Fourteen years ago I used that phrase here, though that time I was questioning whether the plethora of viruses that were showing up in our email would cause us to seriously limit our internet use, thus making our computers once again "personal". I've undoubtedly used it numerous times since then, though not in these pages. I reported then that although I had assumed that it was spoken by either Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara in a reference to part of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, they didn't really deserve credit for it (only for destroying villages, not making claims about the reason for doing so).

The Wikipedia entry on the journalist Peter Arnett reports that

Arnett's most famous act of reporting from the Vietnam War was a story published on 7 February 1968, about the provincial capital Bên Tre: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong." The quotation was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The accuracy of the original quotation and its source have often been called into question. Arnett never revealed his source, except to say that it was one of four officers he interviewed that day.