- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
If there is one thing Americans love it’s a good scapegoat. There is nothing quite like projecting our collective pathologies onto another person and then watching them burn for what all know are our own crimes.
Ironically, McNamara could point fingers with the best of them. Till the end of his life he stoically justified his technocratic decisions. If the title weren’t already taken, his biography could be called “Mistakes were made, but not by me.”
"The moral case against the damage done to the Vietnamese population and landscape by U.S. firepower and Agent Orange defoliation is compelling. But the U.S. effort in Korea was even more devastating, and the U.S. efforts in World War II included the incineration of German and Japanese cities by conventional and atomic bombing. To the historian, the case that the Vietnam War was a unique atrocity in itself is hard to make" [emphasis added].
Vietnam was, indeed, not "unique," and our collective refusal to acknowledge that fact allows for the continuation of our bizarre imperialism. Far from rebutting the leftist position, Lind shows, in this devastating paragraph, that the left never went far enough in their criticism.
