On the matter of LBJ's willingness to enter the US into a higher degree of war against Vietnam, it depends on the context of the question.

In certain historical or biographical inquiries, that may be a very important matter.

From other perspectives, the personal and political viewpoint of LBJ on Vietnam does in fact matter far less than what happened on the ground as a result of US policymaker decisions. If the subject of inquiry is LBJ, it's highly relevant. If the subject is an inquiry as to the systematic patterns of, objectively measurable motivations, and effects of US foreign policy, then LBJ's personal / political motivations are of less interest.

This may have nothing (I hope it has nothing) to do with this latest debate with bucky1 or whomever, but, it's true for me.

Back 4,000 years ago when Saint Reagan was President and created the nation with a mere wave of his hand, saying "Let there be Morning," one of the Great Initiatives of US foreign policy was to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Central Americans and Southern Africans, while also running a fundamentalist Islamic drug-dealing terror war in Afghanistan against a secular regime.

Sticking just to Central America, it went like this.

If you thought the US' leaders should be intervening to determine the governments of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, but wished it was being done in a somewhat less bloody, more accountable manner, you were a mainstream liberal. (If you didn't give a damn how many the US and its thugs murdered, you were a conservative.)

If you thought the US' leaders should not be determining the governments of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, much less slaughtering hundreds of thousands or continuing to support murderous (and even genocidal) dictators, you were a fringe element.

That's how I originally 'became' a "leftist", because those simple, honorable, and correct (yes, after all these years) foreign policy beliefs were deemed outside the mainstream.

By the way, I think that whole Afghan terror war which led straight to the establishment of bin Laden as a terrorist leader, Al Qa'ida, and the Taliban turned out to harm the USA more than the Soviets' ties to Afghanistan were harming us. As far as I can recall, no Soviet-supported Afghan fighters ever attacked the USA, particularly not in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania.

Maybe I'm not the fringe. Maybe the mainstream of US foreign policy remains at the fringe, justified by fringe-worshipping pundits.

The OAS is moving toward arrest warrants against Iranians

Involved in the Buenos Aires Jewish center bombing 1994 in which almost a hundred people were murdered. I know it looks bad for the blogerati who cut their teeth on how noble and peaceful their idols are. And I suppose you could skirt out of it under the aegis of "Well they're just Jews, they probably deserved it"

Why don't you find the "blogerati" who, what, endorsed that bombing?

Why don't you specify which "blogerati" wrote about "how noble and peaceful their idols" were, which, presumably, they directly wrote about those bombers?

Why don't you quote from the "blogerati" who skirted out of endorsing this bombing by saying "Well they're just Jews, they probably deserved it"?

You don't care one whit about the people killed in that terrorist attack, any more than you've cared for any other victims of terrorism or state-backed violence in Latin America. Their dead bodies are just your cheap fodder for trying to slur people whose rational views you cannot accept.

I know it's against all tradition to support sanity & reason in foreign policy, but I'm glad Glenn is there standing up for it.

But hey, our current idiots made everything wonderful and peaceful by laying waste to the society which was Iraq (albeit under a brutal tyrant whom they would have survived), how could devastating another huge region of the world prove in any way a bad idea?

For the freakishly sanity-retarded right wingers who believe they are helping Israel when they pledge to unleash God knows what chaos warlord civil war lawless hell throughout the Middle East by bringing the misery and statelessness of Iraq to an even more giant, more powerful, yet currently stable and fairly coherent nation -- you aren't.

I don't care how many buddy-buddy groups there are among Israeli "think tanks" and others in the mainstream of Israeli right wing nuttiness.

With any calculation of the real-world, as opposed to Sgt Fury / Captain America fantasy, effects of a massive attack on Iran, not only do Iranians lose, not only do their immediate neighbors lose, not only does U.S. security once again take a hit from the American security-hating right wing, Israel too loses.