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Never fight a land war in Asia. It's an old warning. Many Americans have said it. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur cautioned young President John F. Kennedy back in 1962. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates highlighted it again as recently as 2011 when he spoke to West Point cadets during the tenure of President Barack Obama. Just don't do it. Don't even think about it.
Even Hollywood knows the deal. In the beloved film The Princess Bride, screenwriter William Goldman managed to milk a joke out of the famous saying. Well he should. Back in 1954, then-Cpl. Goldman was typing up documents in the Pentagon. He heard the line over and over from bitter Korean War veterans. Like MacArthur and Gates, they'd tried a land war in Asia and they didn't like it one bit. Nobody was joking, either.
The U.S. president in 1954 certainly knew all about avoiding land wars in Asia. He wanted nothing to do with them. The pre-eminent strategic leader of his generation, Dwight D. Eisenhower had commanded the great Allied invasion of Europe in World War II. Before he took that responsibility and rose to five-star rank, Maj. Eisenhower had spent the latter half of the 1930s working for MacArthur in the Philippine Islands, then an American colony. He'd wrestled with too much land mass, too many enemies and way too few U.S. troops. America's strengths, then and now, lay in technology, in substituting firepower for soldiers. We preferred to rely on oceangoing fleets and long-range air forces, not boots on the ground. Ground wars in Asia favored the ever more numerous home teams.
When the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, brought America into World War II, newly promoted Brig. Gen. Eisenhower faced the impossible task of figuring out how to reinforce MacArthur's outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded defenders in the Philippines. Our fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Most of our airplanes were burnt-out wrecks dotting Hawaiian and Philippine airdromes. The U.S. Army had little to send and no way to get it there. Longtime infantryman Eisenhower personally knew MacArthur and many of his officers and sergeants. Smart as Ike was, he couldn't cook up a way to save them. After a few...