The situation in the Balkans isn't like Vietnam, we're told. And the situation when we first began sliding into Vietnam was different from the disastrous French experience in Indochina. The French warned us not to go there. We didn't listen, we're not listening still.
History can teach, but only if students are willing to learn.
In late 1961, President John Kennedy dispatched a small group to Vietnam. But Kennedy didn't take his own advice. Kennedy, like Lyndon Johnson after him, and Bill Clinton now, had an objective, but it was the wrong objective and the policies were also wrong, seeming to be made up as they went along. Those more than 55,000 names on the Vietnam War Memorial are testimony to the folly of wrong goals backed up by bad policies. Clinton says the purpose of the NATO bombing is to stop the ethnic cleansing efforts of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.