Take out the word "Vietnam" and replace it with "Afghanistan and Iraq" and you would be hard pressed to know the difference if you had no knowledge of military history.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...George Santayana
Yes, these so-called "counter-insurgencies" to "protect freedom" merge into one issue, one that the US seems powerless to refrain from engaging in, and why is that? Is it a failure of retention, an inability to remember how failure occurred coupled with an innocent repeat of the same failures?
ReplyDeleteOr is instead that failure, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder, and these events which to some are mistaken adventures, to others are compensatory and rewarding in one or more of several ways. These people are quite ready to remember the past, and to repeat it in ways that are quite expensive and destructive of others, but what do they care about that, if they profit thereby.
"War is a racket. . .the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
-- MajGen Smedley D. Butler, USMC, double recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, 1935