In his celebrated essay “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine”, published in 1972, Daniel Ellsberg drew out the lesson regarding the Vietnam war that came out of the 8,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, which he had secretly copied a few years earlier. It was simply this: policymakers acted without illusion. At every juncture they made the minimum commitments necessary to avoid imminent disaster – offering optimistic rhetoric, but never taking the steps that even they believed could offer the prospect of decisive victory. They were tragically caught in a kind of no-man’s-land – unable to reverse a course to which they had committed so much, but also unable to generate the political will to take forward steps that gave any realistic prospect of success. Ultimately, after years of needless suffering, their policy collapsed around them.
上世紀六七十年代，丹尼爾•艾爾斯伯格(Daniel Ellsberg)用幾年的時間祕密複印了8000多頁五角大廈檔案。根據這些檔案，他寫出了那篇著名的《沼澤迷霧與僵化機器》（The Quagmire Myth and the Satlemate Machine，收錄於1972年出版的一本文集），詳細地總結了越南戰爭的教訓。歸結起來很簡單：政策制定者們的行動缺乏遠見。在每一個關鍵時刻，他們都只做出了避免眼前災難所需的最低承諾。他們只是在口頭上表示樂觀，卻從不真正付諸行動——即便他們相信行動可能取得決定性勝利。政策制定者們彷彿悲劇般地困在了無人地帶——既無法從走了很久的路線上掉頭，也拿不出政治決心、邁出任何有一線成功可能的一步。最終，在經受了多年不必要的折磨之後，他們的政策還是全面潰敗。