I really do want to respond to some of the various points made upthread, but I have to wait until I've got time to write proper responses.

For now, though:

In the 1950s, theoreticians gained a more institutional role in society. In the RAND corporation, founded by the Air Force, scholars developed concepts such as game theory and organizational behavior to guide strategic thinking. Others, like Albert Wohlstetter, attempted to distill the lessons of Pearl Harbor into theories of “vulnerability” and “deterrence” in the nuclear age. However, their work carried little weight with President Eisenhower, who had an aversion to abstract theorization. Even the Air Force at that time generally ignored its RAND staffers’ suggestions, unless they justified requests for military budget increases. The decade thus marked a low point in the influence of these thinkers, and they would not bounce back until the election of Kennedy.

The 1960s saw a drastic increase in the attention paid to intellectuals, as many found jobs in the administration, but the result was not more effective policymaking. Kuklick’s prime example here is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which experts misinterpreted both during and after the event. First, Kennedy’s advisors failed to see the big picture, in that they did not see Soviet encroachments as a response to the possibility of American missiles in West Germany. Second, they glorified their own role in ending the crisis, attributing success to sound advice, rather than the fact that the Soviets had been bluffing. They misread the crisis as a victory for graduated escalation, and they applied the same formula in Vietnam, despite starkly different circumstances.
and

The final chapters recount intellectuals’ attempts to modify their theories out of self-interest. Those who had been most responsible for decision making now pointed to structural causes, not themselves, as the reasons for failure in Vietnam. Henry Kissinger, the paragon of realist foreign policy, tried to claim in his memoirs that he had aided the cause of the ideological hardliners. Robert McNamara expressed regret for his role in the war, but he attributed the Vietnam “tragedy” to a lack of “social knowledge,” a problem which no one could have solved (214). Thus, just as they and others had wielded their expertise to justify actions, now intellectuals used it to distance themselves from the outcomes of their own policies.
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/reviews/...view.cfm?id=21

I have not read the book being reviewed.

I have never been in the military and as I've said many times on this board before, I am a practicing physician. We all have biases and lenses through which we view the world. As the child of an academic and the product of a college town, I have always been interested in the world of our intellectual movers and shakers. Plus, being the child of immigrants and growing up in the American Midwest, I always had various competing narratives in my head. I've watched as those competing narratives have come to a head during the 00s, especially in Afghanistan. I don't know anything about the mideast and so don't offer much opinion on Iraq. Sometimes, shutting up is the better part of valor. Even I know that.

Human nature - that difficult, beautiful, mysterious thing. And the desire to control and shape the behavior of others! Very human nature-y and very much a part of the nature of our intellectual classes. That's what I've seen, that's what I believe. Don't know how accurate my reflections are, but there you go.

As for "what should we do", much talk on these boards previously about working with groups naturally allied against the Taliban and keeping a small but steady presence, instead of attempting a grand reordering,, another Great Game.

Anyway, nothing can be perfect. I can't believe I used to kind of believe that, foreign policy-wise. How shallow. And yet, I believed it.