These Are Our Debating Partners

It's really, really, really important for conservatives to lie about Vietnam. Without lying about Vietnam, I'm not sure there would be much of a conservative movement at all. They certainly wouldn't be able to get away with prosecuting their little Iraq war.

Here's what The Washington Times [1] says today about why, "[b]y every reasonable measure, President Bush's surge strategy has been a success," and why we have to stay the course in Iraq:

The late Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap who was the leader of the North Vietnam military stated in his memoirs: "What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender. It was the same at the battles of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media were definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won."

And here is what Snopes.com [2] explains about the outright fabrication the Times allows in its pages, quoting Ed Moise of Clemson University on Giap's 1976 book How We Won the War:

This book has been the subject of several unfounded rumors on the Internet. The first one began in the late 1990s. Supposedly, General Giap had written in How We Won War that in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leaders in Vietnam had been ready to abandon the war, but that a broadcast by Walter Cronkite, declaring the Tet Offensive a Communist victor,y persuaded them to change their minds and fight on. This rumor was entirely false. Giap had not mentioned Cronkite, and had not said the Communists had ever considered giving up on the war.

Several variants of this rumor appeared in 2004. In these, Giap is supposed to have credited either the American anti-war movement in general, or John Kerry's organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) in particular, for persuading the Communist leaders to change their minds and not give up on the war. Giap is sometimes said to have made this statement in How We Won the War, sometimes in an unnamed 1985 memoir. All versions of the rumor are false. Neither in How We Won the War, nor in any other book (the 1985 memoir is entirely imaginary), has Giap mentioned Kerry or Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or said that the Communist leaders had ever considered giving up on the war.

Entirely imaginary.

And that's why we call it the Big Con.

Colossal thanks to reader DW for the tip.