I just watched Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth, said to be the third of his Vietnam trilogy, following Platoon and Fourth of July. I was much moved by Heaven..., an incredible life odyssey of a Vietnamese woman, Le Ly, caught soup to nuts from the French colonialists to the American invaders and finally, Vietnamese liberators. She even marries a Marine and lives in San Diego for some time.

As captivating as Le Ly's life adventure is, what struck me over and over was the immeasurable destruction of Vietnam and Vietnamese society resulting from the American invasion. We destroyed that country--how does it go, "I had to destroy the village to save it..."? I always knew this, but Oliver Stone shows this. Such an insight is worth seeing the movie for.

And in the end, we did not 'save' Vietnam. My neighbor Al, a lifelong Air Force soldier and Vietnam Veteran, still believes America could have won that war, and my rejoinder is that our victory could only have been achieved by wiping out practically all the Vietnamese people, so what would have been the point?

The ruination of Vietnam for ideological and economic reasons is only one of many events that condemn America and give the lie to American exceptionalism. Just in my lifetime we see Korea, Iran, Guatemala and others..., Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya et al, actions that destabilized and or destroyed entire nations and caused the deaths of millions of people. Not much to be proud of, sorry to say, and the impulse continues as there is evidence that the US had a hand in the Ukraine rioting that led to the ouster of its kleptocratic  president, Yanukovych. I am quite sure that US motives for removing Yanukovych had nothing to do with his corrupt administration and everything to do with his rejection of European neoliberal policy. In other words, if he had been willing to go along with European austerity and privatization policies, he could have as many gold-plated bathtubs as he wanted. His sin, like those of many past autocratic leaders, was to reject Western leadership. Perhaps Oliver Stone could yet make a film about the downfall of one of these autocrats who strayed from the Western path.