[ClearCase_guy]

I've never understood the whole Best and Brightest thing.

In 1995, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara announced in his memoir, In Retrospect, that he had secretly known, during the Johnson Administration, that we could not win in Vietnam, and needed to pull out.

Okay. We beat Nazi Germany, and beat Imperial Japan simultaneously. But it was just flat-out impossible to beat North Vietnam. Even after the Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong were virtually wiped out and the Communists had nothing else up their sleeve (except Jane Fonda), it was just flat-out impossible to beat North Vietnam.

This is a defeatist attitude that an intelligent decision-maker in Washington should have been ashamed to admit to owning.

[mrustow]

If you think he was bad, read the following review of Lewis Sorley's book, A Better War, and have your heart broken.

A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999)

[VietVet]

I cannot read Robert McNamarra's mind, of course. Even less can I look back in time and tell what he was thinking in 1965 (and being a pyschologist, I think his ability to look back and truely remember what he was thinking then is more limited than he might admit). But if it is true that he did not believe we could win the war in Vietnam as early as 1964 or '65, then he was extraordinarily pesimistic, and dead wrong.

There is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you believe you are going to lose, you hold back your reserves, to cut your loses, and guess what, you lose.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the US did not lose the Vietnam War. We quit. That's worse.

VietVet

[xm177e2]

We couldn't win the Vietnam War... without being willing to attack North Vietnam. If Ho Chi Minh wasn't satisfied with half of his country, we should have taken the whole thing from him. Leaving the Communists a base from which to attack us was a terrible mistake. When you go to war, you have to go to war and engage your enemies, not make arbitrary borders and refuse to go beyond them.