James Fallows Vietnam Quotations

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.