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The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today

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Cynthia Chung
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Republished from Rising Tide Foundation

VN War Montage.
VN War Montage.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Collage: Nguyen1310. Individual constituent images used in the collage: US & ARVN military personnel.)
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In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, remarks in his book "The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy," that these massive arms shipments were not returned to the United States but rather, half were transported to Korea and the other half to Vietnam.

The implications of this are enormous.

It signifies that there were Cold War preparations already underway as early as August 1945 and likely much earlier, and that the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned five years in advance and the other ten years in advance respectively, before the actual wars were to take place.

What this means is that the official narrative for why the Korean War and the Vietnam War were fought are fabrications of the Cold War "reality."

Therefore, it should be asked, what was the real reason that Americans entered these two brutal wars? Why did leading figures among the American elite, many who were so adamant on not joining in the combat against fascism in WWII, become so quickly convinced, that everything having to do with communism, was their personal responsibility to destroy?

These questions will be answered in this series titled "The Fascist Roots of the CIA."

The CIA and the Pentagon: A Tale of Two Star Crossed Lovers

As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.

It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of "the power elite."

The entire period of April 12th 1945 to that fateful Election Day can be best understood as the first stage of America's coup. This is especially clear between the period of 1945 and 1949, when a number of new pieces of legislation were passed which successfully reorganised the departments within the United States such that much of the government and military decisions would be beholden to the authority of a few men, men who were much more powerful than the president himself.

The National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was one of the first of this new breed of legislation and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, placing it under the direction of the National Security Council.

Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, (less than four months after the creation of the CIA), the perceived necessity to "stem the flow of communism" in Western Europeparticularly Italyby overt and covert "psychological warfare" forced the issue and NSC 4-A was born.

NSC 4-A was a new directive to cover "clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare," this provided the authorization for the intervention of the CIA in the Italian elections of April 1948.

It was understood that the U.S. military could have no "direct" role in covert operations, since that would defeat the purpose of deniability.

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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).  She has lectured on the topics of Schiller's aesthetics, Shakespeare's tragedies, Roman history, the Florentine Renaissance among other subjects. She is a writer for (more...)
 

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