News from Around the World

Above all, the Vietnam War was never banished from the minds of our war planners and policymakers. Even when they were playing an opposites game with Vietnam (as in, for instance, their no-body-bags, no-photos-of-the-American-dead-coming-home policy), Bush administration officials had a clear case of Vietnam-on-the-brain, as did the society they represented. In 2003, while the invasion of Iraq was still ongoing, the historian Marilyn Young commented, “In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds.”