During the Christmas holiday I watched Fog of War, Errol Morris' coolly noir documentary on the professional life and legacy of Kennedy and Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Within half an hour, the movie had me hopping mad. Here was the firebombing of Japan presented all by itself, clearly flirted with as a war crime, completely without context: it was about thirty months into the war with Japan (a war begun by their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor), nearly seven years after the Rising Sun committed the Rape of Nanking, two years after surrendering Americans in the Philippines were forced into the Bataan Death March and brought to horrifying labor camps, at about the same time Allied Pacific forces were beginning to capture island after Japanese-dominated island. A brutal, ruthless empire by any standard, one that America was determined and at times desperate to defeat - and yet none of these facts were alongside poor McNamara, proof of what happens to a man after four decades of demonization. Instead, a repulsive population-to-population comparison of bombed Japanese cities to American cities, followed by McNamara quoting a dumb remark by a military counterpart, to the effect of "If we'd have lost the war, we would've been tried as war criminals."

Yes, along with every other unwilling American authority, man or woman, Mr. Secretary. The real question would be whether the mass executions would take place before or after the Rape of the West Coast, or, say, New England. I doubt Japan or Germany would have rebuilt the United States as a sovereign democracy had they beaten us. Oh, I haven't been so angry in years. I tried my best not to insult my friend OX, who served as assistant to the director for what was an otherwise skillfully produced film.

One more part of the film put me through the roof. McNamara was talking to a Vietnamese politburo leader in Vietnam just a few years ago. McNamara mentioned the war and, admittedly, felt like decking the communist when he launched into a litany of Red propaganda - that it was Vietnamese independence, not totalitarian domination, that occurred when Saigon fell in 1975.

Enter an Impromptu from Jay Nordlinger this morning about a Vietnamese dreamer:

Like many thirtysomethings, Hau Thai-Tang has whimsical boyhood memories of the first time he saw a Ford Mustang. But they don’t involve moonlit drive-ins or Main Street cruising.

His mental images of the muscle car icon are set in war-torn Vietnam, where Mustangs served as a backdrop to raucous USO shows staged for homesick American troops.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” said Thai-Tang, who was accustomed to cars like his family’s two-cylinder Citroen.

“Just seeing the proportions — it left such a lasting effect,” he said of the Mustang. “It stood for everything that was great about America.”

...Today, Thai-Tang, 37, is chief engineer responsible for bringing to market the fifth generation of America’s top-selling sports coupe and convertible for 18 consecutive years.

“You’re essentially CEO of the Mustang company,” he said.

The catch? Mr. Thai-Tang and his family escaped from Saigon and that old despot fool's "independence." Read the article, and it's not a mystery what Thai-Tang probably thinks about America and independence, either.

I DON'T AGREE: Via Glenn Reynolds, the Belmont Club argues that a prolonged war on terror can and will lead to "the two sides [resembling] each other." Was that military axiom intended for the phenomenon of free nations fighting against totalitarians trying to pull them back down under tyranny? Hardly. A review of The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Adam Hochschild includes the most nightmarish abstract I've ever read:

In brief, the book is the story of the almost unbelievable orgy of violence unleashed over several months by the Japanese army after it occupied Nanking, the capital of Nationalist China, in December 1937. There is dispute about the death toll, but most serious scholars place it in the hundreds of thousands [300,000 is the accepted number]. Chinese men were forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers and daughters. Japanese soldiers gang-raped women by the tens of thousands. They nailed women to trees. They drove stakes through their vaginas. They bound the hands of Chinese men, lined them up in long rows, and machine-gunned them into huge burial ditches. They bayoneted babies in front of their mothers. They buried people alive. Soldiers had "killing contests" and boasted to Japanese reporters of their scores. Some of the carnage was recorded on film. An American missionary (the United States was not yet at war with Japan) took movies, and a colleague smuggled the footage out of the country sewn in his coat lining. Japanese soldiers took still photos, then brought their film for developing to Chinese photo shops where horrified employees, at great risk, surreptitiously made extra prints.

The Jewish and ethnic Holocaust we should know well. From what veterans tell, campaigns undoubtedly hardened Allied soldiers - but there is an unbridgeable gulf between free men, embittered by the death around them and fighting for their lives, and the primal abomination that was Nazi and Rising Sun evil. The Belmont Club's analogy is sound in the sense that weary American and allied soldiers increasingly risk using poor judgment and grim tactics. But absolutely no further.