More likely, it was Gen. Matthew Ridgeway's warning that victory would require 7 years and 700,000 GIs.
Our initial involvement in Vietnam was as a fighting force battling the Japanese in WWII.
Before that, the OSS/CIA was all over Vietnam and was trying to convince our government that Ho Chi Minh was on our side. "He will do anything for us," reported one US agent.
Because Communist Ho Chi Minh was so popular throughout Vietnam.
Congress went to Vietnam and decided to come home??? :)
The main problem was that our incompetent Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, worshipped mathematics and technology and had no sense about fighting wars. And it didn't help that the Vietnamese had never lost a war in about 1,000 years.
Internationalism should begin when there's a direct threat to our security, as was the case with bin Laden and the Taliban, or a serious violation of international law, as occurred when Saddam Hussein launched a preemptive war against Kuwait. Isolationism should begin when those conditions don't exist, such as with Saddam Hussein in
2002-2003.
I'm referring to the usual suspects, the ones who got everything almost completely wrong.
What if the leadership strongly shouts just that sentiment, not through its words but through its actions?
The point is that the very people who are supposed to stop the domestic attacks still don't understand the terrorists and keep believing that the next threat will be just like the last one.
That's another example of overly conventional thinking. Al Qaeda wants each subsequent attack to be bigger and more frightening than the previous one, so I doubt they'll resort to biological or chemical attack because it's hard to cheaply produce such weapons in forms that can be dispersed widely. Al Qaeda's best weapons are still large jet planes, and many US flight schools are still accepting foreigners without proper background checks.