"Beware of Reasoning by Historical Analogy"

Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Vietnam War, historian James Clay Thompson warned: the primary lesson learned was that the United States should never again go to war in a former French colony located on the other side of the globe, in a land with a tropical climate, against an insurgent force supported by a sympathetic communist regime in a contiguous state.. Thompson acknowledged the lesson’s limited applicability.

Pennsylvania Democratic Representative John Murtha, a decorated Marine who served in Vietnam, recently dubbed the American effort in Iraq “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusi...