McCain: we could have won Vietnam

Very few military historians agree with McCain's bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat -- which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict -- the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war's enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.

To reach such an assessment requires, at the very least, a review of the relevant statistics, although such data can scarcely convey the war's horror. Numbers are useful, however, because they provide perspective on the assertions of politicians like McCain, whose rhetoric of "victory" is otherwise meaningless.