George K. Tanham

A reviewer of Senator Fulbright's Indictment of President Johnson's policy in Viet Nam has pointed out that "it is possible to argue that the false starts of American policy in Asia and elsewhere have been at least as much due to the illusions of liberalism as to the 'arrogance of power'."[i] Obviously, particular policies and actions may be judged as making a bad situation worse, but they may not be the cause of its being bad in the first place. Much of the hawk-versus-dove dispute stems from shared misconceptions about communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and therefore also about the resulting counterinsur-gency actions-misconceptions which form part of an ethos largely inapplicable to that troubled region today.