combat in that wicked war.

The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973—signed a month after I took my military physical—ended direct US involvement, although the US government continued to aid the South Vietnamese until their government and armed forces completely collapsed in April 1975. Today, Vietnam and the US are at peace with each other, but even today, unexploded US bombs continue to blow up and kill innocent people.

Samuel Johnson wrote in 1758:

To put it another way, war breeds lies. Lies gave us Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Ukraine War. Like it has done with so many wars that have US involvement, the New York Times has first promoted the conflicts it later claims to abhor, and Ukraine is no exception. Popular columnist David French—who has never seen a US war he didn’t support—two years ago visited Ukraine and gushed about the “valor” he saw with the Ukraine people:

With the Donald Trump administration now trying to broker a peace, French is not as “proud to be an American” as he was before January 20, and his rage-filled columns are aimed at either Trump or evangelical Christians that don’t share French’s political views. However, even French’s employer is now admitting that President Joe Biden and others in his administration were lying all along about the war, its progress, and the extent of US involvement:

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who always has said that US involvement was much deeper than Biden and his acolytes were claiming, writes:

One only can conclude that the US had stepped well over the boundaries of what would be called “acts of war,” and only paying scant attention to the fact that Russia still has nuclear weapons aimed at US cities. According to the NYT:

Although the Biden administration claimed this was not a “proxy war,” it was the very definition of a proxy war, with Ukrainian political leaders wanting even more US involvement, making the American advisers a veritable “trip wire” if Russia attacked any Americans. Indeed, it was the major deception known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that brought American ground troops to Vietnam in the first place.

This whole point bears repeating: the Biden administration was willing to risk nuclear war with Russia to promote a war that never needed to be fought in the first place. By pushing NATO to Russia’s borders and using CIA, USAID, and agents from other agencies to destabilize regimes bordering on Russia, the US risked plunging an entire region into pointless warfare. Taibbi writes:

Given that most of the political players in this fiasco are out of power, new scrutiny will likely move to the Trump administration’s actions. Yet, while we have “dodged a bullet” (or, better put, “dodged a nuclear missile”), this affair is not over. More than a million people have died, much of Ukraine lies in ruins, and Trump has been unable to broker that elusive cease fire.

None of this had to happen. The Biden administration was full of Samantha Power and David French types that have anxiously awaited the US’s latest “war of liberation.” In the end, of course, there is no liberation, just the death, destroyed cities, and irresponsible international “experts” who already are in search of their next war—until someone stops them.