He's announced his resignation and is looking forward to (it is rumoured) receiving a £10 million fee from Murdoch for his memoirs (and, presumably, other services rendered...) together with all the other lucrative consultancies and directorships that ex Prime Ministers tend to collect. Hardly surprising he can't be bothered to come up with answers to the basic question of what our troops are actually doing out there (other than getting killed so Tony gets to hang out with Bush and pretend he's Churchill).

...(although it hardly needs pointing out with members of this administration) that her country is conspiciopusly absent from the list of things she wanted to serve.

Cocaine withdrawal.

Giap's statement that "We were not strong enough to drive out a half million troops, but that was not our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American Government to continue the war." Is just a restatement of the Clausewitzian truism that "War..is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will" i.e. to place your enemy in a position where the cost to them of continuing the war is greater than the cost of giving up.

In a democracy, public support for a war is a resource at least as important to its successful prosecution as men and material and must be husbanded and spent just as carefully. This, as Victor Hanson notes in his book "Why the West Has Won", is the main weakness of a democracy when it engages in a war where there is no consesus that the war, or the continuation of the war, is necessary or worth the cost, as was the case in Vietnam and has become the case in Iraq. A democracy being what it is people are free to protest against the war and can, ultimately, if the level of protest and war weariness becomes great enough, force their leaders to abandon it. This is the nature of a democracy, people are free to express their views and elect different leaders if the greater part of them dislike what their current leaders are doing. Anyone who wishes to use a democracy to fight a war needs to understand this basic fact: Public support for a war in a democracy is not a given and if you lose it you'll lose the war.

So is the way to successfully prosecute a war to become a totalitarian state and lock-up the protesters? Hanson argues (and I agree) that the answer to that is no. He notes that where there is consesus that a war is necessary, as was the case with WWII and the Cold War, a democracy will prosecute that war with utmost brutality and few moral qualms (for example, even 60 years on there are still relatively few people in the West who complain about the firebombing of Dresden or the nuking of Japan). Also, the freedom and personal liberty which citizens of a democracy have, which can be a weakness when a war lacks supports, becomes a decisive advantage where a war is supported as it leads to scientific and economic advantages which no totalitarian state can match.

The point is that the anti-war movement was (and is) what naturally happens in a democracy when incompetent political and military leaders in a democracy engage in a war the greater part of the public does not consider to be worth the cost. It was a symptom of the defeat, not a cause, and to complain about it is really to complain about the personal freedom which true democracy requires.

Anybody else remember the over optimistic (some would say deluded) reports on progress in Vietnam which Westmoreland would be called upon to present whenever McNamara and Johnson wanted to add some credibility to its justifications for continuing the war? There really is nothing new under the sun.

...when Pakistan is already a nuclear armed Islamic nation which has a history of political instability , a record of proliferation (a lot of Iran's nuclear tech supposedly came from Pakistan) and a large and disgruntled group of Islamists in its population, not to mention an ongoing AQ inspired (and, in some places, led) insurgency which the government does not appear to be winning? Iran won't have a weapon for 5 to 10 years, with Pakistan all it will take is a few bad days to give fundamentalists control of real rather than hypothetical nukes.

Surely the point of the story isn't that Clinton acted improperly or unprofessionally. It's that she did act professionally and, in doing so, showed herself to be yet another slimy lawyer who'll believe whatever her client wants her to believe provided her bills are being paid. There's a lot of controversy about how women and children are cross examined in rape trials and the way that defence attorney's will try to humilate and traumatise them (or threaten to) to get the complaint withdrawn - sure, the case needs to be put to proof but many of the cross examination techniques used in rape trials are simply designed to prejudice the jury against the victim (rapists having a female defence lawyer is a classic trick).

I'm sorry, but a knee-jerk "she was only doing her job" doesn't cut it for me. A person of integrity, when presented with an odious task, will decline to do it and look for another position where they don't have to compromise their principles (which is why lawyer's with principles rarely last more than a couple of years in the profession). A person without integrity will do the job and excuse themselves by saying "eveybody else does it", "if I didn't do it someone else would have" or "I was only doing what my boss told me".