Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam > Status Update

"A prince, says Machiavelli, ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone has scruples about the telling him the truth. What government needs is great askers." - what government gets through elections is the most effective liers, perhaps we should be sending people who they know are ignorant to parliament?

"Not ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence and, more fundamentally, refusal to grant stature and fixed purpose to 'fourth rate' Asiatic country were the determining factors, much as in the case of the British attitude toward the American colonies. The irony of History is inexorable."

"If this was 'arrogance of power' ... it was not so much the fatal hubris and over-extension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, ... Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. Nation-building was the most presumptuous of the illusions." - pub. 1984

"Morale among the remaining American forces sank, with units avoiding or refusing combat, wide use of drugs, and - something new to the American Army - cases of 'fragging' or murder by hand granade of officers and NCOs."

"The effect of the American Presidency with its power of appointment in the Executive branch is overbearing...If [appointees] are Cabinet officers, they have in the American system no parliamentary seat to return to from which they may retain a voice in government." - presidencial vs. parliamentary democracy.

"He quoted John Quincy Adams dictum that wherever the standard of liberty is unfurled in the world, 'there will be America's heart...but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

"In the American forces, short term one-year tours of duty, intended to avoid discontent, prevented adaptation to irregular jungle warfare, thereby increasing casualties since the rate was always highest in the early months of duty".

"Here was a sign of the vanity of nation-building. What nation has ever been built from outside."

"Reminiscient of British visions of ruin if they lost the American colonies, prophesies of exaggerated catastrophe if we lost Vietnam served to increase the stakes."

"...if Americans could have seen the value of accepting a strongly nationalist North Vietnam, Communist or not, a vigourous, independent, intensely anti-Chinese nation would have been a far better barrier against against the feared Chinese expansion than a divided warring country offering every opportunity for interference from across the border."