For some 45 years, the U.S. national-security state justified its existence and its Cold War antics based on the “communist threat” that the United States was supposedly facing. If the United States failed to maintain an enormous standing army and a CIA, the nation would almost sure to fall into communist hands.

Moreover, we were told, dark-side practices, such as torture, assassination, terrorism, invasions, occupations, coups, regime-change operations, and partnerships with criminal organizations and tyrannical foreign regimes were necessary to combat the evils of communism.

Why, they even said that it was necessary to invade Vietnam and sacrifice tens of thousands of American men to prevent the dominoes from falling to the communists, with the biggest domino being the United States.

The Cold War was nothing but a sordid, corrupt sham, one that, not so coincidentally, kept the Pentagon and the CIA in high cotton for decades, with ever-increasing budgets and power, especially with the climate of perpetual crises and war that they made a permanent feature of American life.

You couldn’t find a better demonstration of the Cold War sham than the friendly visit that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, recently made to Vietnam.

Yes, that Vietnam. The same country in which almost 60,000 American men were sent to the deaths during the Vietnam War, for nothing.

Why was Dempsey visiting Vietnam?

Because he wants to enter into a military partnership with the communist regime in Vietnam.

Yes, you read that right: the U.S. national-security state wants to enter into a partnership with a brutal communist regime, the same brutal communist regime that the U.S. national-security state was opposing during the Cold War.

Oh sure, there are different people running the communist system in Vietnam but it nonetheless remains a brutal communist regime, one that will stop at nothing to maintain its grip on power over the Vietnamese people.

Does Dempsey have any reservations about entering into a military partnership with communists?

Why should he? After World War II, the U.S. national-security state actively recruited members of the Nazi regime, and the CIA entered into an assassination partnership with the Mafia. Moreover, let’s not forget the partnership between the U.S. national-security state and its counterpart in Chile in 1973, a partnership that entailed torture, rape, assassination, and execution of thousands of innocent people, including two innocent Americans. There’s also the vast amounts of foreign aid that have gone to pro-U.S. tyrannical regimes all over the world.

What does Dempsey envision for America’s partnership with communists? According to this article in the New York Times, he wants to sell American weaponry to the Vietnamese communists to “help offset the power of China.” Vietnam currently buys its weapons from Russia and apparently Dempsey wants to cut into that business.

In fact, the New York Times article is worth looking at for no other reason than to see a photograph of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saluting as he passes in review of communist soldiers. Did you ever think you’d see that spectacle? I’ll bet those 58,000 plus American soldiers who were sacrificed in that senseless war are turning over in their graves.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to how the Vietnamese communists would use those U.S.-supplied weapons? They’d use them the way that communist regimes have always used them — against their own citizenry, as a way to maintain their brutal, tyrannical hold on power.

Just ask the people of Egypt, where Egyptian military brutes are brutally suppressing dissent against their tyranny with bombs, bullets, missiles, and tanks that the U.S. national-security state has supplied that tyrannical regime.

That obviously doesn’t matter to Dempsey and the Pentagon. What matters is the great game—to “help offset the power of China,” a matter that has suddenly become important to the national-security state, especially given the winding down of the ongoing fiasco of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, however, the Pentagon and the CIA say that the United States must continue its brutal embargo against the Cuban people. Their rationale? The “communist threat,” of course. Never mind that Cuba has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. Of course, neither did North Vietnam.

What better demonstration of the crooked and warped direction that the national-security state apparatus has taken our nation than the Pentagon’s attempt to enter our nation into a partnership with a brutal and oppressive communist regime, the same regime, in fact, that supposedly posed a grave threat to “national security” during the Vietnam War?

What better demonstration of the need to dismantle, not reform, the entire national-security state apparatus and restore a constitutional republic to our land?