LOS ANGELES -- It's understandable. Now 85, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in his new book "Wilson's Ghost," is urging that America get involved in foreign crises only under the umbrella of multinational efforts. And you would take that view, too, if you had been the boss of the U.S. Defense Department under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and had led America into its Vietnam nightmare.
But that philosophy -- combined with China's avowed policy of noninterference in other states' internal affairs and Europe's predictable greediness to cultivate the 79-million-strong Vietnamese market -- means that the Montagnards, one of Southeast Asia's venerable highland tribes, will probably be extinguished from the face of the Earth.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, it appears, is back to its old cruel tricks. While trying to burnish its image so as to entice foreign investment and trade, it has been hunting down and killing off its Montegnard ethnic minority, largely harmless agriculturists who sided with America during the Vietnam War.