So McCain thinks we didn't use "enough force" and what was needed was carnage without constraint? Is he wrong about that?

Presumably, if you're willing to kill everybody you've got a pretty good chance of "winning", right? So the logic of McCain's argument is we just need to kill them all? Short of that, those pesky Inhabitants will still be there to be pesky, though, right? As pointed out upstream, (1) how many million Vietnamese civilians actually died in that conflict, versus the American casualties? (2) wasn't the last "relatively successful" externally-imposed regime change really Rome over Judea? and (3) look how well USSR did in Afghanistan even with the ability to avoid domestic "debate" the merits of the invasion; and (4) (the one I really liked) If a foreign power invaded the US to "Liberate" us from Bush-Cheney, what would the consequent "insurgency" look like as Americans thought their freedom threatened and what would it take to "defeat" that?

Sure, if you kill everybody, you could well call yourself a "victor". What have you won? And are you weak of Will if you question whether the slaughter of an entire population might not be morally or even economically justified?

I seriously doubt that, in a presidential campaign, even John McCain would accept the logical consequences of the argument he is making. I would hope that the American people would not accept it. Somebody ought to ask McCain what he means by suggesting we did not bomb enough, or kill enough, in Vietnam. What would the right number have been, given what we now know it was? More than a little bit chilling when the "not enough" abstraction is put directly into the terms of human deaths.

Let's stop re-fighting old wars in current entanglements, and evaluate the situations that Bush has created on their own merits. That's when progress can begin.

John McCain

Fighting the last war by starting the next one.....

I missed your point.

There are too many darn words in Glenn's post. Seriously. For the same reasons Chomsky doesn't gain traction on television, this argument is unlikely to gain traction w/ most "voters".

"Too many words" is not the reason Noam Chomsky doesn't get traction on television. It's the message itself, no matter how many words were used to express it, that is deemed crazy, fringe, radical, etc. and thus not worth hearing.

As he has pointed out, when you have a message that is something other than conventional wisdom being said over and over, then it's impossible to express the message in a persuasive way using very few words. Those who espouse conventional wisdom need not offer evidence or articulate their premises, because it's all just assumed. Only those who challenge that wisdom are required to do so, which makes that message one that, by definition, can't be accommodated on television.

The way to "win" a war? Invade a country, defeat its army, "cleanse" it's population, and settle yours there. After all, war has always just been a method to gain resources at the expense of a neighboring people.

That's why the new definition of War in both Iraq and as seen in Vietnam is so twisted. There is no real way to "win" when you are merely occupying a nation who's people have no wish to see you there, with a relative handful of troops.

Unless, of course, your goal is to maintain a steady return of defense appropriations...

These types of "wars" are really waged on the American people. They are nothing more than a bulk transfer of resources from the American Taxpayer to the Defense Industry.

The Military didn't realize who it was really fighting in Vietnam. However, with so many of our "best and brightest" working on the issue, they eventually got it together. The quotes in Glenn's column from Pentagon hacks trumpeting their psyops campaign against the American people waged via the "independent" media are evident of this.

Dropping propaganda leaflets on Vietnamese villages was just a waste of time. They should've been dropping those on Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. The bombs falling on Hanoi? Better directed on Berkeley and Ann Arbor.

... the "stabbed in the back narrative" of Vietnam in the context of a new book advancing that narrative by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces during the disastrous 2003-2004 period when, among other things, the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred.

It's worth noting that this goes back further than Vietnam in the mythology of American reactionaries. Korea and even the Second World War were the subjects of similar narratives by the embittered cranks of the day — many of whom were in uniform.

Patton was an infamous early advocate of a dolchshtoss legend for how the Soviets came to dominate eastern Europe after the world war. That the United States as a nation was simply not interested in continuing the last war into a new phase against the Russians was utterly lost on him. The notion that the American people — not American generals and in particular not a single particular American general, no matter how "bound to destiny" or whatever he said about himself — are the ultimate arbiters of American policy was repellant to Patton, and he was influential in (or maybe merely symptomatic of) the coalescence of a larger body of thought that said that US interests had been betrayed by weak will in the top echelons and Communist fifth columnists at home.

So "stabbed in the back by Commies" became a theme in the years after the war, fueling conspiracy theories and witch hunts that set the stage for Korea.

It was MacArthur who articulated the American dolchshtoss legend about Korea in its most popular form — that our hands were tied from doing what any nation must do, by weak politicians who listened to secret Red Chinese sympathizers. MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons against China to end Chinese involvement in Korea — his "no substitute for victory" comment is actually a sinister, deranged expression of that benighted sentiment that echoes those of what passes for leadership in the present day — but wiser heads prevailed in those days and he was ultimately relieved of command.

By the time Vietnam rolled around, no new invention was needed. The American right wing already had a generation's worth of mythmaking at their fingertips, and all that was needed was the slightest sign that things were going poorly and the hoary backstab story was trotted out again.

The thing is, of course, MacArthur and his ilk were right. If the United States had sacrificed a hundred thousand more soldiers and used atomic weapons we could have completely rolled over Korea — or nukes plus a million more soldiers in the case of the Soviets. But the cost would have been staggering, not only in lives and wealth but in any hope of realizing the uneasy nuclear detente which we've successfully salvaged in the decades since.

But the dagger-stabbers don't really think about consequences — they think about absolutes. There is no substitute for victory, after all — even if the price of that victory is endless subsequent defeat. It's a form of madness, as its adherents inevitably reveal the more they speak. They're simply crazy.

Why does all this matter? Because it's important to understand that Vietnam was not the birth of this strain in reactionary thinking. McCain's — and America's — obsession with reliving that conflict and seeing in it the source of all wisdom belies the fact that, throughout the entire modern era, there have been crazed, bloodthirsty idiots saying the same sorts of things. The particulars of the conflict have never mattered. The people and issues and time and place have never mattered.

The stab-in-the-back myth is a fundamental dysfunction in certain people's way of thinking, and anyone who is subject to it should simply be — as MacArthur was, despite being a war hero and everything — separated from the levers of power.