Vietnam

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

Did Robert McNamara know Vietnam was unwinnable?

Former US defense secretary Robert McNamara was known in Washington as a relentless, humorless taskmaster or even “a computer on legs.” Then on February 9, 1962, a little over a year after taking office, McNamara made headlines when he danced the twist with Jackie Kennedy at a White House party. A few days later, the then-first lady sent by hand to McNamara a lighthearted Valentine collage she had made from the news coverage of their dance. After her husband’s assassination, their friendship deepened. Jackie’s opposition to the Vietnam War grew, as did her conviction that McNamara secretly opposed it.

mcnamara

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

The dog that haunts Russ Benzin

Batavia, New York Fifty-five years after his Vietnam-era military service ended, Russ Benzin remains haunted. Not, thank God, by memories of the state-sanctioned mass murder that is war, but by a seemingly intractable and feral military dog he came to love. I met Russ years ago in the third-base bleachers at Dwyer Stadium, where we whiled away many summers watching a set of trained canines – the Batavia Muckdogs of the (now defunct or, rather, exterminated) New York-Penn League. In the manner of ballpark friendships, ours developed over the years: from nodding acquaintance to grumbling exchanges (“why the hell didn’t the third-base coach send that guy?”) to friendship.

dog russ benzin

Monday

Jenna Stocker

Tim Walz’s military crime is all in the cover-up

There’s an unmistakable aura if you’ve ever been to any of the 172 VA medical centers run by the Veterans Health Administration. It’s a quiet somberness — near reverence — that demands attention and respect. Many veterans are elderly, and they glide through the hallways in wheelchairs pushed by volunteers. They often wear jackets with American flags and service branch patches that look oversized on their age-shrunken frames. But from under their hats, almost always in caps of the conflict and associated service ribbon, their eyes reflect a knowledge of human nature that goes along with the horrors of war. They aren’t asked to explain their service; you can see it in their faces. At the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, this is a common scene.

war
Daniel McCarthy

The American epoch of failure 

For 20 years America built a Potemkin village and called it Afghanistan. Now this cardboard democracy has been trampled down in a matter of days by the Taliban. The speed and comprehensiveness of the rout cannot be explained by Joe Biden’s blunders. The war has drawn to a humiliating end not because of a weak president’s missteps in the final weeks but because the entire project was misconceived. Afghanistan was not ready for democracy and trillions of dollars in American aid could not even begin to change that fact. With US and allied forces providing security, the Afghan government did not even have to fulfill the most basic function of any state. The Afghan government lived off charity — foreign money, foreign arms.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Joe Biden’s grapple with senility is the GOP’s 2024 message

Weep, ad men. The Republican Party shouldn’t have to rely on any of you in 2024. They don’t need your creative, your deployment of over-the-top grainy crime videos, your use of shooting up legislation with AR-15s. All the GOP needs this election is an editor and the C-SPAN live feed of Joe Biden coping with senility. For a cringe-inducing twenty-six minutes in Hanoi, Biden put his diminished, cranky, meandering mental capacity on display. He rolled out his frequently deployed Hollywood equivalent of a Mandela Effect — his own personal Berenstein Bears, his Stouffer’s Stove Top — about a movie scene that simply does not exist in the plane of existence which we, for our sins, inhabit.

joe biden

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Pelosi is right to put China on notice

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has always had a flair for the dramatic. During the Trump presidency, for example, she ostentatiously tore up his State of the Union speech. But for sheer spectacle, it will be hard for Pelosi to top her “will she, won’t she” visit to Taiwan this week. In spite of the suspense, there was never really any doubt about it. For weeks China has issued dire warnings about the perils of her visit. So, as it happens, have several commentators, including The Spectator’s Freddy Gray, whom I debated on the Americano podcast, and who seems to have a bad case of the collywobbles about the Pelosi trip.

Thursday

Casey Chalk

China: one bully to rule them all

Several years ago, I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It’s located, a bit surreally, in the former United States Information Agency building. Formerly called the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes," it showcases various captured US military equipment. What was particularly jarring to me was learning of the millions of Vietnamese civilians killed during the Vietnam War era. Of course, there’s a bit of irony here: a building formerly dedicated to projecting American public diplomacy and messaging in Southeast Asia now serves the different propaganda purpose of seeking to portray America as a violent aggressor guilty of war crimes.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Kamala Havana?

It was supposed to be a welcome break from serving as the Biden administration’s stooge. Instead of being the mascot for the Biden administration’s busted border policy, Kamala Harris would get a pleasant little trip to Singapore and Vietnam, to shore up her foreign policy experience just in case, God forbid, the Democratic party has to actually rally behind her as president. But instead of gaining experience, Harris has to worry about US diplomats being shot with a laser beam, or something. Yes, that’s right, the latest incident of Kamala’s ill-starred vice presidency is an outbreak of Havana syndrome. US State Department officials announced that it was investigating a 'possible anomalous health incident’ in Hanoi, the preferred euphemism for the mysterious disease.

kamala havana

Tuesday

Monica Crowley

Saigon and Kabul: what would Nixon say?

Having worked with former president Richard Nixon during the last years of his life, I’m often asked what his view would be about some present-day issue. Given the rampant comparisons between the calamitous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban following the Biden administration’s precipitous withdrawal and the disastrous fall of Saigon in 1975, Nixon’s perspective would have been invaluable. He believed, like all strong, effective US presidents, that American strength means greater stability and peace and American weakness begets instability and conflict. With the end of the cold war and the bipolar international system, the US became the global hegemon, nearly solely responsible for a stable global order.

NIxon

Sunday

Taki

The differences between British and American readers

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. New York This feels strange. Since 1977, I have been writing the High Life column in the London Spectator and concentrating on American goings-on for a British audience. Now I am about to write the High Life for an American readership. Are American readers very different? You betcha, though they are supposed to speak the King’s, or the Queen’s, English. Never mind. Both countries take their democracies seriously, and their freedoms even more so. One difference is that, over in the Old Country, people know that democracy is rare in distant parts of the world.

new york american

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

The Trump-Kim summit: what we know and what’s useless prattle

Cable networks have countless hours to fill, and it is far easier to fill them with speculation about a closed-door summit than to wait patiently for real news. We won’t have that news until the Trump-Kim summit ends. Oh, we might get a nudge about whether the talks are going well, but nothing more. That’s how secretive negotiations work. To save time, here’s the essential background. It covers almost everything you can hear — and several things you won’t — for the next 24 hours ‘live from Hanoi’ on all the networks. Kim Jong-un’s only goals are to stay alive and in power. To that end, he and his father have spent enormous resources to build deliverable nuclear weapons, with substantial aid from China.

trump-kim summit

Wednesday

Godfrey Elfwick

Smirking, the infamous facial expression of the far-right

The students of Covington High School, Ky., were the subject of a recent viral video which shocked me to my very core. Everything about this encounter triggered me. Their obvious disrespect of a proud Native American as he bravely made his way towards this group of vile, contemptuous MAGA hat-wearing teenage boys, banging his Ceremonial Drum of Peace and chanting a mystical tribal incantation (presumably in order to ward off the sickening Aura of Trumpism) disturbed me so greatly that I actually did a small vomiting. The final straw came when the courageous Native American Vietnam veteran came to a stop and peacefully hammered on his drum directly into a young boy’s disgustingly smug face. What did this hateful Apostle of Trump do?

godfrey elfwick smirk

Tuesday

Cockburn

Who is the real Nathan Phillips?

The Native American man with the drum who – now so infamously – approached a group of high schoolers from Covington, Ky., on Friday has been widely identified as a Vietnam veteran. But he isn’t one. The man is called Nathan Phillips, and he identifies with the American Indian Movement, an extremist separatist organization tied to at least one murder. He was singing their song when he approached the kids. He told the Washington Post that he was ‘blocked’ by the students, though later video evidence suggests that that was an exaggeration, to put it mildly. Phillips remains adamant that the boys should be punished for what they did to him, and has refused to meet with them.

nathan phillips