Moon of Alabama — Moon of Alabama Phoenix 2.0 - CIA's Vietnam Terror Unleashed Upon AfghanistanPhoenix 2.0 - CIA's Vietnam Terror Unleashed Upon Afghanistan

Repeating failure in expectation of success.

This further exposes the CIA as a secret paramilitary organization rather than an intelligence agency as such.

Moon of Alabama
Phoenix 2.0 - CIA's Vietnam Terror Unleashed Upon Afghanistan

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See also

In short a lot of activity, a lot of killings, a lot of doors kicked in, a lot of personal grudges paid off by fooling the Americans into doing your dirty work and not much else. Shades of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.

Russia Observer
New US Operations In Afghanistan

Patrick Armstrong

Richard Sale — Ho Chi Minh

Important story about "Uncle Ho," especially now that Ken Burns has put Vietnam back on the table. He should have been the hero of the piece.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Ho Chi Minh
Richard Sale

Mike Whitney — Trump’s War Whoop: a Gulf of Tonkin Moment?

Reports in the western media have dismissed the RT account as “nonsense” and placed the blame squarely on Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Leading the charge once again is the New York Times chief propagandist Michael R. Gordon who, readers may recall, co-authored fake news stories with Judith Miller about Saddam’s elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.…

Gordon’s article helped pave the way for invasion of Iraq, the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the destruction of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Now he’s moved on to Syria.... 

Counterpunch
Trump’s War Whoop: a Gulf of Tonkin Moment?

Mike Whitney

Michael Brenner — How America Expunges Bad Memories

America is a place that expunges unpleasant memories that belie the happier vision of its “exceptionalism,” most notably the brutal ugliness of the Vietnam War and more recent war crimes in the Middle East, observes Michael Brenner.

Professor Brenner might have started with the Native Americans and African slaves. However, his point that when even recent unpleasant memories are buried under the veneer of exceptionalism, the country has a problem.

Now American "humanitarians" are wringing their hands and shredding crocodile tears over the "war crimes" that Assad and Putler are committing in Aleppo, while continuing to supply terrorists with arms, funneling arms to Saudi Arabia for its war on Yemen, and considering a military response in Syria that Gen. Dunford recently testified will kill a lot of civilians.

Consortium News
How America Expunges Bad Memories

Michael Brenner | Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh

The BRICS Post — US military challenged territorial claims of India, China: Pentagon

US military aircrafts and naval ships carried out these operations against China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Oman, the Philippines and Vietnam, the Pentagon report on Monday said. The purported aim of these assertive US missions are to demonstrate that Washington will not accept the claims of jurisdiction of these countries over disputed areas.…

Not just picking on China.

The BRICS Post
US military challenged territorial claims of India, China: Pentagon

Daniel Ellsberg — Nixon Almost Took Vietnam War Nuclear In November 1969

Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential race based on the idea that he’d end the war in Vietnam as quickly as possible.

Ellsberg said Nixon believed he could win the war quickly by issuing a nuclear ultimatum to Vietnamese forces and offering a treaty which would offer concessions from both sides.

“There was pressure to make the war larger” if the offer was rejected, the whistleblower noted, and “nuclear targets were picked.” Ellsberg speculated that the plans would have gone ahead in November 1969.

Instead, a huge demonstration on Oct. 15, 1969, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, combined a general strike with nationwide protests and teach-ins. About 2 million people came out to protest across the country, even “little towns that had never protested before,” Ellsberg recalled.

This was a major success of the anti-war movement, even though most of its members were never aware of their victory.

“As far as you could see from the anti-war movement, it had almost no perceivable effect,” he said. “The war went on.”
However, Ellsberg concluded:

“People didn’t understand the Joint Chiefs were pressing throughout this period for a bigger war, and Nixon was threatening and planning a bigger war.

It did not shorten the war significantly, but it did keep a lid on the war. Without the Moratorium, there would have been an escalation, possibly the use of nuclear weapons in November 1969.”

MintPress News
Daniel Ellsberg: Nixon Almost Took Vietnam War Nuclear In November 1969

Anton Tsvetov — The changing nature of Russia-Southeast Asia relations

The figures quoted above are certainly not yet indicative of a booming Southeast Asian presence on the Russian market. But these examples do demonstrate an important trend. The roles of Russia and its ASEAN partners are not what they used to be or at least not what we perceived them to be. When thinking about these relations we usually use a mindset where Russian policy towards the countries of Southeast Asia is in focus. We seek the reasons for underdeveloped ties in the fallacies of official Russian external action. Well, it seems that this has to change. 

With great economic difficulties at hand and help from the developed West unlikely, Moscow might as well start thinking of itself as an object of action on behalf of Southeast Asian countries. In private discussions and even in some public speeches Vietnamese scholars and civil servants are bluntly pondering the idea that Russia’s economic woes are a chance for Southeast Asia to take a bite of the Russian markets, particularly in the areas where local producers are not very competitive.

For decades, Asian states were seen from Moscow merely as a marketplace for Russian arms, hydrocarbons and machinery exports. This created a certain image for the relations as those of a great power and lesser-developed recipients of technology. Seems that this is no longer the case and Russia can benefit greatly from the growing capabilities of the ASEAN countries in terms of capital exports.…

Russia's Asian pivot is more than just toward China. European business people musts be having heartburn watching the Russian market slipping away from them due to sanctions, a sour political climate, and Russia's consequent pivot away from Europe toward import substitution and emerging nations of the Global South and import substitution.

Russia Beyond the Headlines

The changing nature of Russia-Southeast Asia relations

Anton Tsvetov, Media and Government Relations Manager at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC)

Gareth Porter — The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon Johnson [It was McNamara]

For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the US bombing of North Vietnam on August 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened, was not a move by LBJ to pave the way for war in Vietnam. 

The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the US commander in the Gulf who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US warships had now expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the president's constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.

McNamara's deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the US entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.…

Truthout
The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon JohnsonGareth Porter

Jeff Faux — How the Great Society Democratized Our Economy

The media buzz surrounding the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s May 1964 speech announcing his Great Society has focused on the question, did it “work?” In other words, did the 200-odd pieces of legislation passed over the following two years succeed in their goals of reducing poverty, improving education, providing health care for the elderly, etc. Judgments as to how the programs worked are supposed to answer the bigger question, should government intervene in the economy to make life better for its people? 

It is a safe bet that the components of the Great Society—especially those dealing with the War on Poverty—are the most studied in the history of social science. For half a century, a vast army of economists, sociologists, political scientists, lawyers, and policy analysts have poured over the data. There is little doubt that almost all of the programs had benefits. The debate between conservatives and liberals is whether the benefits were worth the “costs.” But if by this time the research has not reached convincing definitive conclusions, it is unlikely that it ever will.

Part of the problem is that such efforts to quantify cost and benefits, while useful, are inherently flawed by their reliance on market prices to establish the human value of, for example, living longer, educating a poor child, or breathing cleaner air.

They also miss the point. The Great Society was much more than the sum of its parts. Like the New Deal before it, the Great Society changed the way Americans thought about the relationship of the government to the economy.

Despite the claims of conservatives, government intervention in the economy did not start with the New Deal. It started with the founding of the republic. But by and large, it was intervention at the service of the rich and powerful—from business subsidies to legal protections for corporate theft and the use of police and the army to oppress unions.

The New Deal brought balance. Social insurance, worker protections, and aid to small farmers, small businesses, and electricity cooperatives, helped spread the benefits of economic growth beyond the financial elite. The Great Society in part dealt with the unfinished business of the New Deal—giving aid to minorities, the poor, the elderly, and the sick.

But it also broke new ground in the use of government as an instrument for making the economy more efficient, fairer, and more accountable....

Economic Policy Institute
How the Great Society Democratized Our Economy
Jeff Faux| | Distinguished Fellow, founder, past president of the Economic Policy Institute
 (h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

Time to resurrect the Great Society?