What really pisses me off is that Robert McNamara had the option of resigning if he really "agonized" over the war. Many military officers did just that in protest over that misbegotten, evil war. He did not.

He continued to serve in his post, long after it became clear to others charged with propagating the war that it was a crime to do so and morally repugnant.

In an past interview with Robert McNeil (shown last night on the NewsHour), he stated that if he had quit, he would be blamed for the war; if he had stayed, he would be blamed for the war.

He stated that he would always be known as the Secretary of Defense responsible for the war, no matter what he did. So he stayed anyway, despite all his "internal doubts".

I guess he liked the title "Secretary of Defense" better than his moral convictions, if he had any.

The fact of the matter remains that he continued to do his job long after the futility of the war became evident. All his hand-wringing afterwards was a sham meant to appease those still angry at him for his role. It did not work then and it does not work with this article.

He's still guilty.

So then you see Daniel Ellsberg as a hero?

About your second point about Lind's characterization of Vietnam and Domino Theory. Mr. Lind is saying that Domino Theory was right...but that was the theory which everyone believed in at the time. The theory was not 100% wrong either. Anyway, you say "putting aside the not-insignificant fact that a victoriously reunified Vietnam did NOT embark upon a campaign of conquest which transformed all of southeast Asia into a bastion of communism. " However, shortly after winning the "American war", Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia. It then commited ethnic cleansing against its Chinese population. So... you are somewhat wrong here. It DID embark upon a campaign of conquest.

No one is saying that Vietnam is a threat now. The point was about how it was viewed at the time of McNamara and how that view had some validity.

the obsessive anticommunism of the Kennedys (courtesy their father) and Johnson's reluctance to go against the advice of a bunch of Ivy Leaguers in spite of the fact that he had little interest in the undertaking. Whatever the cause, the resulting train wreck brought postwar American prosperity to an end, civil discontent at home, the election of Richard Nixon, and a world flooded with American dollars to pay for it (which found their way back home in the 1970s payback of out-of-control inflation).

No.

But can you justify remaining in a job just for the title and the perks even when you know it's killing people?

"I was just following orders."

Great excuse for any crime. Fits any war.

I don't know whether they do, but I do.

What's missing from Lind's account, of course, is any consideration of the practical domestic consequences of the war: a country which is still - almost 40 years later - divided against itself as result of our defeat, and the enormous scale of the human suffering, both our own relatively minor losses, and far greater disaster inflicted upon Vietnam.

To here Lind tell it, this is an almost academic debate, one incapable of being settled and one in which it's impossible to realistically assign responsibility for failure; there is an argument on the side, an argument on that side, and yet another argument for this third group of people over there, and there are no practical grounds for choosing between them, and thus it's really nobody's fault, and somehow Lind's only very strong opinions - he has long been and still remains an interventionist radical on these issues - are invisible, he poses instead as the evenhanded observer, the levelheaded voice of reason who explains that McNamara's is not a man who made momentous decisions and advised other men who did the same, but rather a vessel into which we pour our own opinions.

This of course is an act of monumental intellectual dishonesty, but it's also an act of almost incredible ideological blindness, Lind doesn't know (unlikely) or can't see (possibly) or can't bear to knowledge (probably) is that we have a fourth opinion: McNamara's own.

Lind's defenders would probably argue that McNamara's own view is irrelevant - that what he's talking about in this article are the various partisan views of McNamara as a lens through which to view the war.

But that's just a cheap dodge, the reason that we won't find McNamara's own opinion (with the exception of one fragment of one sentence) measured against the alternatives presented in that article is that it's absolutely damning of Lind's own unstated preferences.

McNamara lived long enough for historical perspective to begin to come into focus: on the evidence of his own words he spent the second half of his life coming to terms with the fact that he had been horribly wrong, and asking himself how future decision-makers could avoid his blindness.

Lind can't even get the first part of that right, his entire intellectual career has been spent trying to find ways to somehow equivocate the extent of the fauilure.

OK Michael, I caught you napping on this one. You apparently don't know anything about Robert McNamara. The smugly diffident tone you chose to deliver your defense summation in sounds like you just might be holding your readers in contempt. The subject of the Viet Nam War likewise seems to get processesed on the Alternative Rock hemisphere of your cortex.

If you did not feel like you had time to research the subject of your essay, fine. Maybe you could have turned it around as a satire. Remaining willfully ignorant has a hiply careless pose that goes along with it of course and maybe thats your angle here.

Do your readers a favour, in the future please make a concious effort to avoid framing the history of American foreign policy debates in the disingenuous terms of left/right as you appear to lack any clear idea of what these political catagoties actually represent historicaly.

I am not sure that feigning seriousness really works for you.