This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Henry Sikolsky in the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center

about the reports that the United States is considering or has considered or will deploy U.S. Marines to Kog Island

in order to secure the oil fields that are now in the possession of the Iranian adversary.

What can go wrong and why takes us to the question of what happened in Vietnam in March of 1965,

when then President Johnson deployed Marines to protect the Danang Air Base that was under assault now and again

by Viet Cong guerrillas, the beginning of the American deployment that eventually went to half a

million, and then departed from Vietnam without success. Henry reflects and looks ahead

and asks an important question that doesn't have

one answer or any answer. What is the goal of this war? What is the reason we're there?

What will achieve success? Henry Sikovsky, more tonight. Because I'm blind in one eye,

but anyway, I didn't do much,

but it was an issue as to how big that war was going to get.

So we don't know what will happen.

I assume the critics of the war might actually, in a perverse way, desire for things to go

badly, quickly so that we get out.

On the other hand, there's a logic, of course, to getting leverage.

The problem, I suspect that both people on the right and left who are

critical of this war have is that there's not a clear theory of victory. You can get the theory wrong,

but you've got to be clear about it. I don't think we have one yet. And that, I think, is the worry and the parallel to Vietnam.

The problem in Vietnam was similar.

We did not have a theory of what would constitute winning.

And so we counted body bags, and here we're counting targets that we've hit.

...