This is an excellent collection of essays on the USA's wars, past, present and future. As the Washington Post noted, "the lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right. If the basic policy is flawed, the best tactics in the world will not salvage it." When the attacks on Vietnam and Iraq were mistakes, then all proposed solutions - a different strategy, more troops, more bombing, attacking neighbouring countries - will fail.

The editors write, "Iraq is most certainly the greatest so far of the neo-colonial wars as the great powers seek out spheres of influence and special advantages in the oil-rich areas bordering the Persian Gulf." Yet Rumsfeld lied, "it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." So did Blair.

The US resolution for war against the `threat posed by Iraq' was in the US state's long tradition of faking threats to justify aggressive wars. After 9/11, Rumsfeld's undersecretary Douglas Feith scolded the senior staff officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Why are you working on Afghanistan? You ought to be working on Iraq." Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, noted, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." And Bush told Blair, "the diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning."

In every counter-insurgency war - Japan against China, France against Vietnam, France against Algeria, Britain against Kenya, Malaya and Northern Ireland, the USA against Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel against Palestine - the people do not want to cooperate with the occupiers. So the occupiers, unable to find out about the resistance, resort to mass torture to get information. In Vietnam, the USA had its Operation Phoenix. Now it has Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo. As the Red Cross said, "The construction of such a system ... cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."

Once a counter-insurgency war has got started, the occupiers are doomed to defeat. Capitalism will drive imperialism to repeat the same disasters for ever - make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again - if we let it.

Iraq and the lessons of Vietnam is full of the background information we all
need to know about. Too bad we didn't know some of this before this crew was installed in the White House. The book is a series of articles by different people with expertise in each aspect such as intelligence, foreign policy, etc. The book is excellent but not an easy read.