Letters to the Editor
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It was more than a war
Of course you know the Vietnam war, and people's attitude about it today has little to do with actual facts. It became the defining issue separating the "greatest generation" for the "baby boomers," Glen Miller fans from Beatles fans. In a large sense it represents the cultural difference that separates liberal from conversative today. So don't talk about facts, people don't want facts about Vietnam, they have already decided what they are going to believe.
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John McCain is at his scariest when he speaks about Vietnam
He truly believes that it was a "winnable" war. This alone disqualifies him (not to mention his ill-temperment; non understanding of economics; dependence on a rich wife; his lock-step similarity to Bush) from the presidency. Before Iraq, Vietnam was the most important foreign policy mistake since WWII. To think for one minute that it was a winnable war exposes the nightmare that is John mcCain's foreign policy vision. There is never a bridge too far; there is never a hill too high; there is never a disagreement that can't be remedied with US military might. That is the Neocon vision; that is Cheney's vision; that is McCain's vision and we must run from it screaming as fast as we can. It is the politics of national destruction and it must not enter the Oval Office again. The scourge that is the Bush nightmare must not be repeated by mcCain. We know who this guy is and he is a scary son-of-a-bitch indeed.
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Amateur psychology
Any admission by McCain to himself that the war was not winnable, or not for a good cause, would make it so much harder for him to accept the travail that he went through in his military service and captivity. Not believing that the war was worthwhile would be very painful for him.
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McCain learned nothing about "The Bright Shining Lie" of Vietnam
John Paul Vann, a US "advisor" in Vietnam about 2 minutes after the French rout at Dienbienphu, the first US officer to document and offer written remedy to every US failing in Vietnam and the only civilian General in US history, took the war to the North at the direction of the Defense Department (documented fact). If McCain had the slightest idea of history, his increasingly doubtful integrity could possibly revive and restrain his ridiculous boot-licking of his advisers and financiers. Neil Sheehan wrote the book, Senator. I'll bet my house Barry Goldwater read it. Senator Goldwater, despite disagreements I may have with him, represents real conservatism, not the consensus-gathering pap you are succumbing to. Heard the spanish word, "cojones" Senator? Give 'em thought. will.
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John McCain
Joe Conason is on the right track here, but he didn't take the analyis far enough. Yes, John McCain is misguided about Vietnam because, in his apparent ignorance of the basic principles of war from Sun Tzu, your chances of winning a war when you don't understand the motivations and intentions of the enemy are no better than 50%. He can't seem to internalize the simple fact that the Vietnamese were willing to spend 1000 years to rid their country of colonialist invaders, be they Chinese, French, or Americans.
That confusion extends to John McCain's understanding of Iraq, and his naive belief that that the Iraqis are going to accept a permanent, massive US military presence in their country in perpetuity. Someone needs to point out that the reason that BinLaden's movement developed critical mass was that it initially focused on getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia, which was a potent recruiting message for Al-Queda. Iraq is neither Germany nor South Korea, even though McCain wishes that were so. Just like the British in the 1920's (whose status of forces agreement we think can be reimposed virtually a century later), we need that presence to prop up a weak government that cannot stand up to the light of day, and control their oil reserves. Everyday more information- like the crude itself- bubbles up regarding the secret backroom deals that are being made to enrich selected American Oil companies, and likely key Iraqi government officials as well. This ought to be the focus of the debate between Obama and McCain with regard to Iraq; instead, we get a phony dialog about patriotism. Is anybody in the Obama campaign listening?
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VIETNAM
one of you said us baby boomers do not want the facts. Wrong. Gen Westmorland said give me all 19 year olds and I can telln them charge. Do not give me 22 year olds because they will say why. I was drafted at 19 and so were millions and if i was drafted at 22, like the millions, we would not have been there. Bush/Cheney and Mccain learned nothing and that is a disgrace. At least Bush put in about 3 or 4 weeks more than Cheney. Mccain agrees with them. Case closed.
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Define winning
According to Noam Chomsky, the USA did win a partial victory in Vietnam. It didn't set up a client state, that's true, but it did wreck the Vietnamese economy, thus ending the 'threat of a good example'. Now Vietnam, though under Communist Party control, plays by global capitalist rules. A triumph of containment.
So to McCain, the USA coulda, shoulda won; a moral victory: and to Chomsky, the USA did in a sense win; a subtle victory.
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Bamboo Cage!
Some believe we should always include the words "bamboo cage" in every sentence about McCain. As in, "McCain might not be emotionally sound enough to run the country on account of all that time he spent in a bamboo cage."
But I think that's just deplorable.
Rastas
P.S. Bamboo Cage!
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Living an American Tragedy
John McCain is the personification of how wrong U.S. nationalism can take one man, let alone a good portion of the populace. It is a sad and tragic commentary on the insanity of starting wars, this glance at one of the more likable yet extremely disturbed public figures to emerge from the Vietnam fiasco.
John McCain is the last in his family line of professional warriors. This, in itself, is almost impossible to reconcile in the mind of a man like McCain. There would be no reason for anything he has done, no purpose to his life at all, a complete collapse of his character and identity, were he to give up the lie, the armor which holds him -- and others like -- him together.
It is also tragic to project what will happen to McCain in the coming dog days of the campaign and then this fall's crushing defeat, which will be, for him, a defeat of everything he believes he "knows." It is frightening to consider that he leaves himself only the narrowest of spaces between psychotic break and sudden illumination, and the latter is a rather rare event, especially among warriors and politicians. Only Barry Goldwater in his later years comes to mind as even close.
Am I calling for pity for this man? No. It wouldn't suit him nor the choices he has made. I do like him, but I would not vote for him with a gun pointed at my head (even if that gun was held by McCain himself). All there is to this man is what Wesley Clark has correctly observed: a heroic victim of a lost and pointless cause, with no place to step as the staircase disappears beneath him.
For the nation it is a blessing that the timing of this election year unfolds as it does. For John McCain it must feel (or soon will at least) like hell, and it should.
The fact that John McCain learned nothing from "The Art of War" or from his own experience with a war (he was way too far inside it to conceivably gain an objective view); the "art" of war is out of style. Those who continue to enjoy this particular aesthetic abomination reap the whirlwind which is about to make landfall. There are probably tens of thousands like McCain, only not all of them have remained buried so deep in their own personal traumas, nor have they remained insulated (or trapped) by fantastic wealth and pathological family history.
McCain's story will be written as tragedy, but only as a footnote to the sea change the nation will have undergone even as McCain drowned in it.
It isn't pretty, but it is absolutely necessary and utterly inevitable.