Doonesbury Goes to War

Both were discretionary wars entered into under false assumptions, and you could argue that both initially had worthy goals. The Iraq adventure, however, was crippled by a fatal arrogance from the onset. The Powell doctrine of using overwhelming force to reach achievable goals with a clear exit strategy -- conceived in reaction to mistakes made in Vietnam -- was summarily discarded, inviting nearly all the consequences the doctrine was designed to avoid.

You came of age during Vietnam. Who were your political heroes as a kid?

I wasn't particularly politically attuned growing up. There wasn't much debate at our dinner table. My parents were Republicans, so the GOP was my team, and Ike was our genial manager. In '60, I was too young to really respond to JFK's charisma as intuitively as I was repelled by Nixon's sleaziness, and in 1964, I was so disengaged that I actually designed placards for both parties at my high school. Later I came to admire Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but more as pop figures than as visionaries who changed the world. Vietnam was the wake-up call. That's when I really started paying attention, and by then heroes were in scarce supply. Besides, who needed role models? We had the certainty of youth. It's amazing what an authority you can become on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution during one four-hour bus ride to visit your congressman.

You were two years behind Bush at Yale?

And four years behind Kerry. Joe Lieberman was also at Yale, and Howard Dean was in my class. My feeling is, there should have been a cap this year on Yale graduates running for president [laughs]. Howard Dean I knew quite well from boyhood. We'd gone to a summer camp together. When Howard became governor, he told some reporter that he'd gotten his sense of humor from me. I wrote him and said, "That's utter bullshit. When you knew me as a teenager, I didn't have a sense of humor. Life was much too grim."