George Packer reviews Peter Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome."

Schlesinger started his career as an early candidate for the hubris of toughness. In 1949, he published a Cold War manifesto titled "The Vital Center," which, in its contempt for liberal soft-headedness, influenced "The Good Fight." In 1958, he published an essay in Esquire called "The Crisis of American Masculinity," arguing that the Eisenhower years had afflicted American men with conformity and ease--what they needed was a more virile politics. (Schlesinger was getting ready to join the Camelot team.) In a few years, a more virile politics sent large numbers of American military advisers to South Vietnam, with ground forces soon to follow. Schlesinger turned against the war in the mid-sixties, and, as Beinart points out, in every use of military force thereafter he saw the making of another Vietnam. Schlesinger warned of terrible consequences before the first Gulf War, counselled against intervening in Bosnia by invoking the spectre of a quagmire, and viewed the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 as a Vietnam-like exercise in futility. None of these concerns were entirely misplaced, but, taken together, they would have handed Kuwait to Saddam Hussein, multicultural Bosnia to Serb fascists, and Afghanistan to the medieval Muslim rulers who had given Osama bin Laden a home. The hubris of youthful toughness yielded to the hubris of knowing better. Schlesinger, like Dewey, took the meaning of one huge tragedy as an answer to all subsequent questions. One of Beinart’s targets is the limited usefulness of historical analogies. In American foreign-policy circles, there are basically two: Munich and Vietnam, appeasement or quagmire. Both are regularly invoked by pundits and polemicists. We need more analogies, or none at all.