Spring 2009

 Comments

The scale of the catastrophe in Iraq—hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead along with more than 4,200 Americans; unknown numbers of wounded and traumatized; several million Iraqis uprooted and exiled; untold numbers of maimed, malnourished, and unemployed; massive damage to the physical country; not to mention the damage done to American diplomacy overall—not only invites a long, hard stare at the wreckage but ignites the question of what to conclude. Almost everyone can agree that “mistakes were made,” but which, by whom, and why? Richard Nixon wrote a book called No More Vietnams, after all. Arguments against repeating the past are perilous, so much so that it might be said that all policy errors are the products of wrong lessons extracted by misplaced analogy—Munich a faulty deduction from 1914, Vietnam a false extrapolation from Munich, and so on.
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