ALAS, POOR STRANGE robert STRANGE mcnamara, I KNEW HIM QUITE WELL!

A FOOLISH STUPID EUNUCH who THOUGHT his OWN STINKING SHIT DIDN'T SMELL!

LIKE THE TALENTLESS SELF-IMPORTANT ACTOR WHO STRUTS UPON THE STAGE,

IS PELTED WITH ROTTEN VEGETABLES AND THE AUDIENCE'S VENTED RAGE,

THEN SCREAMS "HEY, TAKE IT EASY, I DIDN'T WRITE THE SCENARIO FOR THIS SHIT-PLAY 'VIETNAM!'" DO TELL!

HAH!!!!!

(^0^)V mcnamara IS IN HELL NOW, BEING JABBED BY SATAN'S TRIDENT ALONG WITH J.F.K., L.B.J., nixon, AND OTHER MISCREANTS!!!!!

Linds revisionist thesis that the Vietnam war was not planed and executed by McNamara but rather any number of other people including the assainated JFK is really sounds more like another rightwing conspiracy theory in drag.

Since peoples historian Mr Lind claims that 30+ ensuing years have been too few to produce a "realistic" assesment of Vietnam to his liking it is little wonder he is loath to cite any references in support of his account. Perhaps he will in time be arguing that it was not Donald Rumsfeld who is responsible for prosecuting our brutal war against Irac and Afghanistan. I expect in time "historians" like Mr Lind will find it more "realistic" to stop blaming Rumsfeld and start blaming Barac Obama or how about that parennial wolf in sheeps clothing George McGovern?

We might begin revising our recollections of Rumsfeld and Irac by picturing the former Secratary of State as an ink blot. This of course may take 30 years or so to get used to and I believe Mr Lind is correct about this part of his fantastic analytical method. Speaking of the Rorscach Effect, has anyone else ever noticed the striking resembelence between McNamara and Rumsfeld? Maybe it's just me.

Imagine a future after the last printing press is shut down and we will be free at last to feast on the insightfull blogs of Michael Lind and his ilk without ever being distracted by the inconvieniences of history. I find that you can get a pretty good read on a writers conception of history by asking them what they mean by "liberation", Mr Lind is no exception.

The headline is very telling. It reflects, perhaps unwittingly, a central problem in the attitude of the American right, left, and center toward the war in Vietnam - that the war was first and foremost an American thing - a tragedy for some, a learning experience for others, and a missed opportunity for others still.

Its tragedy were the tens of thousands of Americans who died, while the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese victims were of secondary importance.

The American right, left, and center do not constitute "all sides" of possible opinion in the Vietnam debacle - although admittedly, I doubt that very many Vietnamese would be very eager to jump on a bandwagon to rehabilitate Mr. McNamara.

Mr. Lind has it all wrong about the nature of the Vietnam war: it was a nationalist, anti-colonial war until we jumped in with both feet. It had nothing to do with communism, except that Ho Chi Minh pleaded with the Great Powers after WWII to extend to Vietnam the freedom the Powers had won for European nations. The French, supported by the US, wanted its colony back again. Ho had no options but to seek support from the communists (including the Chinese communists, even though China had been an enemy of Vietnam for 1000 years).

Even McNamara acknowledged that in "Fog of War", although, per his usual mendacious ways, he said that in the early 1960s "no one realized that this was a nationalist issue". Unfortunately for you, Mr. Lind, and for Mr. McNamara, people have memories. We haven't all been lobotomized yet. My father in 1962 began railing daily against our involvement in Vietnam for the very reason that the "domino" lie was just that. My father knew that Ho had been rejected by the Great Nations and turned only to the communists in a desperate move to liberate his people from the French. Hell, even the French told us to stay out of Vietnam; let them have their country.

So who is my father who was so knowledgeable in 1962 about things that 30 years later McNamara said were not known in the 1960s? Was he some state department expert? A CIA agent perhaps? Must have had some inside knowledge, right? No, my father was a postal clerk with a high school education. He read in the free press about Ho Chi Minh and the history of Vietnam. At age 10, I started reading all the books I could find on Vietnam that I could understand at that age, so I could understand what my father was talking about. At age 10, I was more curious about Vietnam than was Mr. McNamara. My father was more knowledgeable than Mr. McNamara.

As for people blaming McNamara rather than others, apparently Mr. Lind is unfamiliar with the chant "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Yeah, that LBJ really got away with it; no one held him accountable. (I'll say this for LBJ in light of our most recently retired war criminal: at least he lost some sleep at night. He wore that war on his face. Four years after he left office, he was dead. That's what having some kind of conscience will do to you.)

Sure, JFK was let off the hook in the 1960s; as a friend of mine would say "he had the good sense to die." But no one in the last 30 years has ever suggested that JFK was not responsible for the debacle of Vietnam. Would it have been different had he lived? We'll never know. It does appear that LBJ held onto Vietnam for a long time just because he felt he had to follow through on Kennedy's war.

As far as the contention that anti-war liberals believe that the Vietnam war was a war crime perpetrated by the US, well, of course the fact that we took homicidal charge of one side of a nationalist war that had nothing to do with us, and vaporized a small southeast Asian country for no reason reads something like, I don't know, a war crime. Especially when the people that are running the war allegedly don't know as much as a postal clerk with a high school diploma.

McNamara could have resigned in protest. He didn't. He is like Colin Powell appearing before the UN; if you are in a position of power, it comes with responsibility. You will pay in the end; the only question is how many millions have to die in the meantime.

In "The Fog of War", McNamara admitted that the fire bombing of Tokyo was a war crime. He admitted that if we had lost the war, he and Curtis LeMay (among others) would have been tried as war criminals; "we were war criminals" he said. If that is true of a strategy of bombing innocent civilians in an arguably just war, what conclusion can we make of the bombing of millions of innocent civilians in a war that we can never justify?

You tell me. I think LBJ finally got it. I just don't think McNamara ever did.

Now onto the current batch of war criminals. What do you say - shall we wait forty years before we hear the slightest mea culpa? Is that the best we can do? Perhaps forty years from now an enlightened writer will tell us how we all got it wrong - no war crimes here. Oh, wait....it's already happened.