Commies and Islamofascists - in 3 parts (Part 2)

The errors of the right and the left cost us something in the last conflict. The left's underestimations of communist intentions undermined a united position in our efforts to respond. But at the same time the right's overestimation may have had us spend way to much to repel the threat.

Part of that may have been that many on both sides were fighting the last war. In this case, it was WWII.

I believe that RWR took the right stance - he knew the Soviets were a paper tiger and thus played a high stakes game which we ultimately won. Sometimes it is right to make a high stakes bet. As RWR said so eloquently "Trust and Verify." I also believe that some of the left, including Johnson and his cabinet including McNamara and his general including Westmorland, were stuck in an unreasonable position of wanting to repel the commies yet not offend the far left. Thus, in Vietnam we were faced with the worst possible situation - buying the ideas of commiting to the battle with little long term thought of how to be successful.

The Vietnam war was also a defining period of my life. Johnson thought he could run the war from the White House. He did not trust his generals (in my mind with good reason) but he kept inching into a position that ultimately killed 50,000 of my generation for a war we were not prepared to win. McNamara and the other "brilliant" strategists were filled with the hubris of Washington (and possibly Detroit) and their constant reliance on numbers games served us poorly.

A second reality of that experience suggests that democracies are not very good at prosecuting a war - so when you get into a war you need to be clear on objectives and goals. I am not sure that the administration actually thought carefully about that before they went into Iraq. (Although I will admit that the goal of democratizing one country in the Middle East is one concept that I think makes some sense.)