Delusions of Grandeur

In case I am ever called upon to contemplate a military solution to a perceived crisis in an executive capacity, I have made some notes to myself on reading David Halberstam's The Best and The Brightest about the men who made the decisions that got the US into Vietnam: 

In a war between anti-communism and anti-imperialism, side with anti-imperialism.

Take doubt seriously.  If the decision is important enough that people will lose lives over it, give skepticism an honest hearing.  Skepticism is probably right.

When it comes to war, Military expertise should not be consulted before the decision to go to war has been made. The man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.  A General is a man with a hammer.

Might does not make right; right is sometimes sufficient to defeat might.

Serious does not mean what you think it means in Washington.  In Washington serious means brave enough to be cowardly.  Brave means willing to favor risking other people's lives and stakes to the extent that your career is not harmed.  In Washington, this kind of serious and brave means your career is never harmed.  Actual bravery, actual seriousness is career death in Washington.  On the other hand, Washington bravery and Washington serious is actual death to people not in Washington.

Higher education at our most elite institutions is no inoculation against bad faith, conventional thinking and intellectual and moral cowardice.  On the contrary, it is all too often a predictor of it.  And what is worse: it cloaks bad faith, conventional thinking  and intellectual and moral cowardice  in fancy, pretty packages of self-justification.

Political grandstanding whims-- such as the uncharacteristically clever notion that Joseph McCarthy got into his head at just the right moment that his career would be abetted by reckless brandishing of the cudgel of  accusations of softness on communism against convenient targets in the government and in the opposition-- can have corrosive long-lasting effects on the course of history.  The deadly effectiveness of McCarthyism as a tool of intimidation and domination could in fact arguably be blamed even years after its inevitable coming apart for creating an atmosphere in which adventurism in Vietnam made political sense in a counterbalancing way to progressively minded Democrats.

The Bay of Pigs, which Kennedy elected in bad faith to pursue as a demonstration of his administration's competence, was a disaster that was the seed for Vietnam which was itself similarly elected in bad faith in hopes of redeeming his administration's competence. 

If you see something, say something.  Practiced by the same elite class of people as the political class, journalism becomes the curation of the status quo.  If you do journalism, you have a duty to humanity to sound the alarm on mistakes waiting to happen.

Nearly 50 years since the American evacuation of Vietnam we have failed every opportunity to demonstrate that we have learned from the well-documented, the exposed history of Vietnam.  Each circumstance "different this time", yet all of them tragically the same in the same essential sin.  And now, Ukraine.