McCain and his tortured view of Vietnam

Joe Conason, at Salon.com, in an article titled, "What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam," writes that in spite of his valor and service to his country, "almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain's military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president."

Conason believes that what McCain did learn in Vietnam was that "torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive." Conason says McCain "has spoken with great moral authority on that issue."

Well, not entirely. Not when McCain is now backing Bush's promotion of torture or at least the "right" of the president to order the torture of those in American custody.


What Conason finds inexplicable is McCain's continued insistence that "we could have won -- that we should have won -- [the Vietnam War] with more bombs and more casualties."

Conason quotes a McCain statement made in1998 in which he said, "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable. ... I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed."

McCain also said something similar to that five years later. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."


The truth is something else. Conason notes that most military historians disagree and are convinced that "...a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life" would not have achieved an American victory.

We must wonder about McCain or any man, politico or no, who maintains such a casual disregard for the preciousness of human life - either American or Vietnamese. Between 1965 and 1973, over 58,000 Americans were killed in action. That, however, is just a fraction of the cost in Vietnamese lives, which is estimated at one and a half million!


McCain is also wrong to assume this was a noble endeavor to protect the South Vietnamese from those damn North Vietnamese commies. Again, from Conason: "...the politics of Vietnam and the geopolitics of the war were at once more complicated and simpler. Complicated because South Vietnam was a corrupt dictatorship that had forfeited the loyalty of most of its citizens, who regarded the United States not as a liberator but as the latest invader in a long procession that dated back centuries and included the French and the Chinese as well."

The United States, says Conason correctly, had no "vital American interests" in South Vietnam, at least none that "required so many deaths and so much suffering."

Today "we live in peace and reconciliation with that same regime [communist] ... "


McCain's view of Vietnam, helps us understand why he thinks it would be OK for the United States to hang around in Iraq for another 100 years, in spite of the fact that the war in Iraq is just as fraudulent and stupid as the war in Vietnam.

Or as Conason says, "...it is hard to imagine why voters would elect a president who still believes that 60,000 American dead and more that 300,000 wounded in Vietnam were not quite enough."

Read Mr. Conason's entire article here.