Zeus Backwards Spells Suez

This is to say I believe that the epic fury of the gods is turning the Iran war into the United States’ Suez Crisis. Our power on a global scale is diminishing day by day.

I’m reading a lot about the Vietnam War right now. I just finished The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1972 account of the technocrats in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations who led us into that war. I’ve now started Fire in the Lake by Francis FitzGerald also from 1972, a much-lauded account of how Americans failed to understand the history and culture of Vietnam when they went to war there.

Given the complexity of alliances that are under strain right now maybe I should be reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August too. It’s quite the escalatory mess.