Byron Allen Black
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

It was reported that American diplomats were shaking their [collective] heads in amazement when Dubya’s Iraq adventure got going: ‘It’s as though we learned nothing at all from Vietnam’.

Presumably ‘they’ had not. Or at least they had not inculcated the correct lesson. The Shrub himself was quoted on numerous occasions stating the USA could have ‘won’ in Vietnam, had it stuck with it. But of course he did not go into detail, or spell out whether ‘winning’ meant the same thing as ‘Mission Accomplished’.

Now a new nuclear standoff (mostly orchestrated by colonels who were infants during the era of the ‘balance of terror’). You would imagine someone would try for more originality. Particularly when unstable new players like Pakistan and North Korea have nukes.