Will We Ever Learn? As this is written, lame-duck President Barack Obama, contrary to all of his instincts and promises, has bowed to pressure from his critics and gotten the United States re-involved, not only in MIddle East conflicts in general, but in the most senseless of its millennia of conflicts, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We and our allies keep repeating the same mistakes, over and over and over again. Most of us heard repeatedly over the past decade of how the United States armed and trained the Taliban of Afghanistan, who sheltered Osama bin Laden, to oppose the nine-year occupation by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. My goodness, how could that go wrong? It was dubbed Charlie Wilson’s war because the main proponent, and even actor on the ground of the plot subterfuge was a lanky Texas congressman by that name with cowboy ambitions. Many would excuse the behavior because we were still in the Cold War with the Soviets, a maniacal and hysterical faceoff of two nations armed to the nuclear teeth with the ability to annihilate each other not once but for what, a few times over, 10 times over. After the first, what would be the point of the rest? All of that spending to ratchet up the time-over counter-threats finally broke the Soviet’s economic back at a time it had a leader sane enough to recognize that it could not keep up with American spending. Well, it turns out that was not the first, or last time we would aid of our own future enemy. Remember that little dust-up in Vietnam that cost 58,220 American lives during a fruitless conflict that lasted nearly 10 years? Born a bit too soon to be drafted for the Vietnam War, I nonetheless became interested early one as a young reporter who ended up covering domestic aspects of it. Bernard Fall’s “Hell in a Very Small Place, the Siege of Dien Bien Phu,” the battle that caused France to give up and walk away from the place altogether, provided my first background information on the debacle, but I must have forgotten about or never learned from the book, much about the history before then. It turns out the United States was instrumental in helping the eventual victor of that war, the North Vietnamese led by Ho Chi Minh. That help became a pattern of U.S. involvement that turned out to bite it in the rear end, based on several beliefs, including “the enemy of our enemy is our friend,” “we back anyone who professes to be anti-communist, no questions asked.” While researching that part of history for Tommy’s Wars: Paradise to Hell and Back,” I already had learned that the Yalta and Potsdam agreements among the Allies that divvied up the spoils from World War II, foolishly allowed the European Empires that had made colonies out of much of the Eastern Hemisphere, to reclaim them after the war was over. France had what it called French Indochina, its merged colonies of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Vietnam was strategic because a 7,000-mile loop of railroad lines extending all the way from India around and up through China, into the U.S.S.R. and on to Europe passed through Indochina, connecting at the China border with Vietnam. Japan began what was to become the Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II by engineering an excuse for invading China in 1937 (a la Tonkin Gulf, WMDs; you know the drill). The United States and some of what became the Allied nations of WWII, stepped in on the side of China even though they were not yet at war with Japan. Pearl Harbor (itself result of an amazingly insane debacle) , had not occurred yet, but would, in part, to cripple the U.S. fleet so it could not come to the aid of a slew of Southeast Asia countries Japan planned to invade at the same time near the end of 1941. Earlier that year a Vietnamese revolutionary espousing communism who had lived in exile for the previous 30 years or so, returned via China to start a revolution in his home country then on the verge of turmoil. On Dec. 7 U.S. time, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at the same time they launched invasions throughout Southeast Asia and were overall victorious. They did not have to fight for Vietnam, for the French acquiesced to Japan’s occupation, at least of the northern part of it. As the war went on, the Viet Minh, whose revolutionary plans had to be put on hold given Japanese occupation, began harassing the occupiers. Well now, here was an enemy of our enemy, so the United States, operating through its forerunner of the U.S. CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, helped Ho Chi Minh his cause.Throughout the war, even before the United States officially declared its role, U.S. fliers aided the Chinese in combating the Japanese in the area. The OSS also had that as a reason to help “Uncle Ho.” Finally in early 1945, as things began going badly for the Japanese overall in the war, it seized control of the northern part of Vietnam from France and installed its own puppet government. Within a few months, Japan had become feckless in war efforts, so at the Potsdam Conference at the end of July, the Allied leaders as one of their last, and what they considered minor acts, divided Vietnam at the 16th parallel, allowing China to grab everything north, France to retain everything south. How could that go wrong? -XXX-