The battle of Shiloh (April 1862) was re-fought for nearly a half-century, and we still don’t know whether Grant was drinking before the battle, or why Gen. Lew Wallace took the wrong road and came late to the battle with reinforcements. You can read various versions of who was to blame in the memoirs of Gens. Grant, Sherman and Wallace.
After World War II, British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and American Gens. Dwight D Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton (posthumously) all bickered in print over the strategy after D-Day, the disastrous Arnhem campaign and the complete surprise at the Battle of the Bulge—issues still not resolved over 60 years later.
Was Vietnam a necessary war, always a hopeless fiasco or a squandered victory? You can read all those versions and more in the books of Sec. Henry Kissinger, Sec. Robert McNamara, Lt. (now Sen.) Jim Webb and Gen. William Westmoreland.
The only difference with the Iraq war is that in the modern age of instantaneous global communications, those involved right in the middle of it, at least on the American side, scramble to get their “true” story out first—and get even—well before the war is won or lost. In such an ongoing conflict, these memoirs are often out-of-date even before they hit the bookstores.
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Towards the end of Vietnam, it largely accepted that it was a way that we should not have been in. During the Reagan years it was more apparent that Vietnam was a theater in the “Cold War” against communism. As history recorded the events that followed the American withdrawl, it seems as though the way we fought the war is more controversial than whether or not we should have fought it.
The lesson that seems to have been learned from Vietnam is to win handsomely and aggressively. Still, there are some of the same “politics” and restrictions that we seem to implement into battle plans and we have never figured out the PR weapon of war.
The short story tells us there is nothing to put an accurate perspective on a war story until the last shot is fired.
With Iraq, we are likely still 10 years or more out from being able accurately assess the good and bad of the war.
WWII deserves a class all its own and I don't even think it hardly fits a model in this topic because the reason for war was never questioned, only the tactics and strategies. This war has a whole lot of everything from politics, to battle plans, to Public Relations and Propaganda, to technology, etc.
I am sure that history will simplify it in about 30 years.