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The Choice of War: Vietnam 1965 and Iraq 2003

Date: July 1, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: Wisconsin Veterans Museum
Email: wage@intl-institute.wisc.edu
Web Address: http://museum.dva.state.wi.us/MNews_calendarofevents.asp
Sponsor: Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
Cost: Free

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How the United States got into Iraq is one the great foreign policy questions of our time. In this lecture Fredrik Logevall examines the decision-making that led to the invasion in March 2003 and compares it to another war of choice: Vietnam. In neither case, Logevall finds, was America’s national security seriously threatened, yet in both instances the presidents opted for war. He explores why they did so, paying particular attention to the domestic and international context in which they operated.

Speaker Biography: Fredrik Logevall is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies for the Field of History at Cornell University. A native of Sweden, he earned his PhD at Yale University in 1993 and has published numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, including Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam and The Origins of the Vietnam War. He is also co-author of A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. His book America’s Cold War, co-authored with Campbell Craig, will be published this fall by Belknap Press/Harvard UP. Currently, Logevall is at work on a history of the French Indochina War and its aftermath (Random House). In 2006-07 he was Leverhulme Professor of History at the University of Nottingham and Mellon Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

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