Legendary Vietnamese General Giap has died, age 102

I can't provide a link to this, because the computer I'm typing at has no cut-and-paste function.

Whatever you think of how unified Vietnam has turned out(and I'd say it's a mixed bag at VERY best), you have to respect the tenacity of the Vietnamese liberation movement, fighting against decades of French and later U.S. imperial asperations.

Just imagine the commitment required to carry on a fight like that for a longer period of time than any single war this country has ever fought(and probably for a longer total period than we've been in every war we were ever in put together).

The lesson we SHOULD have taken from that war was that no country should ever be denied independence from colonial rule. Instead, our leaders carried on the delusion that "we just didn't TRY hard enough", and even most of our political figures who started in the anti-Vietnam War movement ended up capitulating to that view and became just as hawkish as LBJ and Nixon...which is why we're still going to NEED an antiwar movement for decades to come.