Les Gelb pentagon papers interview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers Gelb reflected in 2018 that many people have misunderstood the most important lessons of the Pentagon Papers: Ellsberg created the myth that what the Papers show is that it all was a bunch of lies... [The truth] is, people actually believed in the war and were ignorant about what could and could not actually be done to do well in that war. That's what you see when you actually read the Papers, as opposed to talk about the Papers... [M]y first instinct was that if they just hit the papers, people would think this was the definitive history of the war, which they were not, and that people would, would think it was all about lying, rather than beliefs. And look, because we'd never learned that darn lesson about believing our way into these wars, we went into Afghanistan and we went into Iraq... You know, we get involved in these wars and we don't know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, peo...