victories. and to sell it in a different way i had i is very difficult. let me give you an example. george w. bush early on when he talked about the war on terror, argued that it would be a different kind of war. there was a war without any final resolution. it was a war without an appomattox, a surrender ceremony. that this war would continue and that beak america's engagement with the world had fundamentally changed because there would always be terrorists. you could never quite -- you could still do this group but you wouldn't subdue other groups. and i mean historical examples of that. including the american reconstruction. you could subdue the ku klux klan as a terrorist group but it was replaced by other supremacist groups like the red shirts in south carolina, the knights of the white camellia in

louisiana. in other words, you think just because they're no longer wearing their bed sheets, that they're out. well, no, there are other people and you know, instead of white sheets there were red shirts in south carolina. same thing. american terrorists. all right. >> so bush makes this argument. subduing terrorism is a different kind of war. different measuring stick. different way to wage what we're doing. people didn't like that. it was much easier to land on an aircraft carrier and say mission accomplished. we've won, statues have ever been pulled down in baghdad. everything's fine. few casualties. we'll just help them set up shop. then we'll come home. victory is ours. all right? and much like the american civil war. prolonged occupation, terrorist warfare. unconventional conflict.

et cetera. same thing as what had happened between 1865 and 1877. claudia. >> in the case of trying to fight terrorism, we just create more terrorism and resentment is that that would be the other thing. one would argue the measures take it on wage a war against terrorism involved military operations that sometimes among other things kill innocent people which creates more resistance. sometimes the rhetoric that accompanied american operations in the middle east over the last 15 years included we're going to remake the world in an american vision which is exactly way to motivate many terrorists in the first place. we are protesting the westernization of our traditional culture. when you say you're going to make us over this way, this is exactly the problem in the first place. so for example, in afghanistan, the interventioning in afghanistan, if you look back at the discussion about that,

there's a discussion that emerges about the status of afghani women. and that one thing that the united states will do in this intervention is elevate the status of the afghani women, that they've been mistreated. again, no one had talked about this issue beforehand. all of a sudden, this became a major issue. well, in other countries and other cultures and other religions stotts of women, status of men are very important and you're going to remake every everything in your vision? isn't that what we said they were going to do? so that every time that the president or someone in the administration made this argument, it was a gift to the terrorists who said, you know what, we warned you that this is what they were really about. they're going to take away who

we are and substitute pizza huts and mcdonald's and coax and do away with those values we hold dear as a traditional society. they are a threat to what we believe. so there is an ideological conflict that justifies jihad. that justifies terrorism. we have to stop them. after all, the world trade center, if you actually know who occupied the world trade center, there wasn't a lot of world trade center occupants, but one of the reasons you target the world trade have is that you see that as the center, the headquarters of american global capitalism. their way to dominate the entire globe and you're going to take it down. you're going to damage it in some way. the world trade center, i remember when it went up. and it was designed for something completely different than it ended up being.

michaela. >> in looking at these situations, should we consider iraq as sort of an attempt at overcorrection for our inaction in world war ii like coming in late? because we tried to paint the same idea that we ended up finding out about hitler, oh, weapons of mass destruction. like this is an awful person that we need to take care of and threeing to overthrow 1993 certainly saddam hussein would be compared by many people top adolph hitler. you can't deal with totalitarian regimes. but there are two other things and we'll end by describing these two things that also got into the american foreign policy. first was something called the munich syndrome, that is based on the agreement between nazi germany and great britain in 1938 to allow the germans to occupy the border land, the mountain ranges on the border what's now the czech republic, then check low vaccia.

and the british prime minister neville chamberlain said this is peace in our time. we've appeased hitler. we've made a deal with them rather than go to war at a time when many many in britain did not believe the british could fight that kind of conflict. they weren't mobilized. appeasement became a dirty word afterwards. you can never an spees a dictator. they'll always want more. so when american foreign policy was discussed in the 140s and 1950s, it was discussed in terms of let's learn from history. and one piece of history you need to learn from is you can never negotiate with a totalitarian regime. that wants to expand. you can't. you have to stop aggression. this helps to shape what goes on during the coiled war. you can't let them go. if you let them come here, the so-called domino theory, once one country falls an, another one will follow.

that's one. of course, what's the culminating point of that debate in vietnam. that's followed by something called vietnam syndrome which is americans don't want to use military force abroad because they will find themselves in a quagmire. an endless war costing many lives that doesn't seem to achieve anything. and in fact, president george herbert walker bush after the 1991 desert shield, desert storm operation said we've whipped vietnam syndrome. we've gotten that out of the way. the publicity leading up to that conflict, one of the things when it came to both generals pourl and schwarzkopf, was look how much they learned from their experience that you have to define an objective that's achievable. you must get public support, be transparent. must do those things again.

one could argue now we're about to have a middle east syndrome come out of this of look what happened to the united states when it committed military force in iraq. it committed military force in afghanistan. where did that leave us? and then presidents are going to have to weigh the next time i feel that we need to commit american military force somewhere is the american public ready, willing and able to ready, willing and able to understand my argument? captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008