Jonathan Schell: Obama's Vietnam Syndrome
[Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale University. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.]
NEW HAVEN – There can be no military resolution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. Writing that sentence almost makes me faint with boredom. As US President Barack Obama ponders what to do about the war, who wants to repeat a point that’s been made thousands of times? Is there anyone on earth who does not know that a guerilla war cannot be won without winning the “hearts and minds” of the people? The American public has known this since its defeat in Vietnam.
Americans are accustomed to thinking that their country’s bitter experience in Vietnam taught certain lessons that became cautionary principles. But historical documents recently made available reveal something much stranger. Most of those lessons were in fact known – though not publicly admitted – before the US escalated the war in Vietnam.
That difference is important. If the Vietnam disaster was launched in full awareness of the “lessons,” why should those lessons be any more effective this time? It would seem that some other lessons are needed.
Why did President Lyndon Johnson’s administration steer the US into a war that looked like a lost cause even to its own officials? One possible explanation is that Johnson was thoroughly frightened by America’s right wing. Urged by Senator Mike Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he replied that he did not want another “China in Vietnam.”
His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, fueled Johnson’s fears. In a memo of 1964, he wrote that “the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now if we should be seen to be the first to quit in Saigon.” In another memo, Bundy argued that neutrality would be viewed by “all anti-communist Vietnamese” as a “betrayal,” thus angering a US domestic constituency powerful enough “to lose us an election.”
Did Johnson’s advisers push the country into a disastrous war in order to win an election – or, to be more exact, to avoid losing one? Johnson, Bundy, and the others of course believed the “domino” theory, which says that one country “falling” to communism would cause others to fall. But that theory meshed with suspicious ease with the perceived domestic political need for the president to appear “tough” – to avoid appearing “less of a hawk than your more respectable opponents,” as Bundy later put it.
What is uncanny about the current debate about Afghanistan is the degree to which it displays continuity with the Vietnam debates, and the Obama administration knows it...
Read entire article at Project Syndicate
NEW HAVEN – There can be no military resolution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. Writing that sentence almost makes me faint with boredom. As US President Barack Obama ponders what to do about the war, who wants to repeat a point that’s been made thousands of times? Is there anyone on earth who does not know that a guerilla war cannot be won without winning the “hearts and minds” of the people? The American public has known this since its defeat in Vietnam.
Americans are accustomed to thinking that their country’s bitter experience in Vietnam taught certain lessons that became cautionary principles. But historical documents recently made available reveal something much stranger. Most of those lessons were in fact known – though not publicly admitted – before the US escalated the war in Vietnam.
That difference is important. If the Vietnam disaster was launched in full awareness of the “lessons,” why should those lessons be any more effective this time? It would seem that some other lessons are needed.
Why did President Lyndon Johnson’s administration steer the US into a war that looked like a lost cause even to its own officials? One possible explanation is that Johnson was thoroughly frightened by America’s right wing. Urged by Senator Mike Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he replied that he did not want another “China in Vietnam.”
His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, fueled Johnson’s fears. In a memo of 1964, he wrote that “the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now if we should be seen to be the first to quit in Saigon.” In another memo, Bundy argued that neutrality would be viewed by “all anti-communist Vietnamese” as a “betrayal,” thus angering a US domestic constituency powerful enough “to lose us an election.”
Did Johnson’s advisers push the country into a disastrous war in order to win an election – or, to be more exact, to avoid losing one? Johnson, Bundy, and the others of course believed the “domino” theory, which says that one country “falling” to communism would cause others to fall. But that theory meshed with suspicious ease with the perceived domestic political need for the president to appear “tough” – to avoid appearing “less of a hawk than your more respectable opponents,” as Bundy later put it.
What is uncanny about the current debate about Afghanistan is the degree to which it displays continuity with the Vietnam debates, and the Obama administration knows it...