the US has no business killing foreigners unless they directly threaten the US, which hasn’t been the case for decades, if not longer.

What was 9/11?

We may have been better off supporting Ho in the early days, especially as it would have given Uncle Ho’s government a chance to flounder on its own, but there was no incentive to do so. Truman only decided to recognize Tito because of Churchill, as it was the latter who convinced Truman that Tito was a nationalist first, and that recognition of his regime would help the U.S. shut off the Yugoslav border to Greek communists engaged in a civil war against their government. (and it worked!) My only argument with Mark are his implications that Vietnam was a war between the “Vietnamese” and the Americans. It was between two legally recognized Vietnamese states, and to quote a line from the The Sadness of War, ...why do we call them puppet troops, when they fight so hard…” (Uncle Ho, by the way, was not a nationalist first. Indeed, his position within the party depended upon his reputation as a long time member of the Communist International, who had spent his youth outside of Vietnam as a revolutionary. Indeed, he had to get Joe Stalin’s permission to return to his own home. The fact that he even asked should tell Mark something.)

Mark has never sat down with a member of the former Communist guerrilla structure whose husband was executed by the Diem government, who looked him in the eye and stated that had she only known what was going to happen after “reunification”, she would have supported the Diem government as the lesser of two evils.

Simply put, Indochina was not on our screen in 1945, except for a miniscule OSS effort that was fleeting. By 1975, it was off our screen again, except for those of us who had developed an unhealthy fondness for the place and its peoples.

“pham-trai mai mot luoui guom” – (swords best sharpen on wind and dust)

The line about Mr Hitchen’s head smacking his brow made him sound rather geeky.

“1) The Vietminh were allies of the United States and Britain against the Axis during the Second World War. The Iraqi Baath party was on the other side.”

Sure, but Saddam was just as much a creation of America’s own CIA as Manuel Noriega and Augusto Pinochet. I suppose I could also mention another currently infamous personage….

“7) Vietnam was a victim of chemical and ecological warfare; Iraq was the perpetrator of such illegal methods and sought to develop even worse nuclear and biological ones.”

Well, first of all, Iraq was not the perpetrator, Saddam’s regime was. Secondly, where the hell did Saddam get the WMD from? The name Donald Rumsfeld suddenly springs to mind….

“12) President Eisenhower said if there was a fair election in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh would have won; the Islamist in Iraq declared that democracy was an alien concept and threatened all voters with murder.”

And yet Iraqi elections result in people with Shi’ite Islamist and pro-Iran leanings winning substantial numbers of votes.

“13) The Americans in Vietnam employed methods (”˜search and destroy’; ”˜body count’) and weapons (napalm, Agent Orange) that targeted civilians. Today, it’s the proxies of neighbouring dictatorships or of international gangster organisations who indiscriminatly kill civilians.”

Seems to me a hell of a lot of people, especially those of the Iraqi persuasion, would disagree quite vehemently with that point.

I don’t really want to be picking a fight, it just seems to me that Hitchens’ views, as presented, are so full of huge holes that a large number of truck bombs could be driven through with room to spare for the odd nutter with an AK47.