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Dangers Of Optimism, Continued

But nothing changed, the other side continued to get stronger, the ARVN side weaker. One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side […]

But nothing changed, the other side continued to get stronger, the ARVN side weaker. One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact … entered into the estimates of the American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the United States was even fighting on the right side. In contrast, the question of Communism and anti-Communism as opposed to revolution and antirevolution was far more convenient for American policy makers [bold mine-DL]. ~David Halberstam (quoted by Wilson Burman)

But Halberstam saw firsthand how hope turned into expectant paralysis and confidence into dangerous myopia. In that dynamic come easy bromides about “terrorists” and rejection of complex terms like “civil war.” ~Wilson Burman

The problem is that the vocabulary of optimism itself distorts our understanding of the world and leaves us lost in illusions. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag

There are at least three terrible things that optimism does to people: 1) it makes people expect success, rather than teach them to prepare for it; 2) it encourages unrealistic expectations that can never be met, thus prompting profound disenchantment and bitterness; 3) it is constantly appealing to the future to make present failure seem more acceptable, which is simply another way of trying to excuse and justify error by saying that today’s errors are the seeds of tomorrow’s victory.  Virtually all foreign interventions possess these three optimistic evils, and it is because of the ruinous effects of optimism that these interventions will fail to achieve their stated missions.

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