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Vietnam taught us not to allow executive branch to lead us astray
Arthur Cyr totally misses the point of the lessons we should have learned from the Vietnam War in his Jan. 28 column. He implies that the lessons were about what we could have done better in order to win the war. The obvious truth is that we never should have been in that war in the first place.
It was foisted on us by an unrestrained executive branch with no regard for the real national security interests of our nation. They justified it with lies to not only the American public, but Congress as well. There are good reasons the Constitution limits the power to declare war to Congress alone.
Had we learned the correct lessons from the Vietnam War, we never would have allowed the Bush administration to mislead us into the disastrous war in Iraq. Again using lies and misrepresentations, they were advocating for a war in Iraq from nearly the day after the 9/11 attack. I won’t speculate on what psychological pressures Bush may have been responding to, but Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and posed no threat to our national security.
The obvious lesson is that we cannot trust our executive branch to lead us into war. It is apparently too easy for the national interest to be minimized, and competing interests to corrupt the wills of the relatively small number of individuals there. We need to restore the balance of power in our government, and limit the ability of chief executives to lead us astray.
Dan Roberts, Beach Park