There’s a folk tale about a not-the-brightest boy who’s always applying the lesson of the last problem to the current situation, with risible results.
Every day his mother sends him off to someone’s house to bring home something. Every day he ruins whatever it is by using the previous day’s method of transport—so he puts butter on top of his head (which was how he should have carried something else, which I can’t recall), & it melts down his face. He drags a fish behind him on a string, because the previous day that’s how he should have brought home a puppy, etc.
I often think of that folktale (and apologies for not remembering it better—I was in grade school when I read it) when examining how wars are fought. The French, in particular, always seem to be using the previous war’s strategies when they’re losing the current one.
Anyhow, the tale cropped up again in my mind when I heard the news that the architect of the Vietnam War died Sunday, in bed, at age 93.
Robert S. McNamara and other best-and-brightest of his generation just could not get over the whole appeasement scenario, or the sense that Harry S. Truman lost China to the Communists. Not that I’m a proponent of appeasement, but, really, you have to put things into context. And McNamara and the others just couldn’t seem to do that.
And so we spent more than a decade and 58,000 American lives (and God knows how many others’) following those policies.
The thing about McNamara, though, that gives me hope is that, after 30 years of stalwart silence he eventually admitted that his policies had been wrong, that he had been wrong. In the end he was a mensch.
And I’ll bet we’ll wait a lot longer than 30 years for anyone from the recently-departed administration to admit that their Iran-Iraq-war-on-terrorism policies were wrong on a massive scale.
Can't you just see that butter melting down their faces?
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