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 The Unlearned Lessons of Vietnam Continue to Haunt The U.S.Posted on Oct 30, 2008Henry Kissinger has just published (in the Oct. 25 issue of Newsweek) a curious and revealing review of a new book on the Vietnam war, written by the man who was the research associate for McGeorge Bundy’s projected account of his period in the 1960s as national security advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bundy did not live to write his book. His research collaborator, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now collected fragments of Bundy’s draft materials and other writings, together with the documentary research he had assembled for their joint book, and turned it into a new account of the Vietnam War as reflected in the papers that crossed the desk of the national security advisor and the other documents with which Bundy worked. The book is called “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam” (publication scheduled for Nov. 11). Kissinger’s review is unexpected in its implied sympathy for Goldstein’s work, despite the fact that he describes it as unremittingly hostile to Bundy’s decisions in office. This was the crucial period when the ground was prepared for the eventually huge U.S. military intervention in Indochina that followed, but it deals with events preceding Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968, when Kissinger became national security advisor. Kissinger draws policy lessons from the book that seem at odds with the policy he and Nixon followed in Vietnam, but more to the point today is that they conflict with the policy followed by George W. Bush in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the currently enlarged NATO war in Afghanistan. Kissinger notes that Bundy was a man of the Second World War and had uncritically transferred his convictions, and worse, his strategic conceptions, about Communism’s “containment” from the European Cold War theater and the Soviet military threat to Southeast Asia, where there were no firm military or political front lines, and where the challenge was to the legitimacy of governments, not to their military power. Vietnam, after all, had under the French been a single country with only a demilitarized zone separating North from South. The governments on both sides—above all the Communist government in the North—claimed to represent the entire people. This meant that the war was fundamentally political, which many American officials at the time would admit, but which had little effect on how they were waging their war. Advertisement All these are errors were repeated by the Bush administration in its supposed war against terror. “Muslim extremism” is everywhere the same and must be stamped out. George Bush decided that a “war” should be fought against something whose roots were nationalist and religious. Fighting is a matter of American “credibility.” Most recently there is a newly announced “Gates Doctrine” extending the war still further, saying that the United States claims the right to strike anyone anywhere in defense of its strategic interests (as it did last week inside Syria). It also claims the right to overturn any government it deems a potential “domino” of Muslim extremism (as in the case of the so-called Islamic Courts government in Somalia, which had that country more or less pacified last year until a U.S.-backed invasion by Ethiopia unleashed the violence once again). Kissinger writes that “with the perspective of nearly four decades, it is possible to challenge (Bundy’s Vietnam-era) assumptions. Communism has proved not to be monolithic; the dominoes did not fall; the problem of how to deal with guerrilla warfare has grown worse, not better.” One might think such conclusions now of the utmost banality. Yet the Bush administration did not learn the Vietnam lessons, and there are disturbing signs that Barack Obama and the people likely to make up an Obama National Security Council and State Department have not learned from Vietnam or the Bush “war on terror.” As for the McCain-Palin policy of “victory” everywhere, the prospect does not bear comment. Governments, like corporations and modern organizations of all kinds, make much of systematically teaching “lessons learned” to those newly arrived to responsibilities, yet they seem infrequently to succeed. This is what Kissinger is implicitly saying in his article. Vietnam was a 1960s and 1970s war. Here we are in 2008, and the basic lessons remain unlearned. Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com. © 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment
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By Paul_GA, November 2, 2008 at 9:09 am #
Thomas Jefferson said this about chattel slavery; I say it about American interventionism: “I tremble when I consider that God is just, and His justice will not sleep forever.”
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, y’know (Hosea 8:7). Perhaps the current economic crisis is the beginning of sorrows; the first blast of the whirlwind.
Report thisBy Oceana, November 1, 2008 at 9:59 pm #
I would add one more tactic, keep middle America unemployed and in crisis mode so that those who do care get side tracked by looking for work to keep a roof over their head or finding a place to live. People wonder if they will be able to feed their family; forget the luxury of getting their children to college.
Information is fragmented and compartmentalized and it was learned to immediately destroy the evidence (Waco, Oklahoma, 911; whatever amount of complicity our government played; but this is another story) by leaving no clue behind and deny, deny and deny. We continue to witness this fragmentation with the financial “crisis”, excuse me, robbery. Wealth continues to be stolen from the masses into the hands of the criminals. What we now see are individuals who will sell their own grandmother and grandchildren down the drain for their own immediate self-interests. They have no desire or ability to look into the future and see the consequences of their immediate actions.
Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries could not be conquered throughout history and will not be conquered - G. Khan, Soviet Union (Russia) failed and all the rulers in between who tried at great peril to their own people. We will fail as well. We’ve become a society that can’t link history with current events (actions) and anticipate potential outcomes following one course or another. We live in a world of mediocrity and immediate gratification.
Another courageous example of true resolve against an occupying force are the Algerians who bravely fought the French and won. That same courageous resolve we are continuing to witness today, not only in Iraq and other surrounding countries, but countries within South America, a model that deserves to be looked at when we pitifully think we can’t do anything. The indigenous people stood up, are standing up, against world governments and corporations who rape, pillage their people and land. Fujimore continues to pay a huge price for standing up against Shell Oil who wanted to put in the largest LNG pipeline across the Andes against the benefit of the Peruvians (that’s another story not being told). These South Americans rose up and continue to rise up saying, “No more!”
My final thought: Who the hell is Kissinger to look toward as some expert? How ignorant are we? He is a war criminal - nothing more than that! He has the blood of many on his hands. I wait for the day that Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and family (WWII profits) and many others will end up in court for war crimes - crimes against humanity. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush flat out murdered Saddam Hussein by establishing a mock court system out of revenge and self protection. I venture to say they probably feared him more than anyone else because of their own complicity within Hussein’s regime. I am sure he would not have remained silent if brought before a legitimate international or internal court system.
The immoral criminal actions of these individuals (including our own complicity as a people within a nation that seems to choose to remain ignorant and not give a damn) will not remain unanswered whether it occurs through a legitimate world court system (they will be so lucky) or through the court system of a country that has filed criminal charges against them.
Karma is just and merciful; it is not partial. Their actions (our actions) do come home to roost, if not in this cyclic life time, in another.
I venture to say that the fall of the house of Bush is due to the collective actions of this family and reflected in GWB. “Chickens, do most certainly, come home to roost!”
Report thisBy Crimes of the State Blog, November 1, 2008 at 3:22 pm #
They learned plenty from Vietnam that they ARE using today.
1) All volunteer storm trooper force: no draft, no general opposition.
2) Go where the real valuable resources are: oil rich middle east.
3) Control the press and intimidate journalists. No images of bloody broken children, children on fire, dead US troops allowed on US airwaves.
Torture and brutal terrorism against entire regions/villages was also used in Vietnam, and that is being used today with the “surge” supposedly “pacifying” Iraq. Only the “pacifying” was ethnic cleansing, and the Sunni attacks only stopped because they got hired.
A sizeable mercenary force is also a new development, to pretend to keep the troop levels low, to avoid the dreaded word “escalation.”
They also learned to attack domestic peace groups, use surveillance, COINTELPRO tactics, state terrorism, trumped up charges and a general police state atmosphere. If all that doesn’t work, their good friends at the mainstream corporate propaganda complex won’t show the protests anyway, so very few will hear about them.
I guess they also learned they can kill millions with impunity, and no Americans give a damn about piles of dead foreigners.
Have I missed anything?
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/
Report thisBy libertarian, November 1, 2008 at 4:42 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Having read only this article but not the book, my biases are reinforced. Kissinger, it appears, is attempting to smear Bundy’s name in an effort to expunge his own guilt as one of the premiere war-criminals of the period. During the Johnson- managed period of the Vietnam incursion, around 2-million Vietnamese were murdered. Following that, when Nixon took over, the bombing and carpet-laying of hundreds of thousands of surface landmines were seeded across Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the border region of Thailand. These toy-appearing devices kill or maim, I believe, around 100 people per week to this day. Kissinger’s insistence on spreading the onslaught to these surrounding countries ended up costing another 2-million Southeast Asian lives, for a wartime total of 4-million killed, most all innocents.
I remember the horrifying account one helicopter gunner describing his work over Cambodia (paraphrasing): we’d lay down machine-gun fire on the villages, sometime gattling-gun fire from our circling support planes. The villagers just kept at their work in the fields or tending caribou, it was like they didn’t even acknowledge our presence. I just kept shooting. I killed hundreds of villagers on that one mission. They just kept working. Damndest thing I ever saw.”
Report thisBy Paul_GA, October 31, 2008 at 9:35 am #
The simplest lesson of all from Vietnam—ABANDON INTERVENTIONISM AS THE BASIS OF ONE’S FOREIGN POLICY. Excuse my resorting to all capitals, but this is a lesson which ought to be rendered that way in every government office in Washington—prominently displayed where it can be read at all times.
Report thisBy nrobi, October 31, 2008 at 4:13 am #
As one person, who, for the sake of history, grew up watching the nightly news, with the body counts of the “vietcong, and Americans” I loathe the fact that we are now caught up in a similar misconception of what a war is and how it should be fought.
Report thisYes, the “war” in Vietnam was a failure of US foreign policy from the start, for there really never was a North and South Vietnam.
These were terms brought to you by the local propaganda complex to justify sending 100"s of thousands of men and women to fight and die for a civil war that was not supposed to be happening.
A book that I found in the library for sale for 25 cents, called, “The United States in Vietnam,” by George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, explains that according to treaties signed by the US and France and other countries in Switzerland, there was no divide between North and South Vietnam and the civil war that we helped fight was pure fiction on the part of the war machine of the military-industrial complex of the US.
Again we find ourselves mired in a civil war that cannot be won by outside forces and we are not welcome to the fight.
Analysis, Get the Hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan,
or be involved in the quagmire of another civil war that will cost the lives of many Americans and others.
By Big B, October 30, 2008 at 11:03 pm #
Being a history buff, I am always amazed that the Vietnam war is still the pivitol event of the second half of the 20th century. Everything we do, everything we are now, was determined by that war. One could say that the downfall of the american empire began after the TET offensive and the subsequent malaise that befelled the nation in 1968.
Just look at Mac, he’s stuck in that moment in time. It’s why he’s a dangerous asshole, and unqualifies for the office.
Report thisBy Oceana, October 30, 2008 at 10:21 pm #
Worthy reading material and web link to reflect upon. History does matter when we consider “the why” of a situation as it enables us to gain understanding:
Soldiers in Revolt, GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, by David Cortright
Drugs, Oil and War, by Peter Dale Scott
A Savage War of Peace, by Alistair Horne
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
Weblink: *** Walter Burien, CAFR1 ***
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