Housekeeping

Hanoi Train Street (Trần Phú), cutting through the city's Vieux Quartier, is neither on the wrong nor the right side of the tracks, but both sides, and lined with cafés where trainspotting locals and tourists gather, often to take pictures of the trains passing at a perilous distance between the rows of tables, and of each other (this picture, from Vespa Adventures, is a lot better than mine). Apparently closed down in 2023 by concerned officials after a near-accident, it is now back in operation.

I really should have said something sooner, but I've been pretty busy with this Vietnam vacation, more packed with planned touristy activities than I'm accustomed to, not that I'm apologizing for that (in fact I'm kind of liking that aspect a lot, especially in Hanoi, a wild city it would have taken us years we don't have to be able to negotiate for ourselves),  but I haven't had a couple of hours together when I could put my thoughts to the current situation since New Year's Eve. We'll be reducing the pace considerably starting tomorrow, and heading for familiar Singapore in a couple of days, and I hope to be posting more substantially again soon.

Losers

Louis Wohlheim in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928). Via MoviesSilently.

Here's world-famous military historian David Brooks with his analysis of the agreement between Iran and the P5 + 1 powers, as a defeat for the allies on a par with the worst US defeats of the past half century:

The purpose of war, military or economic, is to get your enemy to do something it would rather not do. Over the past several years the United States and other Western powers have engaged in an economic, clandestine and political war against Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program....

There have now been three big U.S. strategic defeats over the past several decades: Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran.

Well, now, for starters, I think we can recognize that definition, as coming from Major-General von Clausewitz: war is "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will", and I think we need to note very clearly that this applies to the aggressor, not to those who oppose an aggressor. And I can assure Mr. Brooks that if the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China had understood that they were supposed to be carrying on a Clausewitzian war against Iran they would have objected very strongly and let it be known, because it's, um, illegal, according to chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

Annals of derp: Kissinger arithmetic

The old vampire Professor Kissinger was on the NPR this morning sharing his fascinating views. He seems to be a little challenged with respect to the arithmetic thing.

Dr. Henry Kissinger:

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of [the military], that the Obama administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon administration ever did. And, of course, B-52s have a different bombing pattern.

On the other hand, drones are far more deadly because they are much more accurate. And I think the principle is essentially the same. You attack locations where you believe people operate who are killing you. You do it in the most limited way possible. And I bet if one did an honest account, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.

Memorial Day

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.

Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.'

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?... (John Kerry, in testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971)

From Southern Foodways.