Henry the K & Disaster

This is a LONG post, so excuse me.

Sadly, No commented on this aspect of the Bush White House a few days ago and I haven't because their post was so similar to my thinking (with gratuitous Kissinger "pick" shot that I wouldn't have likely come up with). Kissinger is advising Bush on how to run the Iraq invasion.

Somewhere Christopher Hitchens just reached his 1st of 12 steps.

For those who poo-poo the idea that Iraq is not like Vietnam, the Bush Administration is taking that lesson.

FROM THE WRONG END OF THE FUCKING TELESCOPE!

Kissinger, trying to re-write his own war criminal, Cambodia-bombing, past totally excuses his own errors in Vietnam by selling the same solution to Bush that failed before to Iraq. Idiots and scoundrels have for years asserted we did not "win" in Vietnam because we did not have the resolve. That is BULL-fucking-SHIT!

It is hardly surprising that when it comes to historical analogies the Bush Administration always takes EXACTLY the wrong lesson from it. They might as well just hire Victor Davis Hanson -- so Bush can start using the American Army in his brand new Thermopylae somewhere west of Ramadi. After all, Hanson is the kind of guy who gets his jollys out of such a battle (which in reality has absolutely NO relevance to our adventure in Iraq), all while forgetting -- the Spartans pretty much all DIED!

Vietnam was a disaster because:

1. It was not strategically as important as we convinced ourselves it was.

2. We assumed the refuse of another country's failed imperialist policy.

3. It was sold through a lie and perpetuated through black & white homilies.

4. We could never have deployed sufficient resources to such a location to stem the tide of an internal civil war.

5. Consecutive Administration's had no real idea what they were doing, but hoped they got lucky.

6. It was the very definition of the limits of strategic bombing of all kinds.

7. The over-active hubris of Kennedy replaced the perceived "old laziness" of Eisenhower in ratcheting up Vietnam, and then when Kennedy seemed to be learning his lesson, he was assassinated.

8. There was NO real internal dissent within either party at the time of the ratcheting up of the war in the early and mid-1960s.

Yet, for years, the right-wing has been sold the idea that we lost Vietnam because we were NOT committed enough, rather than, it being something we should never committed to in the first place. It was a misplaced allocation of resources, (see Morgenthau, Hans)

I've written about Morgenthau before, while many of you may not have heard of him, or just tangentially did during some international politics course you took in college, he is among the most influential theorists on international diplomacy in the cold-war era -- though the lessons of his teaching are certainly more universal than that. He is the founding theorist of the "realist" school of international relations. The sad thing is, self-proclaimed "realists" today are guys like Dick Cheney who are nothing more than power mad cynics about human nature. THAT was NOT the purpose of Morgenthau's theories.

Let's look at what Morgenthau said on April 16, 1965, eight months after the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution"

We are militarily engaged in Vietnam by virtue of a basic principle of our foreign policy that was implicit in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and was put into practice by John Foster Dulies from 1954 onward. This principle is the military containment of Communism. Containment had its origins in Europe; Dulles applied it to the Middle East and Asia through a series of bilateral and multilateral alliances. Yet what was an outstanding success In Europe turned out to be a dismal failure elsewhere. The reasons for that failure are twofold.

First, the threat that faced the nations of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War was primarily military. It was the threat of the Red Army marching westward. Behind the line of military demarcation of 1945 which the policy of containment declared to be the westernmost limits of the Soviet empire there was an ancient civilization, only temporarily weak and able to maintain itself against the threat of Communist subversion.

The situation is different in the Middle East and Asia. The threat there is not primarily military but political in nature. Weak governments and societies provide opportunities for Communist subversion. Military containment is irrelevant to that threat and may even be counter-productive. Thus the Baghdad Pact did not protect Egypt from Soviet influence and SEATO has had no bearing on Chinese influence in Indonesia and Pakistan.

Second and more important, even If China were threatening her neighbors primarily by military means, it would be impossible to contain her by erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire. For China is, even in her present underdeveloped state, the dominant power in Asia. She is this by virtue of the quality and quantity of her population, her geographic position, her civilization, her past power remembered and her future power anticipated. Anybody who has traveled in Asia with his eyes and ears open must have been impressed by the enormous impact which the resurgence of China has made upon all manner of men, regardless of class and political conviction, from Japan to Pakistan.

The issue China poses is politicaI and cultural predominance. The United States can no more contain Chinese influence in Asia by arming South Vietnam and Thailand than China could contain American influence in the Western Hemisphere by arming, say, Nicaragua and Costa Rica...

...Why do we support the Saigon Government in the Civil War against the Viet Cong? Because the Saigon Government is "free” and the Viet Cong are "Communist." By containing Vietnamese Communism, we assume that we are really containing the Communism of China.

Yet this assumption is at odds with the historic experience of a millennium and is unsupported by contemporary evidence. China is the hereditary enemy of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh will become the leader of a Chinese satellite only if the United States forces him to become one...*

... Until the end of last February [1965], the Government of the United States started from the assumption that the war in South Vietnam was a civil war, aided and abetted—but not created from abroad, and spokesmen for the Government have made time and again the point that the key to winning the war was political and not military and was to be found in South Vietnam itself. It was supposed to lie in transforming the indifference or hostility of the great mass of the South Vietnamese people into positive loyalty to the Government.

To that end, a new theory of warfare called “counterinsurgency" was put into practice. Strategic hamlets were established, massive propaganda campaigns were embarked upon, social and economic measures were at least sporadically taken. But all was to no avail. The mass of the population remained indifferent, if not hostile, and large units of the army ran away or went over to the enemy.

The reasons for this failure are of general significance, for they stem from a deeply ingrained habit of the American mind, We like to think of social problems as technically self-sufficient and susceptible of simple, clear-cut solutions. We tend to think of foreign aid as a kind of self-sufficient, economic enterprise subject to the laws of economics and divorced from politics, and of war as a similarly self-sufficient, technical enterprise, to be won as quickly, as cheaply. as thoroughly as possible and divorced from the foreign policy that preceded and is to follow it. Thus our military theoreticians and practitioners conceive of counterinsurgency as though it were just another branch of warfare, to be taught in special schools and applied with technical proficiency wherever the occasion arises.

This view derives of course from a complete misconception of the nature of civil war. People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.

Magsaysay could subdue the Huk rebellion in the Philippines because his charisma, proven in action, aroused a faith superior to that of his opponents. In South Vietnam there is nothing to oppose the faith of the Viet Cong and, In consequence, the Saigon Government and we are losing the civil war.

And another quote that sums up the disaster of Bushworld:

"The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman’s thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil."
- Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson, Politics Among Nations, 6th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 165

Now tell me, who was prescient about Vietnam -- and tell me whether or not there is reason to be depressed at how the stupidity and banality of disasters always occur through a patently unrealistic and simple view of history?

Golly, wonder how George W. Bush and his sychophants fit into that pattern? Same as they did during Vietnam.


* If there has ever been a more accurate statement than this about Ho Chi Minh and the effect of our involvement I don't know what it is. Just a few years after we finally departed from Vietnam, China and the Vietnamese government were at war.