Behind War

...The parallels are striking...

...Despite that strict definition, she finds an immense amount of folly throughout history, and most of it is related to the causes of war...

...Has it underestimated the fear and anger our various interventions in Latin America would produce in that region...

...Most of The March of Folly is devoted to the "imbecility" and "woodenheaded-ness" that has led to wars in the past...

...Ralph K. White (Ralph K. White, emeritus professor of social psychology at George Washington University, is the author of "Fearful Warriors: A Psychological Study of Soviet-American Relations," recently published by The Free Press...

...She defines folly as "pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest," and adds that it must satisfy three other criteria: "It must have been perceived [by many persons] as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight...

...a feasible alternative course of action must have been available," and the policy "should be that of a group, not an individual ruler...

...In both cases, a great nation grossly underestimated the determination of a much smaller nation to assert its independence...

...George III, the United States in the 1960s, and the Germans and Japanese in World War II all suffered from this failing...

...Senator J. William Fulbright, George Ken-nan, and others in America...

...The outstanding virtue of The March of Folly is its systematic demonstration of how the same kinds of "folly," with essentially the same psychological causes, crop up again and again in widely different historical contexts...

...Most important, has our great leap forward in military expenditures, with special stress on such first-strike weapons as the MX and the Pershing II, generated a degree of fear and anger in the Soviet Union that has intensified the arms race and heightened the danger of a preemptive nuclear war...

...Wisely, Tuchman formulates a strict definition of "folly" and limits her discussion to those foolish acts that fully conform to her definition...

...Tuchman discusses in fascinating detail the misconceptions and the studied ignorance of George III and the British Parliament before and during our Revolutionary War, and of America's leaders and most of the American public before and during the Vietnam war...

...Did the present Administration underestimate the anger of the Moslem majority in Lebanon when our Marines and warships began to side with the hated Phalange...

...and in both cases there were wiser men who, if they had been listened to, might have prevented the folly of a long war (Edmund Burke and William Pitt in England...

...Her favorite term for this is "woodenheaded-ness," which "is epitomized in a historian's statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns: 'No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.' " Many and perhaps most of her examples of persistence in error are also examples of a persistent inability or unwillingness to understand the thoughts and feelings of an opponent—that is, a lack of realistic empathy...

...Her most striking examples are those that illustrate the tendency of leaders to cling blindly to error long after the evidence of their folly has mounted...