Are there lessons to be learned for Vietnam in American foreign policy today, for American journalism today?
Neil Sheehan: Sadly, I don’t think the American nation has absorbed the experience of Vietnam. They haven’t processed it. They haven’t come to grips with it. If they had, we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. The central lesson of Vietnam is the United States can do evil as easily as it can do good. Now that is something that grates on most Americans. They think America is an exception to history, that the United States can never do anything wrong, that what we want, the rest of the world ought to want and that they do really want it. Well, that is not necessarily true. So the lesson of Vietnam is: before you go out to do violence to other people and violence to your own young, your own people, you ought to be absolutely certain that you have to do it. You don’t pick a war. Iraq was called a “war of choice.” You don’t start wars of choice. I mean, you start a war that you absolutely have to. If you go to war, you absolutely have to, and we didn’t have to go to war in Vietnam. We thought we
