One of the interesting exchanges last night was between John McCain and Ron Paul. McCain accused Paul of advocating isolationism. In the course of the discussion, McCain brought up the arguement that America never lost on the field of battle to the North Vietnamese. Paul rebutted by accurately relating a discussion between the late COL Harry Summers and a North Vietnamese Officer at a diplomatic function after the war.

Summers said, "You know you never defeated us on the field of battle."

The North Vietnamese replied, "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant."

Here's your answer to the "So what?" question.

First, McCain also said (paraphrasing) the war was lost because the American public lost its nerve and public opinion caused us to withdraw. That is partially true. Ask yourself the next question. Why did the American public lose its nerve and generate public opinion causing us to withdraw?

Answer: the war was being poorly fought on a macro scale by our civilian leadership. That leadership violated almost every one of the Principles of War. (Yes, there is such a thing. It's been around in our military since 1922.)

Second, the author of the book detailing those violations is COL Harry Summers. The book is On Strategy: A Critique of the Vietnam War. Here is a link with a biography of the late COL Summers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Summers

Summers book was the basis of one of the questions I submitted to YouTube for the debate.

See the question and some other videos we posted yesterday at www.youtube.com/author331.

More to come.