Timothy Wells Quotes

In the Vietnam War, America and her allies were defending the South Vietnamese from the Communist and Nationalist incursions of the North Vietnamese. However, the South Vietnamese government was itself a very fragile democracy which provided rights little better than the Ho Chi Min lead government of the North. Further, the South Vietnamese rulers and governments while claiming to be democracies, were little more than in name only and were very corrupt. As with many unstable and weak governments, South Vietnam had experienced a succession of coups, with some of his advisors favoring the coups and a few actualy supporting them. Johnson was continually frustrated by this and this expression was his own inimitable style.

He had just assumed his post 6 days earlier. At this point he did not have enough knowledge to favor or oppose the regime change, but he did realize that the decision was a serious one and there would be no turning back. Diem was a creature of the Central Intelligence Agency. An anti-Communist Christian in a Buddhist county, the CIA engineered his rise to power, created his political party, provided him with cash to bribe other Vietnamese politicians, and paid for all the propaganda so he would “win” the Presidential elections. However, he abused the Buddhists, was thoroughly corrupt and ran a corrupt administration, but worst of all from the American point of view, he was unable to motivate the South Vietnamese population to fight the Communists. He reached the point where he was more of a liability, and the Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup d’etat to remove him from power and replace him with a President more to our liking. (See {634540}.)

This coup has been the biggest trauma for the Iranian people in the last centuries. The blowback from it, has soured relationships between America and Iran for decades. Khamenei personally was traumatized by the coup and publicly refers to it quite frequently. Ironically, reasons and policy logic for the CIA orchestration of the coup are even today murky. The desires of the British may well have been the main reason. “Arrogance” is the term Khamenei uses to describe the British-American alliance and their propensity to try and shape the affairs of other nations.

In 1993 Mooshood Abiola was the apparent victor in the Nigerian presidential election, but the election was `nullified' by the previous President and military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida. Abiola announced he would attempt to form a government anyway.

This was a training manual for the conduct of Guerrilla wars in general and the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua.

The Lloyd George government was using the military to cross the picket line of a national miners’ strike.