"My Cambodian Moment" Sen. F. Hollings

[number6]

Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC), November 7, 2003

http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc3354.html

Mr. President, I come to acknowledge my "Cambodian moment" in the Iraq war. I refer to the Cambodian moment that Senator Mansfield experienced after years and years of opposing the war in Vietnam. He had a practice of taking written memoranda time and again to both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, supporting the President openly on the floor of the Senate, but finally at the time Cambodia was invaded under President Nixon, he could not take it any longer and spoke out.

snip --

In conscience, I cannot stand silent any longer. What happens if we had invaded the city of Atlanta, let's say. We had landed at Hartsfield Airport, and then we had gone on to an aircraft carrier and said: Whoopee, mission accomplished; when the truth of the matter is, two divisions of Republican Guards have blended into the environs of Atlanta with all kind of ammunition dumps, and all they do day in and day out is raid the dumps, set traps, blow us up, kill more Americans, and we talk about schools opening and hospitals working, and that we have a water system. This cannot go on. It has to stop.

snip --

The most ridiculous thing on the TV last night was to hear the President say foreigners are in Iraq killing our soldiers. Can you imagine us, thousands of miles away, talking about foreigners killing our soldiers? Come on. What happened was, Iraq did not have terrorists at the time we went in. They tried to connect al-Qaida to Iraq, but now the President himself has acknowledged you couldn't connect al-Qaida. They didn't have nuclear capability. And, of course, there was no democracy. There weren't people yearning for it, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz said, meeting us in the streets waving: Whoopee, we finally got democracy.

...

[number6]

1. more...

"At the time I was a young politician, having just come to the Senate, listening to those who knew. I knew Leader Mansfield would know about Vietnam. I knew my friend Senator Dick Russell was against the war in Vietnam from the get-go. Now, if Senator Mansfield had spoken up, he could have saved 10,000 lives. We would have followed him in the Senate. But he was trying to follow the mistake and the misread of Maddox and the Turner joy that brought about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

"There are similarities. There are the misleading statements that I have just given, the litany by the President telling us all there was reconstituted nuclear. Here again we are in a guerilla war. It is an urban guerilla war, not in the bushes of Vietnam but we still again are trying to win the hearts and minds. "

from GNN

I think its going to get worse.

[brainshrub]

2. Untill a pro-war Republican makes this speech I won't be impressed.