How many more would have died in Viet Nam if not for the Protests?

[trumad]

Wow! Repukes today, Repukes yesterday! They really have not changed a bit. They're mad because Kerry and others protested the War in Viet Nam?

[demnan]

1. Yeah

I'm not sure why we have to relive this hell.

[kentuck]

2. John McCain would still be in prison in Hanoi?

Who knows?

[NoPasaran]

3. I've always believed

That if not for the antiwar movement we would still be there today.

Kerry prolonged the war? Fiddlesticks!

[amber dog democrat]

4. The North Vietnamese were going to win

no matter what we did. By 1966 there were doubts already about the outcome.
We may have hastened the demise by the Vietnamization program under Nixon and maybe thie war would have gone on for a far longer time.

I dont think the leadership had a clue what was really going on or cared much about the corrupton in Siagon.

But the more innocent lives lost and the farmers brutalized, the stronger the North Vietmanese bacame. It was just a matter of time - but thank god for the protesters all the same.

[AVID]

5. also - how many lives did he save - ONE - that last man

[nomatrix]

6. I am sick of their lies

"Tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans who are angry with his antiwar speech...."

I am sick of this crap coming from people who weren't even born yet.
3 million served in Vietnam. 44,000 dead by the time Kerry spoke before congress. They have no clue, because they never had the opportunity to be drafted into combat.

The opinion of the war was formed long before Kerry spoke.
The war crimes committed happened before Kerry spoke.
Kerry held congress accountable for their lack of action on behalf of the soldiers.
Kerry put a face to the tens of thousands of protestors of the Vietnam war, that included many veterans.

[nomatrix]

9. Add to that 18 yr. old couldn't vote yet

Kerry spoke in April 1971, the law wasn't passed until July 1971.

There was tremendous anger at legislators who could send you to war by draft and you couldn't even vote them out.

[debatepro]

7. Some scholars suggested....

Some people scholars have suggested that if the United States didn't pull out that china may have become involved. It could of got ugly.

[Francine Frensky]

8. Don't let Nixon win! Nixon wanted Kerry stopped 30 years ago

he funded John O'Neill back then to get him started.

PBS frontline on all of this was very interesting. I like the part where Kerry's name comes up in the oval office as "very well-spoken, talks like a Kennedy, looks like a Kennedy"

[nomatrix]

10. Nixon wanted to Nuke 'Em.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/5352258.htm?1c

"Seymour Deitchman, a national security consultant who spent 28 years with the Institute for Defense Analysis, told the Nautilus Institute that ``there had been not infrequent talk'' among war planners he knew that ``a few nukes'' dropped on strategic points on the Ho Chi Minh Trail would close that essential supply line along the border with Laos and Cambodia.

Later in the war, Nixon raised the idea of using a nuclear bomb on
North Vietnam in a conversation with Henry Kissinger, then his national security adviser. In a segment of the ``Nixon Tapes'' released to the public in March 2002, Kissinger and Nixon can be heard discussing plans to step up the war effort with air power in the spring of 1972.

When Kissinger laid out options that included conventional air attacks on power plants and docks, Nixon responded: ``I'd rather use the nuclear bomb.'' Kissinger replied: ``That, I think, would just be too much.''

``The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?'' Nixon asked. ``I just want you to think big.''

There's no way of knowing whether Nixon or Kissinger was aware of the secret Pentagon study published five years early that argued persuasively against the nuclear option in the earlier stage of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War."

Nukes....that'll shut 'em up!