Nostalgia...

Remember the days when Clinton was president? Remember when, the months before I joined the army, before the USS Cole bombing, before contested presidential elections, before preemptive war, when my mom asked what I would do if the army got into a war I disagreed with and I condescendingly patted her on the head and said, "Mom, what are the odds of that happening? Honestly, I don't think that will ever be the case..."

Doesn't it all just seem like a happy memory? When the worst thing the president did (and let's keep in mind it got him impeached) was lie about getting a blow job? I just read this in Slate today:

Zinni, Eaton, and Newbold are explicitly trying to supplant the lesson of Shinseki with an earlier lesson—one that was propagated throughout the U.S. armed forces in the late 1990s but laid aside once the war in Iraq got under way. It came from a book called Dereliction of Duty, by H.R. McMaster, then an Army major, now a colonel. Based on extensive research into declassified files, the book concluded that during the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff betrayed their constitutional duties by failing to provide their honest military judgment to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the quagmire of Vietnam. When McMaster's book was published in 1997, during the Clinton administration, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the JCS chairman, ordered all his service chiefs and commanders to read it and follow its lessons to the letter—to express disagreements to their superiors, even at the risk of getting yelled at. William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense, echoed the sentiment. Ever since, Dereliction of Duty has been a must-read for all senior officers.

Newbold is the General (R) that I quoted in my post a while back, the General who is now speaking out against the war. I guess I'm just thinking about how great the Clinton years were, and, like childhood, I didn't realize how golden those years were until they were gone.