Thanks.

Counting casualties is a bit difficult when napalm and 2000 pound bombs are dropped into heavy forests and villages. Our bombing campaigns (whether in Iraq or in Vietnam) earn us far more hatred than benefit.

If McCain volunteered for Vietnam duty then he was taken in by the blatant propaganda issued by our government promoting that war. That dimishes his stature as a presidential candidate, in my opinion.

@ in 1962 a little booklet co-authored by Bertrand Russell and Russell Stetler appeared.

The title: War And Atrocity In Viet Nam.

Included a chronology of events beginning with the French witdrawal in 1954.

Included Eisenhower's assessment of the country's value in natural

resources.

Also:

Napalm. Defoliation. Burning villages.

'Strategic Hamlets' (civilian population concentration camps.)

The tremendously lethal AR-15 rifle.

(Apologize for lack of more memory)

I wish i still had my copy of it.

It was part of what began to unravel and unmask our intrusive and unwarranted agression there.

Which led to knowledge of the secret, cruel, incorrectly suppositioned domino theory later touted to justify indiscriminate savagery under the guise of fighting Communism.

Not that North Viet Nam wasn't communist. But they were fiercely independent; unaligned with Russia or China. And they weren't invading anybody else's country.

I wrote before that the false premise for entering into that conflict is equivalent to the BushII lie about Iraqi Weapons Of Mass Destruction.

Kennedy, then Johnson, then Nixon, all swallowed it and followed it.

McCains can win only by killing or hiring every single human being in a country like that. Bribe and Bomb- what a great democratic principle to export.

Are there now 4 million displaced Iraqis?

Notice his ignorant mischaracterization of the Bath Party?

Greed, Racism, Tyranny and Ignorant Stupidity, Anti-Morality again attempt to profit while inflicting misery.

They bleat: Give Me Loyalty Or Give Me Death. They didn't even have the decent wisdom to honor Pat Tillman's family with the true story of his tragic sacrifice.

The Founding Fathers of our nation would have musketed these Hatriots back into barred caves.

I used to conventionally oppose Republicans. But these murderers are not Republicans. They are a plague of annihilation and usurpation under a tarnishing patina of political and polemical perversity posturing as a Party.

In the guise of protecting sheep, they keep crying wolf to intimidate responsible reason or dissent. Inherently, they despise democracy and traditional debate. They hide or destroy or deny evidence.

I feel we should no longer care to keep 2 Party scores, except in regard to the groundswell for Obama. Both Parties must renounce the errors and injuries of current, past, passed and surpassed policies decimating our heritage, balance, and free existence.

Lead us/follow us in vote and voice and choice.

Come together and rescue us all.

We want to be proud again.

We can and must strive in cooperation to higher reach and free speech a reversal in vision.

Halt derision and division.

Hillary was near as 'Red' as Lincoln was ' Blue' in that awful Iran threat.

Stop that stuff.

Focus on repairing and reconstituting our besieged Republic.

Sorry for any incoherency caused by the typographical error in the first sentence of my previous comment. I certainly agree with you that Richard Nixon increased casualties for all of those involved in the Vietnam War by prolonging the war, and I just wanted to emphasize that the high casualty rates from 1969 until 1971 were not caused by efforts to disengage our military forces from the Vietnam War. With regard to Iraq, I understand that removing our invasion forces will cause some difficulties, but I am in complete agreement with you that prolonging the war in Iraq will only make these agonizing difficulties worse.

"fools glorifyin' themselves & tryin to manipulate Satan"

--Bob Dylan

The name is spelled V-A-L-L-E-L-Y.

I ordinarily would let that go by, but I consider a correction to be relatively important, in light of the fact that Paul Vallely's name is misspelled "Valley" within the text PDF of the "Mindwar" document itself, as found on the Internet.

http://www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/MindWar.pdf

You'd think they would have caught that mistake.

Lots of interesting quotes in there...I was always struck by the use the word "ethical" in the essay, especially as related to perhaps the most telling phrase employed by the authors in their summary- "coerced into effect by the United States."

Mad Bomber McCain was a substandard naval aviator. During his captivity, he may have collaborated with the enemy, unlike the toughest of the POWs, men like Robinson Risner, Jeremiah Denton, James Stockdale et al.

Today, McInsane is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Israel Lobby. When it comes to putting Israel's interests front and center, McInsane would do so without question.

"Did Orwell write a sequel? I don't remember the exact phrase 'MindWar' from 1984, but it certainly resonates of NewSpeak."

It isn't from Orwell. Did someone say it was? It's from Aquino and Vellely's monograph. I suppose people have apsychological reluctance to get this fact into their heads.

America's addiction to war can be traced all the way back to the Civil War. This war was and still is seen as a moral crusade against slavery but what precipitated the war were the economic consequences posed by the threat of the south seceding. Every war is economic power masquerading as a moral crusade. The American War of Independence was a war about taxes.The Iraq war is a war about oil and oil politics. It has also been called the first colonial war of the 21st century. It's a text book case of a war fought for profit. I don't think the moral damage that slavery did to America has ever really been calculated. For a country so dedicated to liberty it was a schizophrenic state of affairs to have human beings kidnapped and bought and sold like cattle and it seems to me that not only has it influenced the treatment of the American working class (the memory of how enormously profitable a business can be when you don't have to pay wages hangs over the corporate world like the memory of a golden age)but it has made it easier to believe that certain people have no rights. Neither the right to a fair trial nor a presumption of innocence. Indefinite loss of liberty in Guantanamo Bay is just another form of slavery. A great Civil War era lawyer, William Garrison, said of slavery: 'That which is unjust cannot be law'. It took John Yoo and the neo cons to prove him wrong. I've never understood how people like McCain can imagine that the media could have told the truth about the Vietnam war and made it look pretty or noble. Perhaps they just expected them to tell 'patriotic' lies and thereby prove the saying that 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' The military establishment created a myth about Vietnam: a virtually identical myth to that created by the German High Command after World War I. The German myth was that the noble German military had been betrayed by Jews and the left and that was why they lost the war. These were the very groups targeted by the Nazis. The American military created a myth that during the Vietnam War they had been betrayed by the media and the left. The surveillance laws the Republicans want to push through before they lose office are to target 'liberals' not terrorists. Their ultimate aim is to control and monitor any group that can challenge them politically. The irony is that they continually bleat about freedom and democracy while they believe in neither.