Reply #44: Webb was in the Vietnam war [View All]

[karynnj]

So, he knows a lot more about what happened in the battles and areas he was in. He also likely has, as people do on even less difficult issues, filtered his memory to fit his point of view. I would trust the views of reporters on the ground in Vietnam, such as David Halberstram as much as an individual soldier. You also have people like McNamara, who was the architech of the war, saying they knew it was unwinnable as early as 1968. A few years ago, a letter written by Kissinger to the Chinese was declassified that said the US would be open to leaving if there were an agreement that the North Viatnamese, China's client state, would not topple Saigon for 2 years. What that means is that John Kerry hit the nail on the head when he said that men were dying every day because Richard Nixon did not want to be the first President to lose a war. (Kerry's comments last year echoed this comment.)

Twice, that I have heard, Webb cited statistics saying that most Americans supported staying and fighting the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. That is simply not true. It is also irrelevent - that war was unwinnable and it was wrong. It's also not like we didn't try. We dumped more tons of bombs on Vietnam than both sides dropped in World War II. Estimates are over 3 million Vietnames died.(Nixon all had a massive bombing of Cambodia before we left.) I can imagine that everyone wants to think that the sacrifices they may were worth it, but Webb should have been able to dispassionately look at the whole picture.