We are presently being exhorted by our sages to “learn the lessons of Vietnam.” “We must learn them,” they warn us, so that “there will never be another Vietnam,” and they generously tick the lessons off for our benefit.
Not unexpectedly, each instructor harvests from the Vietnam story the lesson he has sown. To the pacifist, Vietnam has proved that war is wrong; to the isolationist of both the old and the new models, that we should steer clear of entanglements beyond our shores; to the fiery chauvinist, that we should have finished things off in a week with a couple of well-placed H-bombs; to the computer-strategists, that we failed to understand that the cold war is over; to the New Left theoreticians, that peace can be won only by the overthrow of imperialism; to the Birchites, that U.S. policy is controlled by Them. This Vietnam lesson-drawing proves once more, it would seem, that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
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