From the initial "Shock and Awe" invasion in March 2003 through President George W. Bush's declaration during a visit to Hanoi in November 2006 that the Vietnam War showed the United States would "suceed unless we quit," the war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate definitively that the United States had learn the lessons of Vietnam. With countless lives lost and the situation in Iraq more desparate than ever, it is clear that something much closer to the opposite is true: U.S. foreign policy makers have learn little from the past, even as they have been obsessed with the "Vietnam Syndrome."
