Does Vietnam still haunt, in terms of Iraq and the neocon push for war?
For a lot of those people Vietnam still sits out there, but it means different things to different people. I don’t at the moment see it with the neocons, but more with the [Armed Services], with what came to be known as the Powell/Weinberger Doctrine of Overwhelming Force. And that was certainly a reflection of the Vietnam War—the sense that if we were going to go to war, we should have the nation behind us and we should be sure that the troops had everything necessary to win. Did some of the anger and bitterness that many people felt about Vietnam bleed into Iraq? Maybe not, because it’s as if 9/11 shut down that chapter and a whole new book opened. It wasn’t a book without a prologue, but Vietnam was not the player it might have been. If there’s any Vietnam element now, it’s just in the comparison that Iraq has become like Vietnam. Do you agree with that comparison? There are a lot of ways you can compare Vietnam and Iraq, depending on who you are and what you’re trying to prove. Muc
