The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort. This cynical attempt to take a page from Joe McCarthy s book and deny the enormity of U.S. crimes in Vietnam gives the lie once again to those who present Kerrey the executioner as another victim. Bob Kerrey was commander of an elite unit trained precisely to carry out assassinations. In response to the revelations, some point out that above Kerrey were bigger mass murderers who lived high on the hog ever after, such as Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger. In other words, like other war criminals before him, Kerrey was just following orders.
Liberals repeat the time-worn refrain that Vietnam was a mistake.
In fact, some of those same mass murderers retrospectively said the same thing, and Richard Nixon wrote a book titled No More Vietnams . Like his superiors, Kerrey was part of U.S. imperialism s failed effort to defeat the Vietnamese Revolution. The peasants and workers of Vietnam struggled for half a century to rid their country of Japanese, French and U.S. imperialism and the murderous puppet regimes that served these overlords. With immense courage and determination, they resisted and defeated the American imperialists and this was a great and inspiring victory for the exploited and oppressed the world over, from South America to South Africa, from Europe and Japan to here in the belly of the beast. Making direct war on the entire population of Vietnam and killing between two and three million people, the American ruling class, Democrat and Republican, starkly showed itself to be a depraved and barbaric barrier to human progress.