Many of the most stidently spoken historical lessons, examples, and parallels are drawn from the details of wars of the past. For Americans, Vietnam is the chief example. Pundits and would-be pundits use selected episodes from that war to argue on both sides of the current debate on the war in Iraq. One historian who has written a great deal about warfare, Victor Davis Hanson, writes that much of the commentary on warfare is uninformed by history. He suggests that, for our own safety, we should study war more to support rational and realistic decisionmaking.
“A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself—despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.”
Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2299
