Reply #38: I realize that LBJ passed civil rights, Medicare and a lot of other

[JDPriestly]

good social legislation. But he also increased our involvement in Viet Nam. Based on experiences I had with Vietnamese students during my studies in France, I strongly opposed the Viet Cong movement. But also based on those experiences, way back in 1965, I knew that the Viet Cong would prevail. It was very obvious is you just studied what was going on in the Vietnamese culture. If I could recognize the handwriting on the wall as a young student in France just based on my encounters with other students, surely LBJ with all of his access to intelligence and reports from Viet Nam should have known how hopeless that war was.

Also, LBJ virtually owed his career to Brown & Root which is now Halliburton.

I picked up the following book somewhere a few years ago:

http://www.amazon.com/Halliburton-Agenda-Politics-Oil-Money/dp/0471638609

I recommend that you read it if you want to understand the full scope of LBJ's legacy. There are two sides to it. LBJ was a hero in terms of domestic programs but really took us on a bad path in terms of our military involvements and the privatization of our military functions.

WWII is the last war we really, really won. Significantly, we have increasingly relied on the privatization of military support services in all the subsequent wars, many of which we lost or at least cannot claim to have won. Above all, as we privatized our military support services, we lost our ability to win the hearts and minds of the countries with which we have been involved militarily. Whether there is a causal relationship between the increased privatization and our increasing inability to win hearts and minds, I do not know. But certainly the possibility deserves some investigation.