History Not Only Rhymes...

...it actually does repeat itself. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest sat unread on my bookshelf for 35 years. It took the author's death in 2007 to elevate the title to the top of my to-do list--how bad is that? Describing how the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations of the 1960s got trapped in a hopeless war in Vietnam, the book is so well written that you feel as though you are in the room watching and listening as supposedly smart men (and yes, Hillary, they were all men) promulgate a huge foreign-policy blunder.

The difference between a mistake and a lesson depends on one's willingness to learn. Halberstam was hoping to impart a lesson, but a generation later we now know that Vietnam was a mistake to be repeated. As Charles Ferguson's acclaimed 2007 documentary No End In Sight reveals, the Iraq War has been deja vu all over again. Elected officeholders and their appointed acolytes have (again) ignored and suppressed the wisdom of bureaucratic experts and have based their decisions (again) on filtered intelligence. Raw technological superiority was supposed to overrun ideological zealotry--in months, not years. Traumatized vets were discharged, civilian casualties disregarded. And so on.

Netflix has No End In Sight in its Instant Viewing library. Subscribers can see it online tonight at no added cost.