John McCain’s Vietnam-Based View of War
Former Army Captain and military analyst Phillip Carter writes today in his Washington Post blog of the “stabbed in the back narrative” of Vietnam in the context of a new book advancing that narrative by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces during the disastrous 2003-2004 period when, among other things, the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred. That narrative, says Carter, “is popular among American military officers of a certain age, who believe if only they’d had gutsy political leadership, support from the homefront, and a willingness to steamroll North Vietnam with overwhelming force, we might have won the war.” As Carter documents (emphasis in original): “It’s a good story, but it’s wrong. No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will.”
What almost always goes unmentioned when this myth is discussed is that one its most faithful adherents is John McCain, and he applies this mentality not only to Vietnam but also to every subsequent military conflict, including the current one in Iraq. During the debate in late 1990 over whether Congress should authorize the first President Bush to use military force against Iraq to repel the invasion of Kuwait, Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and had the following exchange with McCain:
MCCAIN: You know, one of the things I regret more than anything else when we ever hear there’s a chance of conflict or a possibility of a conflict, is we always re-visit the Vietnam War as some sort of role model when, in fact, the model of the Vietnam War is exactly what not to do in the conduct of war, including actions on the part of Congress. But to say that there was, quote, “fifty-two thousand casualties in the surgical strikes of North Vietnam” is just darn foolishness. The fact is, as you know, Dr. Kissinger, that in 1972, for the first time, there was significant bombing which was not constrained by either congressional or presidential mandate which virtually brought that nation to its knees with a minimum of casualties despite the hue and cry over one bomb that hit one hospital which seemed to be the biggest attack in the history of warfare, which still angers me. The Vietnamese and North Vietnamese themselves have stated that there was minimum casualties — in the 19 — in the Christmas ‘72 bombing raids. And the fact is, to purvey the idea that somehow — that airpower failed in Vietnam because airpower was not capable certainly is an insult to the experience and the intelligence of those of us who served there. . . . .
The — and Mr. Kissinger, isn’t it true that the reason why the North Vietnamese came back to the bargaining table at Christmas in 1972 was because they were virtually brought to their knees by the bombing of North Vietnam?
MR. KISSINGER: They certainly agreed after the bombing to things that they had not agreed before, and were very eager to settle. I believe they were brought back to the bargaining table — yes.
SEN. MCCAIN: Do you believe that 52,000 casualties over a seven-eight period or eight — let’s see, ‘65 — eight-year period is some kind of exorbitant number of casualties?
MR. KISSINGER: I have no — I have no independent knowledge of that figure one way or the other although it sounds credible to me.
That’s the very embodiment of the “stabbed-in-the-back” Vietnam narrative. We had our greatest success when we could bomb North Vietnam “not constrained by either congressional or presidential mandate.” That’s when we almost brought them “to their knees.” But incessant complaints about civilian casualties and anger over irrelevant matters such as the bombing of hospitals is what prevented us from winning — “which still angers him,” because the number of dead North Vietnamese wasn’t really “exorbitant.” There was room for plenty more. Ponder what that means for Iraq, Afghanistan and any other new countries on which a President McCain decides to wage war.
This simplistic message is all McCain has been saying for years about Iraq as well. One of the greatest myths about McCain now — mostly propagated by the candidate himself and then amplified by his media allies — is that, since 2004, he had been calling for the surge strategy to be used in Iraq. That’s just false. McCain wasn’t calling for the counter-insurgency strategies implemented by Gen. Petraeus. As surge advocates endlessly argue, the “Surge” isn’t exclusively or even primarily about more troops, but rather, is defined by its shift to a “population-centric approach.”
That’s not what McCain was advocating. All he was complaining about was that we weren’t deploying enough troops and using enough force. From his April 22, 2004 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:
Third, it is painfully clear that we need more troops. Before the war, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff said that several hundred thousand troops would be necessary to keep the peace. While criticized at the time, General Shinseki now looks prescient. . . . .
Fourth, we must ensure that our understandable efforts to minimize collateral damage in Fallujah are not seen as a victory for the hardest of the hard core killers. Our goal in places like Fallujah where unreconstructed Baathists, former intelligence officers, and foreign jihadists converge should be to capture or destroy them. We face implacable enemies who reject a peaceful role in the new Iraq. We must be careful not to be seen by Iraqis as responding to direct attacks with accommodation.
McCain also warned that “we need a constructive domestic debate” and that those who were opposing the war were being “irresponsible”: “We must show bipartisan resolve to prevail in Iraq, and not allow the insurgents to believe that they are winning minds in Washington. Our troops, the Iraqi people, and the world need to see unified American political leadership.”
This is all just classic, Vietnam-based “stabbed-in-the-back” mythology. We win wars when we unleash our glorious deadly force with no constraints — neither “efforts to minimize collateral damage” (which are “seen as accommodation”) nor “irresponsible” domestic debates where citizens question the wisdom of the war. We lose wars because we restrain ourselves in the use of force or lack political will.
It’s hard to overstate how pervasive this mindset was and is among the Pentagon leadership over the last seven years. In fact, the 8,000 pages of documents which the New York Times forced the Pentagon to release concerning its “military analyst” program is suffuse with arguments of this type concerning both Vietnam and Iraq. It was that mentality which spawned the domestic propaganda campaign. As David Barstow wrote in his article exposing the program:
Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.
This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.
“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”
Valleley was a frequent participant in the military analyst program and a prolific email contributor to their communications. This belief in the need to “avoid Vietnam” by manipulating domestic political support for the Iraq war was pervasive at the Pentagon. As Barstow writes:
On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.
“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’”
“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”
McCain, to my knowledge, has not been asked his views on the NYT’s military analyst story, but he certainly subscribes in full to the underlying mentality expressed here, as retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore wrote recently:
While the Vietnam War was disastrous, McCain conceded, our military had — he argued — turned the tide after the enemy’s Tet Offensive in 1968 and the replacement of Gen. William Westmoreland with Gen. Creighton Abrams as commander of our forces there. Precisely at that tipping-point moment, he insisted, the American people, their patience exhausted, had lost their will to win. For McCain, there really was a light at the end of that Vietnamese tunnel — the military saw it, yet the American people, blinded by bad news, never did.
In today’s Iraq — again the McCain version — Gen. David Petraeus is the new Abrams, finally the right general for the job. And his new tactic of protecting the Iraqi people, thereby winning their hearts and minds, is working. Victory beckons at the end of the “long, hard path” (that evidently has replaced the Vietnamese tunnel), unless the American people run out of patience, as they did back in the late 1960s.McCain is no Hindenburg. Yet his almost automatic displacement of ultimate responsibility from the Bush administration and the military to the American people indicates the traction the stab-in-the-back myth has already gained in mainstream politics. For the moment, with hope for some kind of victory, however defined, not quite vanquished in official circles, our latest dagger-myth remains sheathed, its murderous power as yet unwielded.
John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America’s hoary, Vietnam era “stabbed-in-the-back” myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over “collateral damage” and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That’s how we could have (and should have) “won” in Vietnam and how we’ll “win” in Iraq. That’s why the central truth of the 2008 election is that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Kristol/Lieberman-supported John McCain is a carbon copy of the Bush/Cheney warmongering mentality except that he’s actually more extreme about its core premises.
UPDATE: There’s a lack of clarity as to whether McCain, in the exchange with Kissinger, was referring to “casualties” of North Vietnamese civilians or American troops. As LWM points out, the number of North Vietnamese civilian deaths is unclear (since, as always, we didn’t count the number of civilians killed by our bombing campaigns and other attacks), but is certainly far, far more than 52,000. The 52,000 number which McCain was dismissing as not “exorbitant” likely refers to American deaths through 1968.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.
© Salon.com
The great myth/lie about military force is that air power can be decisive. If it were, Hitler’s Blitz would have ended World War II.
The real reason America lost in Vietnam was due to its support of a regime that the people of Vietnam were not prepared to defend with their lives. The same is true of Iraq-Nam today.
I don’t know whether Hindenburg propagated the “stab-in-the-back” myth after WWI, but Ludendorff, who effectively ran the war for Germany during its last year, sure did.
Now that McClone is the “presumptive” Republican Party nominee, he won’t need to think about this stuff any longer. He just needs to follow Karl Rove’s and Dick Cheney’s directions and everything will fall into place.
I am glad to see that people still remember who gained the most from the ‘backstabbers’ myth; fascists. Eventually, should the theory be accepted by most of the target population - us citizens for mcsame’s purposes - the gov’t will prosecute and persecute those whom they consider to be backstabbers.
Le plus que ca change, le plus que c’est la meme chose.
In Senator McCain’s vapid moral universe, does it matter whether or not a war is right or at all justified?
Of course not, might makes right, victory is what matters, and it is the strength of our will that will determine what is true and what is false.
McCain has taken to heart very well the sentiment of Herr Hitler, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”
Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth - by Kevin Baker
Worth a read!
What does WINNING mean? SINCE 1942 thunders on correctly that these “wars” against “enemies” are illegal OCCUPATIONS. How do you WIN an illegal occupation? When the domestic population is entirely annihilated? When the resource being pursued and plundered is eventually used up?
The real FRAMING needs to work with the very term “winning” as it is meaningless. It just merits an excuse for bellicosity and destines another nation to be the guinea pig for the military industrial complex’s latest war technology.
Maybe winning a war could be seen as KILLING no one to gain a stated objective. How about that for a more enlightened society?
And it is positively disorienting to see a person with so little respect for life (of foreigners) potentially about to take the office of COMMANDER IN CHIEF. I hope the lords of karma intercede with a quickness!
Glen -
The 52,000 figure in your Update paragraph still can’t be a correct translation of what McCain’s garbled statement was talking about. 52,000 is the total casualty count on the Wall in DC for the entire Vietnam war, not just the war through the ‘68 Tet offensive.
CDers -
Note how quickly Henry the K was to volley back John McCain’s question about how the ‘72 Christmas bombing caused the North Vietnamese to come back to the negotiating table where (Henry assures us - presumably under oath) “they certainly agreed to things after the bombing that they had not agreed [to] before, and were very eager to settle.”
Now here is one of the truly monumental bald faced lies in all of American history. The North Vietnamese agreed to nothing in the final Paris accords that they hadn’t been offering for years, despite the Christmas bombings, the ivasion of Cambodia, and nuclear escalation blackmail.
Along with the stab in the back myth, the myth that saturation bombing of Hanoi caused the North to consent to a ceasefire lives on, so as to perpetuate the greater and more dangerous article of right wing faith that hi tech militarism can, indeed, work successfully when pitted against a popular guerrilla movement.
Bill from Saginaw
Following McCain’s logic to its inevitable conclusion, we could have “won” the war if we had taken General Curtis LeMay’s advice and nuked North Vietnam. Destroying a nation that posed no existential threat to the United States, however, would have turned us into an international pariah for generations to come. The answer is not to fight wars of choice in the first place. If our national survival were truly at stake, no moral or political concerns would prevent us from doing whatever we had to do to win. If the moral and political concerns restrict our tactics and strategy, then by definition it’s not a war of national survival, in which case we shouldn’t be fighting it.
Bill from Saginaw wrote: The North Vietnamese agreed to nothing in the final Paris accords that they hadn’t been offering for years, despite the Christmas bombings, the invasion of Cambodia, and nuclear escalation blackmail.
And this is exactly what is stated in Stanley Karnow’s outstanding Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Vietnam: A History”.
Anything else is a lie.
Good posts, all!
‘North’ and ‘South’ Vietnam were US constructs-the DMZ was never a real border, only a temporary division-it was in the interests of the US to promulgate the lie so that the ‘South’ was seen as being invaded by another country.
There was no ‘winning’ in Vietnam, since the US was fighting in support of colonial aspirations (started by the French) against the people.
Continued violence would only have produced more ‘losers’. Using nukes would have been the nadir of this type of violent effort to ‘win’ hearts and minds.
Following up on the words of Siouxrose, re: reframing -
As many of you are probably tired of hearing me say, the Democrats since January should have had a united party. If one of the candidates had withdrawn, the united party could have spent this year ’succeeding’ in its effort to supplant the Rethuglicans.
Instead, the paradigm has been ‘winning’ this or that primary, ‘winning’ the nomination.
‘Winning/losing’ is a paradigm which McCain can talk about in regards to Iraq. The Dems cannot ‘win’ that argument.
Reframe the message, change the paradigm. ‘Succeed’, not ‘win’. ‘Occupation’, not ‘war’ (in regards to Iraq).
Ah where is Joe Goebbels when we need him most. Nothin’ like gud ole’ firepower, my goodness look how well them Nips are doin’ since we dropped a couple a’ Krispy Kreamers on ‘em.
A couple of points, none of which contradict the article or the posts. The Blitz worked, but for Churchill, who was the one who effectively ordered it. Churchill bombed Berlin, Hitler retaliated with London, when the RAF airfields were the target he needed first.
The total war concept requires much greater than 10% of the target population dead to achieve its objective of breaking the will of the resistance. Iraq is already there, counting back through 1991. Perhaps 40% or 50% is enough, but probably not. In the US, it took well over 90% to subdue the natives, over a period of four centuries.
I note the US did not lose the SE Asian war in the sense of surrender, only in loss of resources. It failed to win, and SE Asia lost far worse. The same is true in Iraq and Afghanistan, except the final outcomes are not yet recognized by many (in the US) as inevitable.
True “hearts and minds” victory requires making people better off with you than without you. Despite the sorry track record of Saddam Hussein, the US failed to achieve even that miserable standard for a number of reasons. The chief one is that it strongly appears the US never intended that to happen. B43 admitted it prior to the 2000 election, and he certainly has not fired anybody for making things worse in Iraq.
“The great myth/lie about military force is that air power can be decisive. If it were, Hitler’s Blitz would have ended World War II.”
Hitler’s blitz was stopped, by air power. Without control of the air any standard war is lost. So air power is always decisive. But its of little help in an occupation or in guerrilla warfare.
WTF May 12th, 2008 3:26 pm
Absolutely correct. They could have stopped it many lives sooner. Most of us thought we should have left in 59.
We weren’t stabbed in the back. We won every engagement we fought. Every battle we choose. We lost simply because they wouldn’t quit. They had enough of foreigners telling them what to do. They were fighting for their homes, we were fighting mainly because most of us were drafted.
We lost because we weren’t prepared to commit genocide or murder, to enslave, to kill women and children wholesale, to destroy the whole country. Ask any veteran of the fighting ( many Viet Nam vets never saw any fighting) and they will tell you that MM was a real fighter. The regulars were a lot better organized and equipped than folks at home were told. Though we made fun of them, we respected them. I think its the same in every war except when the other side treats your men as the Japanese did ours in WW2.
I think of it as they won rather than we lost. For those of us that have returned there, they have been gracious in their reception of us. Most hold no real hate for us. I don’t know if I could be so forgiving.
“the american people lost the will to win in Vietnam”……what a bunch of crap. That occupation was a dirty, political affair that cost the Vietnamese millions of lives because they didn’t agree with what we thought should be going on in their country. McCain is still fighting this war.
One’s use / mis-use of terms like “myth” and “mythology”
is a very telling measure of their capacity / lack-thereof, for depth of thought.
On that basis, Greenwald (like most self-proclaimed “progressives”) = not very deep.
The reich-wing loves mis-use — it’s essential to the maintenance of their ability to keep beating the progressives to death.
McCain still calls the Vietnamese “gooks.” I think that pretty much tells us all we need to know about him.
Maybe we should believe what the bush machine said about McCain during the 2000 nomination process. After all who would know better than a fellow repubican.
Or maybe McCain can get cheney or rove to be his running mate. All the republicans would be real happy with that bunch of thugs.
Glenn’s book “Great American Hypocrites” is a must read!! I finally understood why John McCain will become our next President, despite such obvious flaws and insane policies, that run against everything most americans actually believe. He will the “daddy” of choice for a majority of voters.
The only hope - since Obama won’t and can’t bring himself to do it - is for 527’s to have enough money to expose the myths of McCain and educate the public about the REAL john McCain - it has to be relentless. I believe Clinton would do it, but Obama won’t be able to do it. Obama will be defending himself throughout the fall as the republican attack machine will go after him in unimaginable ways. Dems have made a huge tactical mistake which they will pay for in the fall - and the whole world will lose as a result.
There is a lot of buzz around what McCain actually did while he was a ‘prisoner’ in VietNam
Sounds like maybe we should call him John Fonda.
http://www.namvets.com/Reading/john_mccain_is_no_war_hero.htm
Google search for: Mccain Vietnamese Songbir
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=TBH&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=McCain+Vietnamese+songbird&spell=1