Vietnam, a National tragedy?

From Matt Taibbi, NY Press , via Cursor

What did the Byrd essay, as well as all the hand-wringing editorials in all of these prestigious papers, have in common? Not one of them mentioned the number of dead Vietnamese. That number, incidentally, is not so precise and round as our beloved 58,000. It is an estimate we place in the millions, with the conservative count edging toward one million, the outside edge pushing for three million. It is hard to be precise when you are counting bone fragments in B-52 craters.




If anyone needs a hint as to why the rest of the world hates us so much, this is why. Thirty years after the fact, America still insists on looking at Vietnam as "our national tragedy," the tragedy apparently being 58,000 dead, a regrettable loss of public confidence in the institution of the presidency, a brief period of political turmoil on American campuses, an enduring hesitancy to use military force. Just look at our movies about Vietnam: the tragedy is always the poor Vietnam vet who comes home and suffers through a long period of monosyllabic turmoil and intermittent employment, doomed to live out his days limping around his hometown in boots and a shabby field jacket, wondering where his life went so wrong.




Right. That's the tragedy. Not the indiscriminate murder of one-sixth of Laos. Not the saturation bombing of wide swaths of rural Indochina. Not the turning of ancient cultures into moonscapes. Not the napalming of children or the dropping of mines and CBUs into civilian villages for scare value.

So, what exactly are those casualties in Iraq? and do we include the dead during the years of enforced sanctions as well?