Among the many acts of U.S.-inflicted devastation in the Vietnam War was the aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides to kill vegetation, thus making the Vietcong easier to hunt down and kill. However, the cancer-causing chemicals proved dangerous…
Tag: Vietnam War
Brian Willson’s Blood on the Tracks
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made many Americans feel good again, after Vietnam in the 1960s and the Oil Shocks in the 1970s. However, when part of Reagan’s “Morning in America” involved death-squad slaughters in Central America, some Americans, like Vietnam veteran…
Obama Slow-Walks Afghan Defeat
Like George W. Bush’s Iraq War, the Afghan conflict appears grinding toward an American defeat. However, President Obama doesn’t want the voters to recognize that fact until after Election 2012 to avoid getting the blame so he is stretching out…
Afghan War: No Vietnam Redux
Exclusive: Many on the American Left are furious with Barack Obama — and find nothing to praise in his gradual troop drawdown in Afghanistan. But the President’s speech may be seen, in retrospect, as an important turning point in U.S. war policy toward…
Today’s Pentagon Papers Warning
The U.S. government has finally released the full Pentagon Papers describing how the American people were misled into the Vietnam War. The declassification comes four decades after most of the document was leaked by Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg, who today says similar…
Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder-2
David Halberstam won acclaim and riches from his influential book, The Best and the Brightest, about the making of the Vietnam War, especially during the Kennedy and Johnson years. However, in retrospect, the book’s narrative asserting that John Kennedy and…
Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam shaped the American narrative of the Vietnam War, making it a cautionary tale about the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation…