Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam

Or, How Not to Learn from the Past

Edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young

paperback

$16.95 / £10.99

From the launch of the “Shock and Awe” invasion in March 2003 through President George W. Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” two months later, the war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate definitively that the United States had learned the lessons of Vietnam. This new book makes clear that something closer to the opposite is true—that U.S. foreign policy makers have learned little from the past, even as they have been obsessed with the “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam brings together the country’s leading historians of the Vietnam experience. Examining the profound changes that have occurred in the country and the military since the Vietnam War, celebrated historians Marilyn B. Young and Lloyd Gardner have assembled a distinguished group to consider how America has again found itself in the midst of a war in which there is no chance of a speedy victory or a sweeping regime change.

Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam explores how the “Vietnam Syndrome” fits into the contemporary debate about the purpose and exercise of American power in the world. With contributions from some of the most renowned analysts of American history and foreign policy, this is an essential recovery of the forgotten and misbegotten lessons of Vietnam.

Marilyn B. Young is a professor of history at New York University and the author of numerous books, including The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990. She lives in New York City. Lloyd C. Gardner is a research professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of more than a dozen books, including Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam and Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, from Munich to Yalta. He lives in Newtown, Pennsylvania.