What do the general, the (one-time) lieutenant colonel, and yours truly all have in common? We all tried to figure out what lessons the military had learned in Vietnam. Petraeus did so in his Ph.D dissertation, which Brian Beutler found to be vapid and unimpressive. Johnson did so in this paper, which I found trying to find out when I had written my paper, which I did as a graduate-school assignment in 1985 for either Paul Kennedy, Don Kagan, or Bruce Russett -- I can't remember who -- and appeared in The Fletcher Forum. It was called "Thinking Twice: The Weinberger Doctrine and the Lessons of Vietnam" and appeared there in the winter of 1986, according to Ms. Johnson's endnote.
Beutler's raising of the issue reminds me of something that's been nagging at me for five years now, which is this: Why in the world did the military let Iraq happen? Ronald Reagan and his cronies were almost as crazy about wanting to fight wars in Central America as Bush and Co. were about Iraq, but the military wanted none of it, and in my view, was able to prevent it by pointing out, over and over, that El Salvador and Nicaragua's problems were political, not military, and that once in, there was no way out. The military's lessons of Vietnam, in other words, were what kept our troops from fighting a ground war in Central America. Colin Powell made it difficult as hell for Clinton to commit troops to Bosnia, and we ended up with a mission that lost not a single life on the ground. (Though Republicans refused to support even that.)
Read the whole Altercation here.
