One of the reasons we had bombed Laos was to preserve our credibility, to show that even if America was defeated in neighboring Vietnam, we would make the victory a costly one for our adversaries. In our post-9/11 chapter, I knew there would be no victory in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in any other new war that we might start in that part of the world. I thought of how Obama chafed at the argument that he needed to bomb Syria to preserve his own credibility. “That’s the worst reason to go to war,” he’d say.
