Musings and Meanderings

The Three Brothers Together for Christmas Albany, San Francisco and France together in NH

The lesson learned from Vietnam NOT applied to Iraq. When I was younger I read an amazing book called "The Fire in the Lake". The premise of the book was that we were doomed to failure in Vietnam. Before you get all hot under the collar this book had NOTHING to do with Military reasons. The book was a sociological and economic analysis of the Asian and Vietnamese cultures. It's main premise was that bringing democracy to a people which whom the whole concept of Democracy was foreign was doomed to failure. This is a failure of American policy in general. The exportation, sometimes at gunpoint, of our version of Democracy belies a hubris on the part of Americans that pays no attention to the culture or society we are trying to import into. The abysmal failure in Iraq can be attributed to this inability to perceive or even imagine a peoples who are not ready for, or have any background in, democracy. For some reason administration after administration, Democrats and Re