Déjà vu

[unhappycamper]

2011: Destroying booby-trapped Afghan towns to save them
Published: April 9, 2011

U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, called in airstrikes to level Tarok Kolache in October after spending 100 days fighting for control of the Arghandab River Valley, a fertile farming area and Taliban bastion.



1968: Bến Tre

Vietnam War

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."<1> The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."<2> The accuracy of the original quote, and its source, have often been called into question.<3> Arnett never revealed his source, except to say that it was one of four officers he interviewed that day. US Army Major Phil Cannella, the senior officer present at Bến Tre, suggested that the quote might have been a distortion of something he said to Arnett.<2> The New Republic at the time attributed the quote to US Air Force Major Chester L. Brown.<4> In Walter Cronkite's 1971 book, Eye on the World, Arnett reasserted that the quote was something "one American major said to me in a moment of revelation."<5> However, one American veteran of the campaign, Captain Michael Miller, has written that he heard the comment being made by one Major Booris in a press briefing.<6>




unhappycamper comment: Still the same Pentagon, still the same playbook.

[Gravel Democrat]

1. kr Deja Vu-Doo

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."

[bemildred]

2. Yah, they never really learn.

There was a while in the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle that I thought they would, but Raygun and Bush the Elder stopped all that and went back to the old ways, and then Bush the Younger jacked it all up to the max. And once you accept the notion that you can use violence to assert control, you wind up bombing the village to save it again.

"It's got to work one of these times, if worked great before World War I."