By contrast, the picture alluded to in the primary post is one that was used to deceive, to convey an impression that was falsely sustained for decades. One may question the impact of a single photo, but by any standard it was iconographic nonetheless and in point of fact was used, knowingly at times and unknowingly at other times, to deceive. Here’s how one journalistic report describes it:

“First, the executed man was nearly always identified as a ‘Vietcong suspect.’ (He was later confirmed to be a Vietcong officer.) In short, he was the enemy — one of the people who was killing Americans.”

Even Eddie Adams, the photographer himself, was often wont to describe this context, a context all too often elided or occluded from the framing of this renown photo.

Further, concerning photos of war dead and other tragedies of war in German and other publications. Did they similarly picture the dead that resulted from Rwanda, when European powers turned their heads? (Rwanda was a German colony before it was a Belgian colony.) Are they showing photos of Darfur, and the results of inaction by EU, the UN and other powers? Are they showing photos of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the results of the failure to do anything there? Did they show photos of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, such as those reflecting on stories that, for example, were only belatedly told by CNN bureau chief Eason Jordan, various stores as the wikipedia reference demonstrates, but primarily this one in Hussein’s Iraq? Or those told in Kanan Makiya’s accounts in Republic of Fear or Cruelty and Silence?

The consequences of not doing something that needs to be done can’t be captured in photos precisely because the action or responsibility was not undertaken. Yes, editors have a degree of power, but they can’t print photos when they permit themselves to be coopted, as Eason Jordan and CNN did in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

I’ve read an account somewhere of the execution photo in which the editors of the newspaper who ran it (sorry, I don’t recall the newspaper) decided to run shots of civilians victims of the Vietcong on the same page because they thought the execution photo was just to inflammatory. Have you ever heard of this account? It was years ago that I read it. In any case, it gets me to consider all kinds of uses of photos in journalism. I made a brief visit to Germany during the outbreak of the the War in Iraq in 2003 and was astounded by the images of civilian carnage running in the German press, but when I got home a week later neither my local paper nor any of the major periodicals were running those kinds of images. So this led me to ask, who is doing the editing? Are the German editors picking photos because the majority of Germans disapprove of the war, or are the American editors picking photos because at the time 70% of Americans approved of the war? Are they picking what ever most reinforces the general population’s feelings at the moment? One day I was looking at the NY Times online and they had this AP photo of this Iraqi kid with missing arms, legs and massive burns on his chest. The caption said he had lost his parents and two siblings due to an American bomb. That day and the next I checked my local paper, and although the ground war was raging at the time, there was no sign of this photo, nor any other photo of dead or injured civilians, Iraqi soldiers, American soldiers/ marines. Nothing but burning Iraqi military vehicles, American marines storming a bridge, etc. What do you think? Something tells me editors have a lot of power.

FYI, Loan didn’t end up running a hot-dog stand in California. He ran a restaurant (or two) in Northern Virginia. I saw him once, years after the war ended, leaning against his lunch counter, looking very old and using crutches. No, I didn’t ask for his autograph. It was just a strange moment – realizing “That’s the guy…”

What is telling – though by no means revelatory since it’s so common as a rhetorical ploy – is the blanket dismissiveness you’re forced to use in order to avoid any and all thought that conflicts with your preconceptions, similarly in order to avoid any and all specifics. The “simple” fact is Vietnam is far from simple and certainly does not lend itself to very many uncritical and unreflective generalizations. That’s transparently so when those unflective generalizations are coupled with ad hominem sniffs at an entire class of persons deemed to exist below any level wherein their concerns need to be so much as acknowledged, much less addressed. In the social/political arena that is tantamount to assigning them a status of non-persons, non-existents. That too is telling, for it renders the otherwise latent interests of the putative “liberal,” the faux “liberal,” in a completely transparent manner.

Various posters within this thoughtful and critical retrospective and re-evaluation offered by Neo-neocon, myself and others, have in turn offered very specific and even highly detailed historical reflections concerning the era in question. Additionally this has often been done with links provided to supportive documentation and histories of the Cold War in general and Vietnam episodes more specifically. When posters put that level of detail, those types of specifics, on the line, they do so, in part, so that others can refute the historical account or the argument being offered if they so choose.

Yet instead of addressing specifics, you – in a manner that in fact is emblematic of the rhetorical initiatives and ploys so often in evidence from Left and leftish precincts – instead recline in the safe haven of sweeping generalizations and an equally generalized ad hominem dismissiveness.

And tellingly so.

You have a GREAT Grandma. Watching Walter Cronkite everynight and still immnuned to his biased reporting. With grandmas like yours, America will be fine.

Normally, I dislike hearing experts, especially academics (don’t know if you’re one) say things like, “If you haven’t read so and so, you can’t talk about this…”

Except when said academics agree with you, eh?

I certainly believe, strongly, that the USA should NOT fight in wars they are unwilling to win — unconditional surrender by the enemy.

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon — all were lousy at “Vietnamization” of the war. But war is always “evil” — YOUR side will inevitably kill innocent civilians. Still, as I wrote on MJ Totten’s blog, we owe the Vietnamese people an apology for NOT winning.

Change. Policy. Results.
The Left is critical of Bush because of neo-torture, and even some real torture, at Abu Ghraib, among other places. Such abuse is to be expected by any and all pro-war folk. Like me. Supporting the Iraq invasion means I’m stuck with the results, good and bad.

Nobody wants to put a number on an answer to the important question: how many would have to die before it is a “mistake” to invade Iraq? I say Bush gets an ‘A’ if it’s less than 2500 American soldiers. Because regime change in Iraq is very very good — and it’s worth something, it’s worth a lot.

But those anti-War Leftists who criticize Bush for the bad results of his invasion policy are intellectual hypocrites. Their double standard allows them to excuse the results of following the 1971 Kerry policy — leave Vietnam (and let thousands be murdered).

The USA left, and thousands, hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians were brutally murdered by the evil commies. Commies the US Army had been fighting against.

Anti-war Leftists who refuse to accept responsibility for the murders are a moral rot in civilization. How evil do the commies have to be to justify continued fighting, with minimal but real evil done in the fight?

How many must die in the Killing Fields before it is SO many that it shows the decision for the US to leave was a mistake?