QUOTE OF THE DAY - AT 8:01 A.M. ET: The death of Robert McNamara continues to resonate in the press.  It gave the left, of course, a new birth of kookdom.  They could drive the knife in once more, and rejoice in their moral purity.  After all, the left had opposed the Vietnam War from the start.  Of course, it opposed everything else we did to resist Communist expansion, but it was proudest of Vietnam. 

And in McNamara they had the perfect weapon - a participant, the key planner, who later "admitted" he was wrong.  Whether he really meant or not, we will never know.  McNamara, after all, was never above currying favor with the trendies.

But new histories of Vietnam are telling the story of a war that could have been won.  And Seth Lipsky, in today's Wall Street Journal, provides some needed perspective to all the yapping over McNamara's death:

McNamara's great failure, in short, was not that he continued to front for a war he had concluded was wrong and had decided we would lose. It was that he collapsed in a war that he should have known we could win -- and then derided its very purpose. A central tenet of the left, after all, is that all the dying in the Vietnam War was without purpose. Here is how that famous New York Times editorial put it about McNamara: "Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose."

I'm not so sure lack of purpose is what those infantrymen will be whispering to McNamara in whatever purgatory he finds himself. Many did grow cynical with respect to the American expedition -- I talked to hundreds of them in 1970, the year that I covered combat for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

But there also were many GIs who believed in the war in which they were risking their lives. And there were millions of South Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians in and out of uniform who understood the consequences of defeat. It is these people -- if they escaped the killing fields and re-education camps in which so many perished -- who have been living with those consequences ever since.

COMMENT:  The key word is "consequences."  When you lose a war, or pull out, there are consequences, some lasting years, or even decades.  Our withdrawal from Vietnam wrecked American foreign policy until Ronald Reagan rebuilt it in the early 1980s.  And "No more Vietnams" provided a powerful rallying cry for the left, replaced now by "No more Iraqs." 

But it was the people of South Vietnam, and especially Cambodia, who bore the most painful consequences of our withdrawal, and bear them today.  To these people the American left, comfortably installed in universities and newsrooms, has nothing to say.

July 9, 2009