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TechnoratiA Vietnam Syllabus for President Obama
Now, according to Peter Baker of the Wall Street Journal, a "battle" of two Vietnam histories is underway at the White House and the Pentagon. Think of them as dueling books. The president and a number of his advisors have just finished reading Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam about a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead" and backed by a hawkish national security adviser. The other, a Pentagon favorite, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, focuses on a military that by the early 1970s was supposedly winning its counterinsurgency struggle only to be "rejected by political leaders who bow[ed] to popular opinion and end[ed] the fight."
If it's a battle of Vietnam histories that Washington wants, should the contest really be limited to these two books? After all, one is about a White House advisor who, like so many of "the best and the brightest," was decades behind the curve in discovering that he had made a mistake pushing for war; the other, a smiley-faced look at the years 1968-1973 in Vietnam that champions an eerily familiar "stab in the back" thesis in which pusillanimous civilian leaders lead a proud military to defeat.
If it's a Vietnam syllabus you're looking for, President Obama, why not start with The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam's brilliant dissection of the Vietnam disaster? Having covered Vietnam as a New York Times reporter, he knew a bankrupt war when he saw one. Or why not consider what an American "counterinsurgency" war really meant on the ground? Nothing will give you a more visceral sense of the destruction visited on Vietnam and the Vietnamese in those grim years than Jonathan Schell's double-barreled classic The Real War. (Why doesn't anyone in your administration ask Schell, who saw the worst of that war close up, for advice on our new "Vietnam moment"?)
Or you might check out William Gibson's devastating, sardonically entitled post-war book, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. It's a history of what the war managers did and, believe me, it gives the World War II acronym snafu new punch. Or you could pick up Patriots, Christian Appy's unique oral history of the war as seen from all sides. It provides a perfect way to explore why, faced with overwhelming American firepower, the other side so often refuses to quit.
Not long ago, your special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, picked up a phone in Kabul and called Stanley Karnow, who got a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 middle-of-the-road, one-volume history of the war. We don't know how that consultation -- in the presence of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal -- went, but Karnow did offer this comment to an AP reporter later: "What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I."
My own suggestion to you and your staff for a single-volume history is Marilyn Young's cautionary tale, The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990. And then give her a buzz, too, and see what she thinks about the present moment. (Notice, by the way, that "s" on "wars" in her title, since she includes the U.S.-backed French war. When a good history of the conflict in Afghanistan is written, its title, too, will undoubtedly have the plural "wars" in it. After all, we've been fighting there on and off for three decades now.)
Finally, there's a classic from 1967 that should be front and center when discussing the future of the Afghan War. Its title still says it all, even if the topic has yet to make it into your White House when it comes to Afghanistan. I'm talking about Howard Zinn's Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.
18 Comments so far
Show AllAnd what parallels might we find to the original sin of escalation--the Gulf of Tonkin lie?
How about reading "The Great Gamble" by Gregory Feifer. It's a story about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the serious problems they faced. True to form, we are facing the same ones now and there is no victory,on the horizon, in this endevour.
Good article. Only it assumes that we are there for reasons other than oil, Israel and war-profiteering.
"Only it assumes that we are there for reasons other than oil, Israel and war-profiteering." –(ezeflyer)
–Yes. "Oil. Israel and war-profiteering" certainly. The usual 'cast' of geo-political characters and known reasons.
And the darker reason which compels and subsumes them all: Simply to kill, for that end alone. But also 'to kill' overwhelmingly.
For America that becomes a 'meta' reason– or an intractable historic and psychopathic demiurge–its own 'event horizon' of implacable dread. America simply 'does' what it 'is.' It will not change course. Militarism for America has become 'sport.'
Even after Vietnam nothing changed, America simply 'reloaded.' Even when America is most at peace, it is actually at war.
Catastrophe as some perverse salvation and its corollary–morbidity. Catastrophe through the spectacle of imposing death and humiliation on 'the other.'
Two books, though not specific to either America, Afghanistan or Vietnam are Sven Lindqvist's, "A History of Bombing," and Marilyn B. Young and Yuki Tanaka's anthology "Bombing Civilians–A Twentieth Century History." Both books catalog a disturbing historiography of malevolence beyond the concrete reasons of resource acquisition and the strategies of geo-politics.
America has become the exigent practitioner of the malefic. That is a realm that exists beyond 'rational' explanations. To wit:
Senator Fulbright: "And this (reprisal raids) was interpreted to mean if we showed the will then the North Vietnamese would surrender. I mean being faced with such overwhelming power they would stop. Is that really the way they were thinking? "
Mr.Thompson: "Would be brought to their knees" was the phrase that was used."
(Fulbright Hearings 1968)
And even more chilling yet for being couched in a rational explanation:
"Airpower...can profoundly influence the human condition. Through selective engagement, airpower can support a recovering population; encourage one element while discouraging another; monitor, deter, transport and connect; and assist in establishing the conditions for a safe and secure future." –(Robyn Read, USAF Colonel, ret.), 2005).
Yes, "a safe and secure future..." –(Jill Bains).
It assumes no such thing, even if Engelhardt thinks there are other reasons. And even then, "oil, Israel and war profiteering" aren't excluded as reasons. Maybe we're there also because the Pentagon crusade for Full Spectrum Dominance must be respected, and Obama deeply respects all such military imperatives. There are a constellation of reasons, all of them serving the US imperialist agenda.
Obama is not stupid but he is a corrupt fool, as we have learned and will continue to learn. A fool will not necessarily get you killed but a corrupt one will.
Our military leadership is so bad, they our lost. Their insanity led to the phrase “fragem if you gotem” in Nam. They no how to use shock and awe to win the invasion but they are lost when it comes to winning an occupation. Running around Afghanistan playing pork chop hill will win nothing. There is only one way to win in Afghanistan put all the NATO forces in Kabul then divide the 60000 US troops in to 4 occupation brigades. Place the four brigades in strategic providential capitals. Make the life in those five areas great and wait a generation. When the tribal leaders of the next generation want the life in the five economic centers, we can go home. Very few people have to die and time will heal old wounds. If you do not want to win the occupation we may as well come home now.
The major flaw in your strategy is cities cannot live without the support of the countryside and it already has a history of failure--the Strategic Villages plan from the Vietnam War.
I would add to the syllabus Andrew Bachevich's book, "The New American Militarism." It treats the whole internal Pentagon reaction to the loss in Vietnam very sympathetically from the standpoint of a career military professional, but then vehemently argues for civilian restraints upon adventurism, American exceptionalism, and global imperial overstretch.
I agree with Tom Englehardt's thesis, but feel there are more parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam than he acknowledges.
True, Afghanistan is far less ethnically homogenous than Vietnam, and the Taliban scarcely resemble the nationalist Viet Cong National Liberation Front. But I think the role of the Pakistani ISI in creating and sustaining the Afghan Taliban is quite analogous to the backing provided by North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union to the Viet Cong. Karzai is another Diem, and the south Vietnamese heroically held periodic elections too. In addition to Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and to some extent China are all major regional powers "lurking in the background" in anticipation of the time when Uncle Sam will finally withdraw.
The links in Tom's article to the article in Foreign Affairs by Herring and the "stab in the back" treatise by Astore are well worth a read.
I sense that one of Obama's major problems is that, as a narrow domestic partisan campaign tactic, he took such pains to "transcend" and "move beyond" the "old divisions of the Vietnam era" that it is extraordinarily difficult for him now to reverse course, and deal with the Afghanistan withdrawal/escalation decision by reference to the fate of LBJ. History thus repeats first as tragedy, then as farce.
Bill from Saginaw
Iran and other Islamic states currently fund the Taliban.
These comparisons represent galactic stupidity. Ask any Vietnam vet who actually fought a guerrilla counter insurgency if the characteristics of war are not identical.
I am sick and tired of people framing war in anti-septic language when they have never stepped foot on a battlefield.
Moreover, I will agree that the Halberstram book is astonishingly clear, arguing against another war escalation and why it happended.
It appears Obama is getting pulled by his stupid appointments again to the right; h a powerful rejoinder of why this Administration looks like the Bush years. He is only getting a neo conservative geo-political view of war.
Elohim, all I get here is that you feel that those who have not fought have no call to speak. What insights would you present as, I assume, one who has?
The one similarity that seems most important is that both the Vietnameze and the Afghanis have been fighting foriegn invaders in gurila wars for centuries and the invaders always lose.
Enough with the Viet Nam analogies. Geeezzzzzeeeee! They aren't that good anyway.
Especially if you believe that by ignoring history we can better understand present circumstances.
Just a bunch of local patriots fighting to keep their country and way of life from a heavily armed invader. Maybe they should change their name from Taliban to Minutemen...
Or freedom fighters! But of course they would still be demonized as the enemy in the MSM.
Good tomes for our war president to read. Other books that Obama could profit from reading concerning America's past involvement with Vietnam would be:
* Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and the above mentioned Marilyn B. Young which features a number of essays concerning these two countries and features such writers as Christian G. Appy, Andrew J. Bacevich, Gareth Porter, John Prados, et al.
* Barbara W. Tuchman's classic The March of Folly as this historian views how countries will insist upon waging war [such as America's quagmire in Vietnam] despite evidence which demonstrates the folly of government's pursuing policies contrary to their own interests.
* For a leftist point of view regarding the debacle of Vietnam one should turn to Joe Allen's Vietnam: The [Last] War the U.S. Lost which focuses upon three main points: the resistance of the Vietnamese, the antiwar movement in the United States and the emergence and influence of the heroic GI rebellion that took place against the U.S. military command. As John Pilger states in his introduction, Allen's book "demonstrates as a historian how a rapacious force as seemingly invincible as the United States can be defeated politically, if not militarily." This, as Pilger notes, should be a book that "should be in every home."
Here's a word in for "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" by Neil Sheehan.
First published in 1988, winner of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and the definitive cautionary tale on that miserable blunder of a war.