William Polk sends wrong message to the troops...

..and who, you may ask, is William Polk?

"William R. Polk is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. After studies at Oxford (BA, MA) and Harvard (BA, Ph.D.) he taught at Harvard until 1961 when President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. There, he was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Polk’s Folly, An American Family History; and The Birth of America."

So, as you can see, he's somebody. And what, you may wonder, is his message?

"Looking back at America’s most grievous intelligence failure, Vietnam, we can see an analogy. Bluntly put, we thought we could shoot or bomb them into doing what we wanted. We saw what we wanted to see and never managed to ask the fundamental questions about what the people on the other side wanted, how they functioned and how we fit into their world."

In all fairness, he does see a significant difference between Iraq and Vietnam. "...we have suffered more American casualties in the months since the invasion than in the first three years of our involvement in Vietnam."

I'm not sure that's going to comfort the "Not Vietnam!" crowd, though...


via Juan Cole