US Senator Ted Kennedy issued a scathing assessment of the US-led war in Iraq, saying it “may well go down as the worst blunder in the entire history of American foreign policy.
And those words came from the man whose own brother gave us both The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam.
Thus proving my long standing theory that irony is lost on drunks.
Comment by Paul — Friday, April 30, 2024 @ 3:30 pm
Jeffrey Record, visiting research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute ; 4/29/04; Salon
I see only two dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that ought to be looked at to provide some instruction for what we face in Iraq. One is our failure to create a legitimate, indigenous government in South Vietnam despite an enormous effort over a long period of time.
The other is the issue of the domestic sustainability of this entire enterprise. We ultimately got out of Vietnam because it became domestically unsupportable from a political standpoint. We’re not there yet with Iraq for sure — it took us seven years to get out of Vietnam. Reasoning by historical analogy is generally dangerous, and these wars are very remote from each other in time, place and strategic circumstances. So you can easily say, “This is not Vietnam.” But are there dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that may have some parallels to the problems we face? Yeah, I think there are.
Comment by Stephen — Friday, April 30, 2024 @ 4:34 pm
US Senator Ted Kennedy issued a scathing assessment of the US-led war in Iraq, saying it “may well go down as the worst blunder in the entire history of American foreign policy.
And those words came from the man whose own brother gave us both The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam.
Thus proving my long standing theory that irony is lost on drunks.
Comment by Paul — Friday, April 30, 2024 @ 3:30 pm
Jeffrey Record, visiting research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute ; 4/29/04; Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/29/record/
I see only two dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that ought to be looked at to provide some instruction for what we face in Iraq. One is our failure to create a legitimate, indigenous government in South Vietnam despite an enormous effort over a long period of time.
The other is the issue of the domestic sustainability of this entire enterprise. We ultimately got out of Vietnam because it became domestically unsupportable from a political standpoint. We’re not there yet with Iraq for sure — it took us seven years to get out of Vietnam. Reasoning by historical analogy is generally dangerous, and these wars are very remote from each other in time, place and strategic circumstances. So you can easily say, “This is not Vietnam.” But are there dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that may have some parallels to the problems we face? Yeah, I think there are.
Comment by Stephen — Friday, April 30, 2024 @ 4:34 pm