Lessons to Be Learned

It's a truism that we continue to learn long after we've left school. Experience teaches us, to be sure, and just by living our lives we can't help but expand our knowledge. But every now and again, something will happen that has an obvious lesson attached to it, a meaning so blatant that you can't help but recognize and embrace it. In the past couple of days, we've seen a two powerful politicians acknowledge such lessons.

I meant to include this in my post about Joe Lieberman the other night. In the story I linked to then, in which Joe Lieberman was greeted with a standing O by his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, he opined on the lessons of the midterm elections. He wasn't talking about anything he'd learned, necessarily, but he certainly hoped that the Democrats, newly in the majority, had learned them. And the lessons Lieberman believed the electorate had intended to impart? Compromise--they should "be willing to compromise" with their opponents across the aisle. Unfortunately, the CNN piece didn't elaborate on whether or not anyone else noticed that lesson somewhere in the Democratic landslide.

Halfway around the world, someone else was talking about lessons learned, as well. The Prez is visiting Vietnam for an economic summit. It's his first visit to the country, of course (but not the first by an American president--Bill Clinton was there a few years ago). The conflict in Iraq has often been compared to the U.S. experience in Vietnam, and it only made sense that Bush would be asked about it. Apparently there's been some rehearsal in the White House, because when the question arose, Bush went right into praise for the rebuilding that has occurred sine the end of the war. No, the Prez wasn't suddenly convinced that more should be done to jumpstart the failed rebuilding in Iraq. No, according to The New York Times:

he added that the lesson he drew from the bitter American experience here was that "we'll succeed unless we quit."

Were there not enough lives lost (on both sides) during the Vietnam War? How do you look at that conflict and decide that it should've been longer? This does not bode well for the possibility of drawing down the troops any time soon.