"The vitriol that was directed against McNamara always seemed excessive and even unhinged to me. After all, he wasn't the president. Why not blame Kennedy for deepening the U.S. involvement in Indochina, or Johnson for escalating it, or Nixon for prolonging it?"

Or, hey, why not blame the bastards who sell the weapons to both sides of virtually every conflict, eventually, and even shoot presidents when they don't go along?

think of Colin Powell during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He was criticized by both Left and Right. The former viewed him as willing to be complicit in something he didn't believe in, going before the UN to present a bogus case against Saddam, tarnishing his image of an upright civil servant. And the Right never forgave him for publicly expressing doubts over the viability of the neocon vision, summed up by the Pottery Barn rule, "you break it you own it."

Iraq is not Vietnam, but America remains remarkably the same.

After all, the anti war left earnestly believes that ANY and ALL US military involvements under all circumstances, ever, are by definition war crimes. So once you understand, as an insider in the government that NO MATTER what you do they will have exactly the same response, then it's quite liberating. If we could do it all over again, then the US should have rolled up its entire apparatus in 1945, pulled up the draw bridges and let the outside world sort it out in whatever way it saw fit. Genocide be damned, it's not our problem.

The writer seems to ignore the "realities" in the Vietnam case; he talks of the "Vietcong" in "South Vietnam", as if S.V. were a real country , and not the Washington fantasy it was. Let's not forget that the reason those "National" elections were not held in 1954 was the "we" knew that that Ho Chi Minh could win it handily, if it were not massively "fixed". Korea was so totally different that classical guerilla war there was a total flop. disigny

That's only been true since Vietnam. LBJ was quite comfortable as a social liberal and defense hawk. There were lots of Democrat hawks like Walt Rostow who believed fervently in the anti-communist cause.

The Left focuses on the inevitable collatoral damage and the Right the beautiful end goal to be achieved by country with special responsibilities.

Nobody ever argued democracy was bad for the Middle East (or anywhere else), rather they questioned whether it could be imposed by military force (after what happened in Vietnam).

Someone recently published a doctoral dissertation called "Imaging Vietnam" which speaks to this point.

The yellow Republic of Vietnam flag is easy to spot in established Vietnamese exile communities. Interestingly, residents' loyalty is to the ARVN, almost nobody speaks of the government headed by a succession of strong men wholly dependent on America to remain in power.

but instead of dollars he dealt in lives.

Robert McNamara is the idiologe who enlarged Wilson's "Monroe Doctrine" to embrace the globalization of capitalism and reasoned that arial bombardment with high explosives was a legitimate curative to bring to bear against any nation who threatened US interests with social democracy and ultimately the scourge of a national health care program. I marvel that neoliberal free-marketeers following their debut in Viet Nam have as yet failed to advocate bombing Paris, France. Meanwile Canada has gone Social Democrat on us. Maybe McNamara was right after all. Maybe it is time to face reality, close off our borders and begin the final launch sequence. T minus; 10...9...

I think your analysis is spot on. On McNamara, the war broke him. His demeanor afterwards was that of a strong man broken under torture. No one looking at events objectively can objectively blame him alone for the strategic failures of his two presidents and the commanders in the field.

Kennedy inherited Vietnam as a covert action of the CIA. It started under Eisenhower.

My older brother quit college in 1958, his A1 status came up in 1959. He feared at he might get sent to Vietnam, so he joined the Air Force voluntarily, and he was out of service by 1965. He was considered a Vietnam era vet.

was educated in France and came to the U.S asking for help to reunite Vietnam as it was agreed after WW2. The U.S. refused, Ho Che Min went to China for help.

France fought the Veitcong before the U.S. and knew it was a losing battle.

The C.A. A was once again the culprit in this war Veitnam , Laos, And Cambodia.

1. Why is it that if you're left wing, you're radical but if you're right wing, you're merely conservative?

2. Vietnam cannot be explained solely in terms of the cold war. Vietnam's colonial legacy from both the French and the Chinese was front and center in the thinking of Ho Chi Minh. It was the United States who brought the cold war into the equation. Yes, Ho was a communist but he was also the guy who wrested all of Vietnam from the grasp of the French. It was the US that took half of it away from him in the name of the cold war.

3. The right wing fanatics are also wrong but not for the reasons you suggest. I once thought that unleashing American military power would have defeated the North albeit at a horrendous human cost. But then a friend of mine who had been a swift boater in 'Nam told me the story of coming under intense machine gun fire one day. It took them most of the day to put an end to the deadly machine gunner. The gunner was a 12 year old girl and the gun was served by her 5 year old brother. You will not overcome that kind of mindset with bombs and guns. Oh, by the way, the atrocities of our bombing and Agent Oranging may not have been unique but that doesn't make them any less of an atrocity.

4. I count myself as a realist but not of the mindset you describe. I ask one simple question: so what if Vietnam becomes communist? Unless you subscribe to the domino theory, the answer to the question becomes the historical record: Not much. They become a small, not-all-that-wealthy country with a communist government that is more a hazard to themselves than anybody else. It is also instructive that you'll refer to Marxist-Leninist fanatics and Islamic fanatics but not recognize the people who invaded Iraq, killed hundreds of thousands of people and made millions more refugees all in the name of cramming democracy down their throats as democracy fanatics.

I vilified Robert McNamara when he was in office. Hell, I vilified the entire US government during Vietnam. And they deserved it. From my perspective, Vietnam is the poster child of government run amok. The poster child for government that decides it knows what's best for us unwashed masses and it really doesn't care what the masses want. The Vietnam era can inform us about the mess we have allowed our government to get us into - and I'm not just talking about the quagmire of Vietnam vs. the Mess-o-potamia.

McNamara revealed his personal doubts about Vietnam after he left office. Those doubts did not prevent McNamara from doing his best to execute the job two Presidents asked him to do (and Rumsfeld would suffer badly in any comparison). He soldiered on in his role of Secretary of War even though it came at a personal cost to himself. I respect him for that.

George C. Scott said it best in Patton:

Presidents start wars

Generals fight wars

Privates die in wars.

You didn't hear anything about Secretaries of War in there, did you.