James A. Warren

“Chastened by the searing experience of Indochina, American presidents refrained from committing the country to ambitious foreign adventures in the last quarter of the twentieth century, for the most part. Sadly, in the emotionally supercharged wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Washington forgot this hard-won lesson, and tried to create pro-Western states in both Afghanistan and Iraq, countries US policy makers knew even less about than their predecessors knew about Vietnam. Those war have not had as dramatic an impact on American society as Vietnam, but they, too, were failed crusades, and for many of the same reasons that obtained in Indochina.”
― James A. Warren, Year of the Hawk: America's Descent into Vietnam, 1965