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The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam

You won't catch me reading another book about a hopeless war--I just finished "1776" by David McCullough not too long ago. But I was interested in the review of "The Coldest Winter" in Saturday's WSJ by Peter Kann. Halberstam died in an auto accident before it was published, but many reviewers say it is his finest work.

Kann sets the scene for us, and the landscape might look vaguely familiar:

"Korea was a war waged by a centrist Democratic administration and undermined at home by the Republican right.

Two decades later another war effort, in Vietnam, was undermined by the radical left.

And today that scenario is being repeated as the Democratic left, virtually every Democratic candidate, is demanding that the U.S. abandon Iraq."

The reviewer then concludes

. . ."post WWII America has proved incapable of the national unity needed to keep military commitments and support its troops in a meaningful way."

He also concedes that the unsatisfactory truce that ended the Korean War did result in a booming South Korean economy and that our time in Vietnam, for all its failures, bought time for other small Asian nations to develop and become stronger to stand up against China. Gee, I would have thought the starvation deaths of those millions of North Koreans (death through Communist democide) would have gotten more space. Maybe starving children only look pathetic after a few generations? Maybe I'm just too recently returned from Ireland?