AP Photo
This is a Feb. 15, 1989 file photo of the last Soviet to leave Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, left, with his son Maxim, at the bridge over the Amu Darya River, at Termez, Uzbekistan. Max looks like a guy who got his dad back.
Learning things the hard way is a painful experience. Learning the same thing a second time the hard way seems like stupidity. I do it all the time...
So it seems with the United States. The stone-cold obvious lessons of Vietnam were:
1. Overwhelming technical superiority doesn't beat primitive righteousness (see also, American Revolution);
2. Ignorance is not a virtue;
3. History has teeth.
Instead, American society seems to have learned:
1. If overwhelming violence doesn't work, the solution is more violence (see Curtis LeMay Syndrome);
2. If a free press exposes the lies on which a war is based, then the solution is to eliminate a free press.
It's not looking good for an outbreak of common sense in NATO any time soon, like Lisbon.
