The US: We don't learn lessons

I've said this for some time--we, the US, just don't learn lessons. We don't learn our own lessons and we don't learn from other country's. I first realized it with Vietnam. The French had been in that country for years. They got out. They failed and left. What did we do? We marched right in. More than 50,000 dead soldiers later, we finally realized there was no winning. The renowned writer for The New York Times, Gloria Emerson wrote so brilliantly about our not learning from the Vietnam War in her highly-acclaimed book "Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, And Ruins From The Vietnam War."

There are a lot more examples. I'll only give a few.

The first President Bush said this about attacking Saddam Hussein and Iraq in his book "A World Transformed" in 1998:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

Did we learn? Did we listen? His own son took us into Iraq and quickly proved the first President Bush correct.

How about learning from the old Soviet Union on spending for defense? Their nation collapsed. What are we doing? We spend more--far more--than any other nation in the world on defense to the expense of the nation. It's as though we're still in the old, long since ended Cold War. It was just announced in The New York Times that the National Guard's budget was being examined for cuts but no, we're going to keep their money flowing.

Finally, how about learning from England and their Empire? We can all see now how that turned out and why. It just isn't sustainable, let alone wise.

Afghanistan? Let's see, how many nations over humankind's history could we have possibly learned that invading that region would be a mistake? Many. How about if we only looked in the last 50 yaars, when the Soviet Union went in, got bogged down and finally called it quits and walked away? Could we not have learned from that?

We need to start learning. We need to start, as a nation, paying more attention, evaluating and doing the right things. This isn't sustainable, in so many ways.

Links: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x399751; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/us/air-national-guard-lobbies-successfully-against-budget-cuts.html?ref=us; http://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/emerson/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Emerson;
http://www.amazon.com/Winners-And-Losers-Battles-Retreats/dp/0393309258#_