Last night I watched The Fog of War, in which Robert McNamera reconsiders his participation in LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War by the addition of ground troops to the campaign of air bombing approved by JFK.  Of course, there’s a lot more to the film than that, but that’s the crux: What would have happened if JFK hadn’t been assassinated.  According to McNamara, Kennedy would have seen that Vietnam was an unwinnable ground war and would have pulled out with only a small fraction of the final total of American casualties: 58,196.

Here’s the Fog of War trailer (by the way, the music, by Philip Glass, is astounding):

Speaking of unwinnable, Keith DeRose has pointed me to a public television documentary that he describes as “one of the most important links I’ve ever found.”  The title is Torturing Democracy.  The entire film is online, and here’s the trailer: