James Fallows Quotes

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.

It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn't have prosecuted the war. We shouldn't have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives.

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.

We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world).

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

We have only two alternatives: Bug Out [of the Vietnam War] or accelerate, and that we must escalate or the Presidency is lost.

… the first armed aggression which the world has seen since the end of the war.

The responsibility of war is entirely upon the professing Christians of the United States. If another war like the last [WW I] should come, they will be responsible for every drop of blood that will be shed.

I started in politics by opposing the war in Vietnam.... I don't think it was right, and I think it has seriously undermined the position of America in the world. It has weakened the social and political fabric of our country. And it is going to take heroic efforts to rebuild America because of it.

The next time you or one of your fellows plans to mention civilian casualties in North Vietnam, I want you both to come down and have a drink with me before you go to testify on The Hill.

It is not possible to teach an entire generation to bomb and destroy others in an undeclared, unjustified war abroad without paying the price in the derangement of our own society.

We make mistakes in every war and serious mistakes were made here.

What will you tell them at your impeachment? That you had a weapon that would end the war immediately and you didn’t use it?

The public, by and large, trusts its leaders not only to tell the truth, but to get the job done. When they don’t get the job done, they get punished, and when they don’t get the job done and it comes out that they lied, they’re in really serious trouble. This is what happened to [Lyndon] Johnson and it’s what happened to [George W,] Bush. If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure the policy works out.

There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.

I just feel like the country is guilty. I think we should be deeply ashamed for what we've done in Iraq, and we've gotta reconcile that, and we've gotta find some way to make peace with this, and we can't do that until we acknowledge what took place, and ultimately, I think that's the poison that is killing this administration. And I think there's a lot of people in the country who are guilty of allowing themselves to be duped in a very sloppy, sloppy manner.