This movie deals with only some of the lies about Vietnam. Inexcusable as they were, the lies told by the Americans were relatively small beer.
It was our Communist enemies who told the big lie — that war was a struggle for liberation by Vietnam’s noble comrades, who took on the Americans with pitchforks. What hooey.
The truth is that the war was a conquest of free South Vietnam by a well-armed, Soviet-backed regime in the north. At the end, the enemy emerged from the jungles with tanks and surface-to-air missiles.
The Pentagon Papers disclosed that our own leaders, in effect, refused to heed evidence that we would lose the war — and sent our troops anyway. “The Post” seems to buy into this theory. Yet it wasn’t sending troops that turned out to be the error.
Rather, it was assuming we couldn’t win. On the ground in Vietnam, our GIs did just that. In the most famous battle, Tet in 1968, our soldiers trounced the Communists. The cause of free Vietnam was betrayed in the US Congress, which had been turned by the anti-war movement.