The naïve patriotism of the general public was manipulated and exploited. "Our country right or wrong" "Love it or leave it" "These colors don't run..." Meanwhile the architects of the war knew all along that the reality was far more complex, that our intervention was doomed to failure, that the succession of strong men we supported were corrupt and anti-democratic, that the domino theory was bunk, that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated, that there was and never would be "a light at the end of the tunnel."
Tens of thousands of young Americans died, hundreds of thousands were disabled, millions of Vietnamese were killed, all sacrificed on the alter of our patriotic hubris.
The revelations that came afterwards--the revisionist histories of our destructive interventions in Iran, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile--all threw into doubt the notion of "American exceptionalism."
Not that we haven't done some good in the world, or that other nations are equally or more venal.
But it's a long way from liberating concentration camps in Germany to napalming children and destroying peasant villages in order "to save them."
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