>Carrol wrote:
>
>> It isn't myth:
>>back in February of 1968 a Colonel really did announce to a
>>TV camera that they had to destroy the village to save it.
>
>But be fair, Carrol: that statement has become the
>canonical example of mindless fanaticism, on par with
>the canonical definition: redoubling one's efforts
>after losing sight of the goal.
Don't forget this paragraph from the WV history of U.S. terror bombing:
<quote> Colonel Harry Summers Jr., the Vietnam War historian and former professor of strategy at the Army War College, was blunter. In a column titled "'Collateral Damage' a Familiar, Often Intended, Part of War" (Los Angeles Times, 8 February), Summers noted that the deliberate targeting of the civilian population in order to break the will to resist "didn't start with 'We had to destroy the town in order to save it,' the unfortunate remark of the young Army officer in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war...." The carpetbombing of Vietnam only continued the U.S. forces' "scorched earth" policy in Korea, the firebombing campaign in Germany and Japan and-the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. </quote>
Of course now in this more sensitive age, we don't bomb civilian populations directly - just destroy the infrastructural conditions of their existence and turn them into weed-eaters.
Doug