“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in 1905, subsequently generally misquoted as “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”. Whichever version, Michael Pascoe writes, Trump’s air war on Iran fits the bill.
Among other things, John Kenneth Galbraith, the great American economist, public servant and author, was a key director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945. He became very unpopular with the US Air Force for finding that the Allied bombing of Germany wasn’t nearly as effective in weakening Germany’s war machine as the generals and politicians wanted to believe.