The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

Foreword
A
merica is good only at fighting crusades,” wrote General
David Petraeus in his doctoral dissertation on “The American
Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” Submitted to Princeton
University in 1987, Petraeus’s work attacked what had
become the military’s conventional wisdom on the lessons of
Vietnam. He characterized this as an “all or nothing approach,”
which boiled down to the doctrine that the United States should
fight only conventional wars with overwhelming support from
a crusading public. Petraeus rejected this “business as usual approach.”
He argued instead that the United States was likely to
find itself in the midst of other irregular wars fighting two,
three, many Vietnams. Petraeus went on to compile the army
field manual on counterinsurgency published in 2006. The following
year, given the chance to conduct fieldwork on his academic
specialty, he was appointed commander of U.S. forces
in Iraq.
Wars are not only crusades; they are also affairs of the heart.
Wars are fought for love, which we have known ever since
Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships full of smitten men
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