When I was 12, I remember listening in my bedroom for sirens to tell me that soon I’d be inhaling the radiated dust that once was New York City 15 miles away. The US Navy was going to intercept Russian ships suspected of transporting nuclear missiles to Cuba. The Russians would either allow us to board or they would fight back, likely escalating quickly into a “nuclear exchange.”

The Russians “blinked.” Kruschev didn’t have JFK’s balls. (The fact that we actually did a deal with him — we agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey on his border — didn’t emerge until years later.)

We won and we learned the wrong lessons. We are going to win in Iraq and we will also learn the wrong lessons.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was only a crisis because we made it one. Having nuclear missiles in Cuba did not affect our national security one iota. Soviet subs armed with nuclear missiles patrolled our shores, so why did it matter that there were a handful more nukes 90 miles away? The presence of Cuban missiles only meant that Miami might be vaporized 8 minutes sooner than New York. The deterrent to any attack remained the 28,000 nuclear weapons we had dispersed around the world.

The Cuban missile crisis was our fault. It was reckless. It was machismo that put the world at risk. Thank God Kruschev didn’t have JFK’s balls. In fact, the Cuban missile crisis is the best argument in history against balls.

But, we learned from it that playing chicken “works.” We learned that threatening to end life on the planet is an effective way of getting what you want. We escalated the arms race — it was JFK, after all, who campaigned by making up a “missile gap” — to heights that almost bankrupted us before it bankrupted the Soviet Union. The real lesson should have been, IMO, that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to use except for deterrence. And if deterrence was our goal, we only needed a few subs swimming deep under water.

Now we are going to win another fight; we would turn the desert to glass before we would lose. And the lesson we’ll draw from this is that it’s honorable to be willing to wage war alone, that war works, that the UN doesn’t, that we are not secure unless every risk is removed, that peace means no strife or disagreement, that strength means power and that restraining from the use of violence is weakness.

Each of these lessons is wrong. The world will be more dangerous because of it.

And there’s not a thing we can do about it. It’d be like suggesting that the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really an American triumph at all.

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