The death rate was higher than either Korea or Japan or Germany. We built up the last two into the second and third richest nations.
Anyone who lived through Vietnam HATED McNamara (to the extent that they'd hate by proxy, all those who didn't). I'll remember Michael Lind from now on - with a bad taste in my mouth.

propoganda of fear of the "other" is a morally bankrupt activity. The only "killing" should be of a bad idea with a better idea and that takes time and communication not bullets and bombs. Humans (particular members of nation states with militaries) have an inalienable right to defend themselves against "imminent" harm and/or seek proportional redress for harms inflicted. But the ends rarely justify the means when it comes to war and collateral damage. There are some exceptions in history--WWII being the biggie.

When "democratic" or "socialist" nations use war as a legitimate instrument of ideology and policy they must be very very careful that they don't become the thing they purport to be fighting--fascists or ideological imperialists.

Maybe when we start seeing ourselves as human beings first and "nationalists" second, we'll be less inclined to resort to war as a solution to the political and economic problems of our politicians and big corporations.

Odd that I never see elite members of those two groups, generally speaking, bleeding and dying and having their homes and business and national infrastructure blown to smithereens to vindicate their ideological preferences.

Calamine, McNamara was one of the guys on staff when the fire-bombing of Japanese cities was approved. Before the greatest war criminal the world has seen, General Curtis Lemay, took charge of the Air Force in the Pacific Theatre, American bombers were restricted to high-level missions. McNamara and others told him that it would be better to sacrifice a few hundred allied air crew to get the job done properly. Henceforth, the bombers left most of their defensive armament behind in order to carry more incendiary bombs over Japanese cities on low-level runs. In Tokyo proper at least 100,000 and maybe as many as 200,000 people were killed in one night's raid. This went on for months over almost every population center in Southern Japan. The war dead do not begin to stack up against the ones that died from malnutrition, dysentry and other causes. So, yeah, Vietnam was awful but most of the bombs dropped were hitting mountaintops, jungle, dead ground and rice-paddies, not peoples' homes and families. To equate what happened to Japan in 1944-45 with the Indo-Chinese conflict does a grave injustice to the Japanese people. It's like you're comparing apples to oranges and telling me that your apple is the shiniest.

In the excellent documentary The Fog of War an elderly McNamara stated quite clearly that JFK, shortly before his assassination, had indeed decided to pull the plug on the then-relatively small U.S. advisory presence in Vietnam. Moreover, the offhand way he said it, in the course of making some other point, gave his statement even further credibility. I cannot imagine what motive McNamara might have had, so late in life, to "rewrite history"; and the fact that Michael Lind either ignores or else is unaware of McNamara's statement in The Fog of War damages this piece in Salon in my opinion.

... were defending America's reputation as a powerful and determined defender of weak allies, not simply physical assets, like the sea lanes and iron deposits so beloved by realist thinkers.

Wait, Lind's saying that realists failed to take into account the reputation hit America would take if it let too many of its allies get bulldozed by communist countries? Realists not taking reputation into account? Really?

I'd dearly like to see which realists Lind's talking about here. He mentions some big names, Kissinger, Morgenthau, but doesn't actually include anything they said to back up this weird assertion of his. Sloppy.

“One problem with realism during the Cold War was the tendency of many realists to denigrate the ideological aspects of conflict as somehow insignificant compared to material factors, or to explain them away as camouflages for "real," that is, material and military, interests. This line of thought was as inadequate in accounting for zealous Marxist-Leninists then as it is in understanding zealous Islamists today.”

I have nothing to add.

And seven presidents were wrong.

The Devil Man

Has passed away

On to Hades

So they say.

Death his birthright

Death his cause

Thousands upon thousands

He did not pause

He was so bright

He was so wrong.

Few are sorry

He is Gone

http://tinyurl.com/lmk6sx

That's all I have to say about that.

If we won in South Korea, why do we still have troops there?

If we won in Japan, why do we still have troops there?

If we won in Germany, why do we still have troops there?

We could have won in Vietnam, but we would still have troops there.

We will keep winning in Iraq as long as we have troops there.

We will win in Afghanistan if we keep our troops there forever.

This is the truth of American War over the globe. We the people must pay for permanent occupation of our "victories."

To me, these aren't victories for the people. It's a permanent expense we have to pay for with money that can't be used for other worthwhile things.

Maybe the people of these countries have benefited to some extent but I don't see the benefit to the American people, who are paying for it all. And if there's no benefit to us, it's hard to call it victory.

Vietnam was ruled by a corrupt, decaying post-colonial aristocracy. It was not a sustainable government in any sense of the word and we never really had any alternatives in mind.

All the Cold Warriors cared about was that it NOT become Communist. They never gave a frack-all whether it was ever going to be anything better than a Communist country.

They didn't have a single damned idea in their heads other than STOP THE COMMIES by trying to prop up a government that was, in essence, simply not sustainable.

Flip the Communists and capitalists and you've got the same problem really in Afghanistan, but in reverse.

The Communist government that tried to rule Afghanistan in the seventies was also quite simply and obviously unsustainable.

And many Marxist-Leninists (outside of Afghanistan, that is) knew this very well and argued that Afghan Communists were deluding themselves and were doomed.

Even Andropov himself knew this, but he made himself forget it so he could use Afghanistan to fight the Cold War just like we used Vietnam.

It's ironic that our "loss" in Vietnam never resulted in an enemy attack on our own shores, but our "win" in Afghanistan ended up doing just that.