Hindsight is always 20/20
Is the point Kevin Drum is making here:
This kind of rose-colored view of past problems is a common rhetorical gambit among pundits who want to make a case that our generation’s problems are somehow uniquely complex and intractable. Hell, I’ve seen folks over at NRO, of all places, waxing almost nostalgic for the Cold War because it was allegedly a simpler time when it was just us and the Russians, and really, we knew how to handle them all along.
In this case, either Fineman’s wrong or I am, and I’m happy to open this up to my older commenters for adjudication. My memory is that (1) far from realizing the domino theory was a fiction, lots of people in the 60s took it deadly seriously, (2) even as late as 1972 McGovern’s supposedly simple alternative was never supported by either the “experts” or a majority of Americans, and (3) we largely stayed in Vietnam out of a fear of looking weak in the face of a deadly and expansionist enemy.
In other words, Vietnam looked exactly as hard back then as Iraq does now. In Iraq we have an insurgency we don’t know how to beat (check); we’re afraid that if the insurgency wins it will spread to other countries (check); and we’re afraid that if we leave we’ll look spineless (check).
Those fears turned out to be exaggerated 30 years ago, and they’ll probably turn out to be exaggerated again. We just need to be clear-eyed enough to admit to ourselves that today’s problems aren’t really all that different from yesterday’s. They only seem that way.