With seven of our military people dying in Afghanistan yesterday, I would suggest people focus on the "lesson of Viet Nam" as it relates to the here and now -- Obama's war. Of course, Afghanistan is different -- the present folly always is.

06271,

I didn't mean to suggest that Himmler was "only" responsible for the Holocaust. When I said that, it was in the context of a hypothetical scenario that didn't exist in reality, and because the Holocaust was what Lind brought up when he mentioned Hitler and Himmler. What you said is definitely true--Himmler was guilty of a great deal in addition to the Holocaust.

It is hard to understand the Vietnam war without understanding the historical context of the decision to fight in Vietnam. The centrists in US policy, i.e., the leaderships of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administration felt a need to "draw a line in the sand [or the jungle]" at what was perceived as systematic Soviet undermining of western leaning states. The US and Europe had been perceived to have abandoned Hungary in 1956, and indeed this abandonment may have been seen as part of an implicit deal to stay out of the area of Soviet influence that the Soviets were breaking in Indochina. Moreover during the same period the British were largely successful in suppressing a communist insurgency in Malaysia (the "Malayan Emergency") with about 35,000 troops -- albeit in part by making Malaysia independent. Korea was a war fought for numerous reasons, but perhaps the biggest was not to keep south Korea from going communist, but to stop Japan also falling.

We tend to reject the idea today, but the "cold warriors" of the 50s and 60s really did believe in the "domino theory" and they may have been right -- certainly the domino strategy had been pursued by the Soviets in central Europe. The other context that today is largely forgotten is the extreme brutality with which the Soviets and their proxies pursued their goals. Among the more remarkable statistics is that Stalin had more members of the German communist party murdered that Hitler did! Communist takeovers were associated with thousands of murders and hundreds of thousands sent to concentration camps -- indeed among the camps used (or reused by the Soviets) for imprisoning and executing their enemies post war were such notorious places as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Majdanek.

McNamara's main failing (by the way, my paternal grandmother was a MacNamara from Clare) was his application of a set of management tools to fighting a war which insulated him and the Pentagon from the reality, delusion about the nature of the opponent and the idea that what was being fought was a ground war akin to WW II or even in many respects Korea.

One thing I do not agree with are the comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. Vietnam was a war very much drifted into, without a very clear decision to engage in it. Rather the Vietnam was was one of steady escalation driven by largely negative mindset -- "Vietnam cannot go Communist" rather than a positivist view "Vietnam should become ..." By contrast the Iraq war was a very deliberate choice, contrived by Cheney and Rumsfeld and their claque of ill informed theorists. There were some sort of affirmative objectives, but not based in reality, but rather wishful thinking. On balance, I see Iraq as a greater mistake and much more clearly as a crime.

Oh yes, and I DO THINK THAT KISSINGER IS A CRIMINAL! for all sorts of reasons, e.g., Chile, etc. etc.

It is important to understand that Wilson's belief in self-determination did not extend to "brown" people. Wilson was pretty well an unabashed racist -- in practical terms for example he introduced "Jim Crow" to the Federal Civil Service, getting rid of black postmasters, he made Princeton a pretty racist place as its president, turning away black applicants. Throughut the Federal Civil service under Wilson Blacks were removed from any position supervising whites, the DC fire and police departments stopped hiring blacks, the toilets and waterfountains in federal facilities were segregated for the first time, the list goes on. He was also regarded as a protestant "WASP" bigot by the Irish and Italians. He was very indulgent of the Klu-Klux-Klan an anti black, anti Catholic, anti Semetic organisation.

Remarkably it was the black, Irish, Italian and Catholic vote that got Wilson elected. It was the deep antagonism his policies forged in these very groups that cost him the election of 1920 and left him too weak to push through the membership of the League in 1919.

So your posting begs the question, would the short brown Paris bus-boy Ho-Chi-Minh been given the time of day by snobbish, racist Wilson?

Thank you Salon (and Michael Lind) for publishing a thoughtful and thought provoking piece. This article challenges conventional wisdom (in this case three conventional wisdoms) in a way that reminds me why I started reading Salon in the first place. As can be seen in the reader comments (mostly civil, thoughtful and intelligent with few expletives and no references to Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh) Salon readers like to think and be challenged. Please give us more of this.

. . . say it all. Well written comments, folks.

In the late '80s (if memory serves me) McNamara visited Amherst College for the first time since 1967, when the College's Trustees unwisely decided to award him an honorary degree, and the graduating class turned its collective back as he received it. As a fairly green assistant professor, I attended dinner with him after he spoke -- his public talk was about the lessons of Vietnam. Dinner conversation turned to the subject of Nicaragua, and the Reagan administration's domino like argument that communism was knocking at the door of our southern border. I asked McNamara what he thought of the situation. His answer revealed that he had never really abandoned his cold geopolitical calculations. He said, to paraphrase, that we should go to the Soviets (the Union still existed then) and say to them that we would stop funding the resistance in Afghanistan if they would stop funding the Nicaraguan government! In other words, the old bipolar world view, as though the Nicaraguans and the Afghans were mere pawns in a geopolitical world.

The best and the brightest indeed. Lind is right on one point, though. Bundy and Rostow were worse. He wrong overall, though. No one was more vilified than LBJ for his stubborn and hideous expansion of that conflict, not even Nixon, who, with Kissinger, was the worst of a bad lot of political leaders, Kennedy included.