Why We Failed in Vietnam

a little bit of film here two points from yesterday's films one Tonkin Gulf there is now absolutely no doubt that there was not an attack on August 4 1964 whatever whatever doubt lingered after all these years was removed entirely when the NSA released some messages intercepted from Hanoi which seemed if you read them one way to be ordering at an attack they have been dicta Declassified translated deconstructed and certainly up unequivocally apply to August 2nd not August 4th when there was small attack second the odd rang battle that Barry talked about yesterday morning I think and that was shown there actually there are two segments to that all that was shown on the film yesterday and all that was shown in Mel Gibson's movie was the first the heroic phase X ray landing zone X ray when Hal Moore who is just the an incredible guy if God forbid I had to go into combat on the ground I would want to go behind him I would I would follow him anywhere I think Hal Moore's unit performs spectacularly under tough circumstances shortly after that another unit poorly led and sort of straggling along from one landing zone to the other fell into an ambush and was decimated when Westmoreland was talking to the troops yesterday as you saw praising them for the victory he was not fully aware of what had happened at Albany and in fact Albany was sort of covered up for many years and it's it's a tragic story it's not mentioned in Mel Gibson's movie either it's but it is the second stage of these operations and Central Highlands alright just to start off right today we've got a very serious and controversial issue and I can tell from the mood of the crowd that you're ready for it but we're going to start by trivet trivializing it with short segments from two 1980s films that do a wonderful job of taking an issue that the nation is very upset about and bringing it down to about the bottom level so fire away sorry I sent you to such a hellhole good interesting you can't possibly want to stay here soon just hear me out first the corporate operation to be geared up in the Far East your name was they got a computer at one of three most able to complete the mission you should recon the earth Ibiza man well why mean prison camp you escaped from a setting once a target area nobody knows that terrain better you knew the respect is very high you'd be temporarily reinstated in the forces and if the mission is successful there may be a presidential pardon you interested yeah I'll get the necessary clearance the next time you meet it'll be entitled the special ops designate we'll watch the operation he's all clear gentlemen I did what I could keep you out of here so you get the way this time cut all right the operative words were the last words obviously this one is even worse get ready no no Rodney Dangerfield how long people eat history is dispatch just information that s not me the hold is very sacred well the primer go to the earth behold a great Christian takes the Bible in the homes and sacred way a lot of people hold their marriage sacred so I knew enough when we dive right in my interpreting for the easiest abyss the last 20 years of marriage history now could someone tell me why in 1975 we pull our troops out of Vietnam the failure of Vietnamization to win popular support caused the ongoing erosion of confidence in the various American but healthy ghosts like allergies right well there's a popular version what went on there and a lot of people have to believe that I wish I could but I was there I was here in a classroom hoping I was right I was up to my knees in rice patties with gossamer you in how many she's ever grateful at the time and me I'm not a fighter I didn't know you wanted to get involved with the discussion mr. helper listen to my helping you can help me okay the other thing we had 30 years ago a little Korean conflict yeah no retail does achieve victory how come it across the 38th parallel and push those rice eaters back to the great ball I'll say how true this would go push she went to the cockpit batteries that's the way to introduce our topic of the morning what what's our time frame for till 10:00 all right all right why did we fail why did we fail why despite our vast power and magnitude of our twenty year commitment were we unable to achieve the objective of an independent non communist Vietnam to impose our will on what Lyndon Johnson once contemptuously dismissed as that raggedy-ass little forthright country of all the questions that have arisen out of the Vietnam War this is the one or these are the one that I think have most nagged at us over the years that have haunted us since that fateful time in April 1975 when the last helicopter departed the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon now the first question I think is why is this so historically as a nation we have had an unmatched record of success so much so that I think it has we have come to take success for granted failure comes hard to us and maybe harder than to other people because of this record and to explain it in the case of Vietnam we have developed various rationalizations that have become part of the mythology we live by we fail because we did not use our military power decisively it is said because the civilians put restrictions on the military that made it impossible to win sir do we get to win this time as Rambo just said a ridiculous statement at face value but one that is suffuse dwith national mythology others insist that we didn't use our military power wisely we attempted to fight world war ii and korea over in vietnam instead of adapting to the war we found ourselves in and devising counterinsurgency tactics that would have been more appropriate and perhaps more workable still others claim that a treasonous anti-war movement and a hostile media turned the public against the war thus submerging the national will it has even been argued that television lost the war and sort of censorship that has been imposed since 1975 reflects some some belief in these views now I think one problem with all of these arguments is that they can never be more than speculation could we have won the war maybe but no one can ever really be sure what would have happened if we had done things differently if we had fought without restriction if we had devised a counterinsurgency strategy if we had suppressed the anti-war movement and censored the media and to attribute our failure to flaws of strategy and a lack of will at best I think oversimplifies a very complex problem and provides at best a partial explanation now god forbid I am NOT up here to defend the strategy if you can call it that that Lyndon Johnson and his advisors developed in 64 and 65 to fight this war in a sense Rambo is right we never set out to win this war in the traditional sense winning was deemed unnecessary at the beginning and 6465 it was certainly deemed too costly and also potentially too risky if by this you mean subdue in North Vietnam so that you could impose your own solution over the entire country of Vietnam the aim was more to use military power to control the behavior of another nation gradual escalation it was called and the theory which is based on the writings of a number of academic theorists about strategy in the 60s including most prominently Thomas Schelling was that if you slowly increase the level of pain it would you would reach that breaking point eventually where North Vietnam would have no choice but to cry uncle you would reach a point where for the other side the cost were greater than the potential gain and they would decide to go along with what you were doing I'm going up old Ho Chi Minh's leg an inch at a time was the way Lyndon Johnson in his inimitable fashion put it in a conversation with George McGovern in 1965 two edges sort of briefly this this all of this theorizing about gradual escalation develops out of the dilemma first addressed directly in Cuba of of how to fight in the nuclear age of how to conduct a war at a time when all-out war raised the possibility of escalation to the nucular level and possibly annihilation it was used with some success in the Missile Crisis in other words we didn't start out with the most extreme measures in the Missile Crisis but started at a low level the so-called quarantine rather than a blockade which is technically considered an act of war and and I think that experience in a lot of different ways shapes the way that Johnson and his advisors look at strategy in Vietnam and of course all of the different elements of this Rolling Thunder search-and-destroy all of these elements reflect this notion of of gradual escalation using only the level of force that is absolutely necessary to achieve the limited aim you set forth which is to maintain an independent non communist South Vietnam there's often talk about not having a clear-cut goal in the war our goal was absolutely clear to maintain an independent non communist South Vietnam and of course with rolling thunder the other the sort of other things are to slow down the or to interdict the North Vietnamese the passage of North Vietnamese men and supplies in the South raise the morale of the south and to coerce North Vietnam into going along with our aims and I don't think there's reason to go here in detail and to all the reasons why it doesn't work they're spelled out in considerable detail in the book and I would just be repeating that here big problem of course is that North Vietnamese North Vietnam is always able to replace its losses and the bombing is never as effective as one might have liked for a whole variety of reasons bombing in the mid-60s hasn't developed much beyond World War two by 1971-72 it has but at this point it's still relatively primitive by the standards we've seen in in recent years and of course the North Vietnamese were creative resilient and absolutely determined in resisting this as everything else of Bury mentioned last night the pawl doom a bridge in Hanoi which was bombed just about every year of the war and replaced and bombed again and replaced and bombed again and replaced the air defense system was was described by one airman as as hell with Hanoi as its hub including Sam's but aircraft even rifles they flew low to avoid the Sam's you would get rifle fire very tough search-and-destroy also opposed its problems as you saw yesterday I don't think you need much the film shown yesterday Illustrated about as well as a good Hill what was at Hill 943 the difficulties of ground warfare the big problem of course was that was that if you were finding the enemy in the first place and the fact that if you ever got them under huge pressure that could retreat into sanctuaries in North Vietnam Laos and Cambodia which raises the possibility of why didn't we invade those areas which raises all kinds of new possibilities and I'll talk about that a little more in a minute what particularly struck me in doing my research for my book on Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam his conduct of the war is is that nobody by 1966 nobody and the high councils of government was really satisfied with the way the war was going or the strategy was playing out and yet never was there anything approaching a full-scale reassessment you know makes you wonder and this doesn't happen under Johnson never does anytime somebody pushes for a reassessment whether it be Brooke crew lack of the Marine Corps whether it be general Harold Johnson chief staff the Army no matter who it may be civilian advisors McNamara at points Johnson deflects it resists it finesse is it which he's wonderfully capable at doing he's a magician of finesse never does it why I really am Not sure I can't it maybe was a matter of not wanting to admit that what he was doing was wrong but it's a phenomenon that is quite striking when you look look at this a flawed strategy then clearly helps to explain our failure in Vietnam but from jump t4 to jump from there to the conclusion that the unrestricted use of American power could have produced victory at acceptable cost seems to me to raise some very difficult questions we can never know whether an unrestricted bombing campaign of the sort the Joint Chiefs advocated in 1965 and after would have forced analyte to settle on our Terms but there is reason to question I think that it would have the American experience with strategic bombing in World War two and Korea suggests that it has very serious limitations the capacity of airpower to cripple a pre-industrial nation like North Vietnam may in fact have been quite limited what was the good of bombing them into the stone-age s general LeMay proposed when has one sardonic wag put it they were already there before the early 70s the advent of the smart bomb again we didn't have the capability was very limited now they're always people who talk about linebacker one in June of 72 and linebacker to the so-called Christmas bombing as exemplifying that the war could have been won with air power linebacker one did have a huge impact during the Easter offensive but the main reason it did was by this time you were fighting a North Vietnamese army that was heavily dependent on on Pol gasoline petroleum spare parts and that sort of thing so which was much easier to interdict and manage invasions of the sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia ground operations in North Vietnam might have been made Westmoreland strategy of Search & Destroy or work better but they're also risk here in terms of expanding the war into new areas when we were having a difficult time managing the war in Vietnam and of course neither of these would have solved what was always the central problem in this war and that is the political viability of South Vietnam the reasons Johnson refused to escalate the war in these ways have been dismissed but I think they need to be taken seriously he refused to expand the war because of the risk obviously of Soviet and possibly Chinese intervention in very beginning of course it didn't seem necessary you're never going to do you're never likely to do full measures when you think you can succeed with partial measures and that's the way they that's very much the mentality they started out in 1965 secondly he feared almost to the point of an obsession if you push North Vietnam to the brink of defeat the Soviet Union and China might have intervened broadening the conflict to dangerous perhaps deadly proportions even to the level of nuclear confrontation and Rodney Dangerfield to the to the to the contrary the memories of Korea and the Chinese divisions rushing across the Yalu in the fall of 1950 were very very vivid in the minds of Johnson and and others one of Johnson's nightmares of course as he used to tell it was that he personalizes everything it's a great fault that an American pilot who would undoubtedly be from his hometown of Johnson City Texas right there would drop a bomb down the smokestack of a Soviet freighter in - Harbor and the next thing you knew you would have World War 3 now it's been fashionable in recent years to dismiss our play down Johnson's fears Chinese Russians would never intervene of course we don't know oh we can't be sure they can have all the war plans they want we don't know whether they're going to execute them or not but evidence from Soviet and Chinese archives does suggest we know that their involvement in the war was much greater than we thought it was at the time and it seems possible if not indeed likely that they might have intervened a North Vietnamese diplomat told me in Hanoi in 1997 that they they looked at the possibility of Chinese intervention the way we looked at nuclear weapons as a deterrent that they would really rather not use for the obvious reasons pointed out in our discussions on yesterday that that having the Chinese when the Chinese came they tended to stay a long time and this was not something that they were eager to eager to have they had thousand years right finally had the United States been able to militarily subdue North Vietnam without provoking outside intervention what then what's next well it would have faced the dangerous and costly task of occupying a hostile nation along China's southern border while simultaneously suppressing an insurgency that presumably was still going on in South Vietnam would a counterinsurgency strategy have produced better results well this is the conventional wisdom of today the rage of today the new gospel within the army at least it always has been kind of in the Marine Corps is counterinsurgency this includes book by Mark Moyer that Barry mentioned yesterday another book by John Nagel the new Field Manual the new Army Field Manual which was rewritten by General Petraeus puts heavy stress on counterinsurgency so much emphasis in the Army now on counterinsurgency that the conventional war people the tank people and others are fighting a rearguard action to kind of maintain their place in the in the in the army the marine combined action platoon program was implemented in I Corps it did enjoy some success but it's difficult to see for me to see how it could have been employed on a countrywide basis simply from the lack of skilled personnel and particularly given the sort of institutional bias in the military at this time against counterinsurgency it was something that was very different to care it difficult to carry out we didn't have the people who spoke the language who who knew the people who could work with them closely the South Vietnamese leadership who relied upon themselves western-oriented in some ways out of touch with their own people never showed much inclination or capacity to do it effectively now it is clear that Abram said general Abrams was a wonderful he's a wonderful contrast to Westmoreland West moralists starched everything is just so he's sort of a mail-order general out of the right out of the catalogue Abrams is rumpled and slovenly in many ways chomping a cigar he was a he was a chronic insomniac he put himself to sleep at night by sitting in a great big chair and drinking a whole bunch of scotch u.s. grant or is he the and he loved vogner so is he is he the model for a Robert Duvall's character in Apocalypse I have no idea but he could well hood will be Abraham's after 68 for the first time really develops programs that integrate military operations and pacification what had such a low priority in the mid sixties it was called the other war Abrams is able to integrate these after 68 in ways that nobody else had the problem is that by this time it's too late pacification might have worked if you had started in the mid 50's and had and really focused on it and had the right kind of people doing it that's I'm willing to go that far with it otherwise I'm not at all convinced now I'm going to kind of take the coward's route here I guess since we're going to talk about the anti-war movement and the media and all of those things I'm going to skip over those this morning except to say do not just enough to provoke some people except to say that I that I do not believe did they have an impact yes they had an impact and I'll talk about the impact of the anti-war movement on Thursday we'll talk about the impact of the media so at some point it was the media reporting good absolutely not some of it was excellent some of it was terrible a lot of it was in between but in neither case do I find these things decisive I am absolutely convinced by John Mueller argument that public opinion and the wars we have fought since World War two is generally driven by casualty list and he documents this very effectively for Korea whereas the media was positive there was no any war movement for Vietnam and Iraq there they run almost perfectly in tandem a surge of support for the war and then a gradual sort of decline as casualty lists increase okay I think the problem with all of these explanations is that they are too ethnocentric they reflect the persistence of what a British scholar has called the illusion of American omnipotence the belief almost an article national article of faith that the difficult we do tomorrow impossible may take a while when failure occurs therefore it must be our fault and we find scapegoats in our midst the bad judgment of our leaders Media anti-war movement and so forth and so forth the flaw in this are one of the obvious flaws is that it ignores the other side of the picture in this case the Vietnamese side which is you should we should concede I think a very important sign the question we most often ask and that I asked at the beginning then is the wrong question or at least not the the whole question instead of asking why we failed we need to ask why the other side succeeded or at least why the war came out as it did and in that end and looking at that I would like to focus on a couple of three or four things one the circumstances of the war itself which you've got a pretty good I mean some of you know firsthand in which you've got some pretty good images of yesterday afternoon the circumstances the war itself the nature of the conflict the weakness of our ally secondly and the relative strength of our adversary and you got some pretty good pictures of that yesterday morning with the images from jin bian foo this war posed extremely difficult challenges for americans it was fought on a climate and a terrain that were singularly inhospitable triple-canopy jungle foreboding swamps and paddies rugged mountains heat that could kill a man baked his brains or wring the sweat from him till he died of exhaustion as one marine put it and it was as if the Sun and the land itself were in league with the Vietcong this person added wearing us down driving us mad killing us needless to say those who had endured this land for centuries had a certain advantage although it's important to note and you got a good picture of this from from a wonderful novel sneem I'll probably forget but it's on the it's on the bibliographies name I've completely forgotten excuse me I'll come back to it at the end that depicts the problems that northerners suffered when they came South particularly with malaria where they confronted Bowne in yeah the sorrows of war a strain of malaria that they were by no means used to and could not get protection against so they're not invulnerable it was a People's War where people rather than territory were the primary objective but Americans as individuals or as a nation I think could never really bridge the gap between themselves and all Vietnamese not knowing the language or the culture they didn't know even in a lot of cases how to tell friend from flow what we need one officer suggested half jokingly half seriously was some kind of litmus paper that turns red when it's near a communist maybe they've got things mixed up one of novelist Tim O'Brien's bewildered gi's comments after a seemingly friendly farmer boughs and smiles and points them right into a minefield maybe they cry when they're happy and smile when they're sad regarding me recalling the emotionless response of a group of peasants of one marine recalled that they did nothing and I hated them for it their apparent indifference made me feel indifference the cultural gap produces cynicism and have even hatred towards people we're trying to help we're fighting dying for a people who resent our being here 1gi wrote home more important yet the formless yet entirely lethal nature of warfare in green vietnam war without distinct battle lines or fixed objectives where traditional concepts of victory and defeat become blurred a formless war one veteran oda against a formless enemy who evaporates into the morning jungle mist only to pop up some other time some other place a type of they're particularly difficult for we Americans to fight and there's always the nagging question I think probably first race by JFK himself how do we tell the four winning it's not taking territory the body-count is what they came up with but that didn't you know that was unsatisfactory in a whole variety of ways and corrupting in a whole variety of ways but more important I think in explaining our ultimate failure is the balance of forces we aligned ourselves with in Vietnam in South Vietnam we attempted a truly formidable undertaking on the basis of a very very weak foundation the country to which we committed ourselves in night 1954-55 lacked many of the ingredients basic ingredients for nationhood and I think had we looked all over the world we might not have been able to find a less promising place for a prawn building project the economy devastated by the Japanese occupation the first Indochina war far more than in the rest of Vietnam the old order had been destroyed but nothing had been created to replace it there was a vacuum there the government we inherited began as a French puppet government with the notorious bow-tie experiment in 1949 it lacked at the beginning and was never able to establish real claim to legitimacy among the people it purported to govern when viewed from this perspective I think there may have been built-in limits to what we could have accomplished there nearly 20 years we struggle to establish a viable nation did lots of good things that I mean the film I thought yesterday did a good job of showing the positive things that were Americans were doing in medical care and the rest but the rapid collapse of South Vietnam two years after our straws suggest how little ultimately was was really accomplished the other side of this coin is that from beginning to end we drastically underestimated our enemy the key in war is know your enemy and we did not know our enemy at all I was watching this film er showed on the NBN food yesterday was watching it in shortly after came out in 1981 and a much decorated Marine was watching with us and who had been actually had been in Saigon in April of 75 and he was he was awestruck in watching those images and said my god no wonder this is what we were up against they had they I don't want to suggest here that there's some kind of super people as they're somewhat sometimes were portrayed in any war propaganda they made colossal blunders they paid an enormous price for their success they demonstrated as Barry pointed out a far greater capacity for waging war than for building a nation still in this war they had distinct advantages from the beginning of the revolution back to the 30s as as I suspect he will talk a berry will talk about later today the Communists for a whole variety of crazy reasons mostly the Ho Chi Minh Connection drew into their camp the best of the traditional Vietnamese ruling classes and the most able dedicated political activists they were thus blessed with superior leadership from ho at the top down to the village level they were skillful indeed fanatical organizers their military operations were were done on sand boxes down to the last detail sometimes overly planned but they were planned with enormous care and attention to the tail they tapped the Wellsprings of Vietnamese nationalism and the urge for social reform to mobilize the people of the country into a total and concentrated effort to seize power sold out by the Chinese and the Soviets at Geneva in 1954 as that pointed out yesterday they Abele exploited the sino-soviet split in the 60s to advance their own ends without at any point becoming dependent on their their allies they improvised through trial and error a strategy I guess this strategy maybe great powers in fighting lesser powers don't feel like they have to strategize because they're stronger whereas the lesser power particularly ones fighting for it's very survival as North Vietnam saw itself and certainly as the NLF saw itself have to think in strategic terms and they developed a unified integrated strategy which brought together politics military diplomacy the the whole basket fairly effectively fairly effectively protracted war was you know the key the secret it had worked against France they presumed it would work against the United States you will kill ten of our men will kill one of yours ho remark to a french officer in 1946 and in the end it is you who will tire and this obviously is the same sort of reasoning that that went on they also kind of particularly the southern 9lf forces had the advantage of that the guerrilla enjoys in warfare as long as you don't lose you in right as long as you don't lose you win so all you have to do is avoid defeat and what they do in 60s particularly is to melt away into the countryside or across the Cambodian border or across the 17th parallel or wherever the fatal error then is to underestimate the adversary we rather casually assume that the Vietnamese rational human beings like ourselves would know better than to stand up against the most powerful nation in the world it would be all of Johnson's point of reference points of reference or Congress that was the experience that shaped him so much as a man it would be like a filibuster in Congress Johnson predicted enormous resistance at front at first then a steady whittling away then old ho hurrying to get it over with how little we knew at that time this would have been 65 66 was that Ho Chi Minh was not been and had not been for two years the driving force in the North Vietnamese government he was a powerful figurehead until his death on September 2nd 1949 the anniversary of the day he was in Baden square he was a figurehead of enormous importance but he was not the driving force late Swan and Truong Shan were the people who are really making the decisions Henry Kissinger still later confessed great surprise with the discovery that his North Vietnamese counterparts and his words were were fanatics since our goals were limited and from our standpoint reasonable we never sought to destroy or to defeat North Vietnam we found it hard to understand to come to grips with their total unyielding commitment I go back to the great Chinese philosopher of war Sun Tzu if you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles if you know yourself but not the enemy for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat if you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle in this case I think clearly we did not know the enemy in some ways I think we did not maybe know ourselves real well the circumstances of the war then pose a dilemma I think we never really understood much less resolved success might have required the annihilation the physical annihilation of North Vietnam but given our limited goals this would have been distasteful and excessively costly it held out the threat of Soviet and Chinese intervention the only other way is to establish a viable South Vietnam that is able on its own at some point to resist pressure from the north but given the weak foundation we work from not to mention the strength of the internal revolution this may have been our means well beyond our means to put it charitably we may and I want to emphasize may we can't know you know answers much as we would like history to be able to tell us what would happen if we'd done something differently we we really can't know we we don't know to put it charitably we may well have put ourselves in a classic no-win no-win situation what are what can or should we learn from all of this and I would add quickly that even before there was a first book that I know of called the lessons of Vietnam was published in 1968 five years before the war was over that tells you something about how we're thinking about this and how early we're thinking about it almost literally from the fall of Saigon and before we have sought to learn lessons from our longest in many ways most traumatic war critics from the left of course have insisted that the main lesson to be learned is to avoid interventions in third-world situations that even remotely resemble Vietnam from the right the primary lesson has been that if we do intervene we must do so with sufficient force to achieve a quick and decisive victory this is what the Powell doctrine is all about which you may have heard about and I'll talk about that a little bit more on on Friday I find most of these kinds of lessons of at best dubious value history doesn't repeat itself each situation is unique to extract lessons from one and apply them sort of Messick mechanistically to another is at best misleading the only true lesson of Vietnam historian and former policy maker James Thompson reminds us with a great deal of hyperbole but also with some insight follow me closely is never again take on the job of trying to defeat a nationalist anti-colonial movement under indigenous communist control in former French Indochina a lesson he quickly added of somewhat less than Universal relevance to stop there would leave me open to far more questions which I would probably want to avoid here but would also be far too negative you don't want to end on a negative note I think there is a great deal of instruction and enlightenment to be found in history even if I'm dubious of so-called lessons and the first thing of two that I would really stress is the centrality of local circumstances in in shaping the contours of and dictating solutions of international crisis situations the point of this talk really has been that we have tended to focus in in situations on what we did wrong why we failed you can go back to 1949 when all of this sort of begins why we lost China and carry it on through up to the present in a lot of ways I'm not saying that what we do or don't do isn't important but what I'm saying is that we've got to look beyond that to understand how situations take shape and how such situations are our play themselves out by intervening in what was essentially a local struggle among Vietnamese we placed ourselves at the mercy of local forces the weak client that I've talked about a a determined adversary these forces are always going to vary but the point should be clear we ignore them at our own peril and I think again in 2000 spring of 2002 spring of 2003 whatever else we may have done right or wrong we ignored the local force we were plunging ourselves into there were some rather simplistic notions many of them fed to top Bush administration figures by Iraqi exiles like on my Chalabi who as a world-class con man that they were only too happy to believe and that victimizes a second point is the limits of power it has been fashionable again to blame ourselves for fighting the wrong way etc etc what I have tried to suggest here is that the situation pose grave challenges for may indeed have but beyond beyond been beyond our control this is not a point of view that is popular I understand among a people a nation accustomed to having its way but it's a view I think that we must consider and even more urgently must consider now in the world we face today where we no longer are the great power as we were in 1949 at the summit as Churchill described it or indeed as we were in the the 90s and up to 2001 when we enjoyed what Charles Krauthammer call that unipolar moment the United States as being the only great nation in the world as great as our power is there are still limits to what we can do most of them set again by the intractability of internal situations in other countries a third and final point is the value of history what is so striking now looking back on the early years of our involvement in Vietnam is our abysmal ignorance of that country and its people and its history to cite a small but revealing example some years ago I ran across the document in which a US official in the 1950s casually observed how difficult it would be to build an army in a country they're talking about South Vietnam then without any military tradition a person obviously grandly ignorant of Vietnam's thousand-year struggle against the Chinese the mongols of their defeat of Kublai Khan Trung sisters other legendary heroes who centuries before Ho Chi Minh mounts it done Bonin twinge opt pioneered the art of guerrilla warfare as I suggested yesterday out of cultural arrogance as much as anything else we also nor the French experience in Vietnam such experience appeared irrelevant because we felt the French had pursued selfless colonial goals where we were pursuing different kind of goals or because as Edward Lansdale the CIA guy out there in the mid 50's once put it the French went from glorious defeat to gross defeat while being on highly articulate on how to win a war they hadn't won a battle since Napoleon they couldn't build a Panama Canal either closer examination of the fridge war on the other hand might have might have given us a really good education in terms of what we were going to be up against alerted us to the challenges we would face in dealing with them if nothing else then we might conclude that rather than employing usually false and misleading analogies decision-makers and interested public might do better to use history to enlighten themselves about areas and people's with whom they must deal particularly important when we're dealing with people who are very different culturally and historically from US history I think like no other discipline can give us a sort of perspective without which understanding is impossible the other thing obviously is that history can tell us how we got where we are and sometimes when we see how we got to where we are we see very quickly that the situation is not like we thought it was or not like perhaps is being presented to us the true use of history Sir Michael Howard has written and I like to conclude on this note with three minutes left I might add the true use of history is not to make us clever for the next time but to make us wise forever thank you very much

Channel: Washington and Lee University

Views: 103,475

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Keywords: Why We Failed in Vietnam, W&L

Id: wlh3b2xX_A8

Length: 54min 19sec (3259 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2009