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November 3, 2008

Online Readers’ Forum: Is John McCain really a war hero?

In 1952 and 1956 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was defeated by Ike Eisenhower. Asked what he had learned from the double defeat, he said never run against a war hero.

Comes now another “war hero” for president. On Oct. 28 a letter by Thomas Morgan questions whether John McCain is an “honorable, heroic fellow.” He answers that the candidate is a “war criminal.”

Mr. Morgan did not explain why.

Let me try.

McCain has boasted on many occasions that he knows how to win wars and contrary to Obama, he has been tested.

Neither McCain nor the USA won the Vietnam war. The genesis of that war goes back to l953, the selfsame year that President Eisenhower helped end the Korean War. When the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh broke free from the shackles of French domination in l953 at Dienbienphu after long, bitter years of insurgency, our president supported the anti-Ho, anti-communist forces in the south. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon escalated the war until, finally, Nixon saw the futility of it and ended it in a tragic defeat.

Since those were the Cold War years vis-à-vis both Soviet and Chinese communism, the rationale for the hot war in Vietnam was “the domino effect.” I.e., the loss of Vietnam would embolden our enemies to conquer nation after nation and thereby swallow up all of Southeast Asia, along with the natural resources valued by the West.

Among the architects of our policy were Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy, and Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon. NcNamara several years ago wrote a mea culpa confession in a book titled IN RETROSPECT. About Vietnam, he wrote that “we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why. I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions, but of judgment and capabilities.”

That ill-conceived and disastrous war cost 58,217 American lives, 153,452 injured, and an estimated 500,000 to two million Vietnamese.

Kissinger’s angry critics, both here and abroad, condemned him as an unindicted war criminal. Very much like those Democrat congressmen who have tried to impeach President Bush and Cheney because of the Iraq war.

Ho Chi Minh’s war of many decades against the French and Americans was a fight for independence, a war for nationhood. Its leader cited our Declaration of Independence as his justification.

How did a small and poor country humble the greatest power on earth? By no less than the attrition of moral tenacity.

Sadly, in 2003 when we invaded Iraq, we seemed to have learned nothing from the enormity of our criminal misadventure in Vietnam.

John McCain a war hero?

Mr. Morgan’s denial is not frivolous.

The senator owes the Vietnamese an apology for any casualties he caused in that monstrously unjust, bloody, and extenuated war.

Let it also be said that the Vietnamese captors owe him an apology for the ignominy of a five-and-a-half-year imprisonment, torturous and bestial, that flagrantly violated the statutes of the Geneva Convention and any other standard of human decency.

— Saul Rosenthal

Terre Haute

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