Pretty good article on lessons of history

Worth a read. A couple of selections below. We should not allow our nation to be misled again as it was misled in the 60s and 70s.

America's last `long war' offers lessons for Iraq, experts say

Previous presidents, they note, made many of the same arguments about Vietnam that Bush and his aides are making about Iraq: The war there was part of a larger struggle against a monolithic enemy, and Vietnam's neighbors would fall to communism like dominoes if the U.S. were defeated.

That turned out not to be true: The U.S. lost the battle in Vietnam but won the war against communism anyway.

American troops remained in Vietnam long after hopes for victory had faded, in part because U.S. officials feared that withdrawal would hasten the spread of communism. In hindsight, many scholars think that the communist takeover of Vietnam backfired by prompting the Soviet Union to become overly ambitious.