From the San Jose Mercury News, 21 January 2007, written by Robert Kaiser, Associate Editor of the Washington Post:

For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18 months covering the Vietnam War for the Washington Post, it is amazing that my country has done this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn't understand, whose expectations for life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans.

Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders, who did not see their country's fate the way we did and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.

How did this happen again? After all, we're Americans -- practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we'd like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, political and historical realities far different than our own. These failings -- more than any tactical or strategic errors -- help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq.

a link to the entire article:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/16512593.htm