The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War Quotes

“If war is horrendous—and it unmistakably is—is pacifism noble? The nineteenth-century British philosopher, economist, and political commentator John Stuart Mill probably answered the question best. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”11”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“While evil can never be banished from the human heart and mistakes can never be banished from human behavior, such outrages were rare on the American side. They were not rare—they were policy—on the Communist side. Ignoring that fact only highlights the ignorance and bias of the anti-war movement.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Not only had Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, but in November 1973, over Nixon’s veto, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. It required that the president obtain congressional support within ninety days of sending American troops abroad for military action. The North Vietnamese knew that no such support would be forthcoming.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Nixon’s view was that the operation was soundly based in International Law, specifically the Hague Convention of 1907: “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.”22”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Nixon applied the stick, authorizing Operation Menu, the bombing of Cambodia, targeting the North Vietnamese supply sanctuaries located along the border.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“of graduated response where your carefully calibrate what size of stick is suitable for each enemy infraction—but agree to put the stick away if he’ll agree to negotiate; and of general fecklessness compared to an enemy that was willing to destroy their country in order to communize it. Had”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Defeat: The Liberal Way of War After studying hundreds of books written by liberals about the Vietnam War, you realize that their prime objection to this war, waged by liberal presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, was that it was just too hard to win. They never stepped back and recognized that what made it hard to win was fighting it the liberal way of limited war where you tell the enemy your limits;”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“logical, reasonable regime, such as Johnson and McNamara dreamed they were dealing with, would certainly have considered negotiating an end to the war and the horrific burden on its people. But the Communists were neither reasonable nor logical, which is why a strategy of attrition and graduated escalations to encourage negotiations was utterly misbegotten. The Communists were fanatic believers in the justness of their cause and the inevitability of their triumph—and the anti-war movement in the West encouraged their sense of inevitable victory.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“politically incorrect—another word for honest”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“It is only in winter that you can tell which trees are evergreen.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“The Communists offer them another kind of revolution, glittering and seductive in its superficial appeal.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“urged upon us by those who have already broken their own pledges under the Agreement they now seek to enforce.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Hanoi was cruel to its own citizens; it was cruel to our citizens; law and human rights are bourgeois concepts for which the Communists in Hanoi had little respect.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Some might have opposed the war because they were isolationists. But America’s bipartisan, postwar consensus was that we had a responsibility to contain Communist aggression. In any event, the anti-war protesters liked to assume they represented a higher morality, and it would be hard to square isolationism with idealism. At best, one might call it naïve; at worst, short-sighted and selfish.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“shock and awe,”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“noble cause after all; maybe we were fighting against a cruel and vicious enemy that was in the service of an aggressive, hateful ideology with designs on enslaving other peoples and other countries; maybe—just maybe—we were doing the right thing.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“miscalculation of tragic proportions,”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“No war in American history is in greater need of a politically incorrect—another word for honest—treatment than the Vietnam War, because the people who misreported the war, hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now tout its supposed “lessons” are the very same people who created “political correctness” in the first place.”
― Phillip Jennings, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

“Như Napoleon đã nói, chiến tranh vốn dĩ rất đáng sợ, cho nên nó nên được thúc đẩy càng máu tanh càng tốt để chấm dứt nhanh nhất có thể.”
― Phillip Jennings, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War