McCain's Better War

It was interesting, though not really surprising, to learn from Matt Bai's piece that John McCain is a big fan of Lewis Sorley's book, A Better War. The nickel version of Sorley's argument is that after the Tet Offensive and the revelation that the past several years' worth of U.S. policy in Vietnam had been built on a tissue of lies caused domestic support for the war to collapse, the country adopted new and more awesomely effective tactics that were winning the war before public opinion and congress pulled the plug.

One problem with this analysis is that it's wrong:

''The Sorley analysis is wrong,'' writes David Elliott, author of the exhaustive and widely lauded ''The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-75.''

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would think [clear and hold] was a success in Vietnam,'' writes William Turley, author of ''The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975.''

''Lewis Sorley is completely wrong,'' concurred retired General Le Ngoc Hien in a recent interview. As deputy chief of staff for operations in the North Vietnamese Army, Hien was responsible for compiling the overall military strategies for both the army and the Viet Cong. [. . .]

It is hard to know what to make of the claim that South Vietnam, after fighting a horrendously bloody and interminable guerrilla and conventional war against Communist foes within and without for two decades, finally succumbed because of the refusal of a supplemental appropriations bill by the US Congress in the spring of 1975. Of half a dozen experts on the war queried via e-mail-including Elliott, Turley, Clemson's Edwin Moise, and several others-none besides Sorley thought South Vietnam could have held out for long. Its army was plagued by corruption and factionalism; it had never established firm popular support. ''There is no way that the RVN could have repulsed the Communist offensive of 1975,'' responded Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Studies Forum.

But in some ways a more interesting point is simply the fact that hawks are so invested in this revisionist take. If you zoomed back in time to 1963 or 1969 it would be taken for granted that the purpose of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam wasn't just to "win" in some abstract sense. After all, who cares about South Vietnam? Why should hundreds of thousands of Americans go around the world to fight for South Vietnam? Because, of course, the war wasn't about South Vietnam. The theory behind the war was that if a Communist takeover of South Vietnam happened, that Communism would sweep across Asia in a way that was massively detrimental to American interests.

And since South Vietnam did fall to the Communists, we can say truly and definitively and without recourse to any hypotheticals that the hawks were totally wrong. South Vietnam went Communist and . . . we were fine. There was no red tide sweeping across Asia. India and Japan and Australia were never threatened. But to John McCain, the mere fact that staying in Vietnam forever wouldn't have accomplished anything doesn't change matters. He likes "victory" so he thinks we should have stayed forever. And, similarly, he wants us to stay forever in Iraq. Not because the benefits will be worth the costs or because he has any vision of Americna strategy. But just because.

Comments

1) The larger problem is that Republicans -- and people like Rush Limbaugh -- can put out deceit without fear of contradiction. Or fear of paying a price for deceit. With a great likelihood that they will be REWARDED for deceit, in fact.

2) As I've mentioned, I had an older friend who was drafted, sent to Vietnam, and came back in a coffin. Families in this country pay a heavy price for Republican deceit.

3) One wonders why the war the Republicans advocate never comes to their front doorstep some dark night.

Posted by Don Williams | May 17, 2008 2:01 PM

He often says, regarding staying in Iraq, that the best thing for troop morale is victory, or that the worst thing for morale is defeat.

So maybe he wants to stay there just because troop morale will be higher if they're getting killed in the sands of Iraq for 100 years but no one can say they "lost" the Iraq Sunni-Shia-Kurd civil war. Or something.

Posted by riffle | May 17, 2008 2:01 PM

Hopefully everyone will keep in mind the new McCain bamboozle: most troops out by 2013. What is the point of this, and what does it mean?

The point is that he is confusing the length of the war (victory) with the length of the occupation.

Obama wishes to end occupation ASAP, that obviously means not fighting the war at all. So McCain is ending the war within five years, Obama is for ending the war ASAP, and removing troops as quickly as possible.

But most troops is just another way of saying at least 50.1% reduction. That would be at least 70k combat troops still in Iraq by 2013. Of course there will still be support troops, contract workers, permanent bases, etc.

McCain's latest formulation is a 50% reduction in combat troops withing five years. That is his optimistic goal. That is the limits of his promise. It should also be the limit of what he is given credit for by anyone interested in getting out of Iraq.

Posted by tomj | May 17, 2008 2:05 PM

I think this gets at a very interesting point about McCain vis a vis Iraq. That is, very much of his motivation for "winning" the Iraq war seems to be a psychological need to re-play the Vietnam war with a different ending, to prove that the war for which he personally suffered so much was not a waste. Thinking in purely political terms, I think the Democrats might successfully play up and exploit this. To suggest that McCain is "still fighting the Vietnam war" succinctly reinforces several broader criticisms, i.e. that he is out of touch, stuck in the past, stubborn, and too old. I'd like to see someone ask him at an open forum, "You said you'd like to stay in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. Measured on the same time scale, we should still have troops in Vietnam. Do you wish we had stayed in Vietnam, even if it meant still having troops there today?" I suspect that his answer would appall many people.

Posted by J Hertzberg | May 17, 2008 2:14 PM

Left utterly unexplored by Matt: what possible effect it could have had on SVA morale (nationwide) to have its ally gradually pulling out, as the ally of the other side remained steadfast in their support.

This might require thought outside of the conventional box though, so Mat simply won't consider it. Doesn't fit.

Posted by James Robertson | May 17, 2008 2:20 PM

We could have won the Vietnam War, but not how Sorley believes. Had we backed Ho Chi Minh, the war would have been over in 1954. The best way to win a war is to back the side that's stronger. Or maybe we could have found a "Middle Way" solution. Rather than backing the feudalist and anti-Buddhist policies of Ngo Dinh Diem, maybe we could have set a price for our support: that South Vietnam would become a free market economy and have religious freedom for the religious majority. We might have had the support of the South Vietnamese under those circumstances. Instead, we supported policies opposed by the majority of South Vietnam and tried to ram those polices down the throats of the Vietnamese. That's recipe for losing a war. Especially against the Vietnamese, who have won quite a lot of wars against superior weaponry.

Posted by fostert | May 17, 2008 2:25 PM

Chomsky claims that the US won the Vietnam War, by devastating Vietnam so thoroughly that no one was willing to volunteer to be the next Vietnam. "One, two, three.... many Vietnams" was Che's slogan, but outside SE Asia things mostly fizzled out.

Posted by John Emerson | May 17, 2008 2:27 PM

Seeing James Robertson's comments above, it appears that Robertson, and probably McCain, are slaves to the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics, "morale" flavor.

I like what J Hertzberg says above about McCain appearing to want to re-fight the Vietnam war. Who knows, McCain may already have spouted off about this -- Probably saying several mutually contradictory things depending on which person he's speaking to.

Posted by riffle | May 17, 2008 2:31 PM

If you zoomed back in time to 1963 or 1969 it would be taken for granted that the purpose of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam wasn't just to "win" in some abstract sense.

Well--I might be able to "zoom back" in memory, and in my memory there was in fact an obsession among hawks with "victory." The "practical" argument went that failure to "win" would make us look weak, and that the perception of weakness would feed on itself. But "victory," not in any abstract sense but in the sense of validation of American manhood, was at least as important to many Americans as abstractions like the Domino theory. That's why Senator George Aiken of Vermont famously proposed as a Vietnam strategy, "Declare victory and get out"; he was satirizing the well-known Occidental obsession with "face." You had also the "stab-in-the-back" thinking that's been key to the thinking of rabid cold warriors from the beginning; we "lost" because of traitors within. In the late 1960s the line was that we could "win," but the politicians in Washington would not unleash the military to do its utmost. Sorley's book clearly taps into this line of thinking, which is far more widespread in the nation at large than you have an inkling about [You're more likely to hear it at the Petroleum Club in Midland than on the Yard]. To an awful lot of people [not nearly as many as there used to be, but more of them will be at the polls in November] the outcome of Vietnam was an affront to the myth that Americans Never Lose; the resulting cognitive dissonance is what Sorley's book feeds.

Posted by David in Nashville | May 17, 2008 2:33 PM

Empires and nations, like people, lose their sanity when divergence between their perception of reality and the objective facts become so great that their actions based upon their warped views actually turn out to be against their own self interests.

The McCain Presidency is likely to plunge us into a national delusion leading to more crises after crises.

Posted by gregor | May 17, 2008 2:35 PM

Glad to see that article get cited.

One of the things that struck me about Matt Bai's article was that in discussing the hypothesis that McCain might not have absorbed the pointlessness of the Vietnam War as "grunts" like Hagel did because he spent the war locked up in Hanoi, it didn't mention that most of the other POWs locked up in Hanoi seem also to have turned against the war. Of 300 or so POWs, there was one room full of about 15 full-on peaceniks, interestingly called the "PCs" for "Peace Committee", who willingly made radio broadcasts against US war efforts, and some of whom became Communists and tried to volunteer to stay in Vietnam and join the NVA in '73. (The North Vietnamese turned them down.) Of the rest of the POWs, most did their best to resist contributing to North Vietnamese propaganda, but privately, many of them, at least, seem to have become anti-war. A GI named David Harker, who the PCs tried to recruit but refused, said in Zalin Grant's "Survivors" that refusing to collaborate was a separate issue from your opinions on the war: "It wasn't simply a matter of being for or against the war. We were all against it."

The fact that McCain was in a POW camp isn't in itself a sufficient explanation for the attitude he took towards the war.

Posted by Matt Steinglass | May 17, 2008 2:41 PM

My father was in Vietnam as a diplomat during the Vietnam War.

He has spent most of his leisure time in the intervening years reading every book about Vietnam that he can get his hands on. For some reason, our withdrawal has haunted him. And he also thinks we should have stayed. I'm not clear on his reasons why, but I think part of it was that he was horrified by what happened in Cambodia, and he also really cared about the Vietnamese people and does not think they deserved communism. For him, it was as much about fighting for the Vietnamese as it was fighting for our strategic interests. He has always been idealistic and thinks that America should and can spread our form of democracy abroad. He also thinks we need to have a presence in Iraq.

However, he went and registered as a democrat so he could vote in his state's primary for Barack Obama because he likes Obama's views on how to approach foreign policy, and thinks Bush is the biggest idiot we've ever elected. And he says he's going to remain a democrat until he thinks the Republicans have more dimplomatic, intelligent, and reasoned approaches to foreign policy, and more sound methods of carrying them out.

Posted by maria | May 17, 2008 2:47 PM

1) The US Army actually has a unit --Center for Military History --devoted to recording the Army's experience in various wars for lessons learned. Chapter 28 of the Army's Reference
"American Military History" covers the Vietnam War and refutes Lewis Sorley's bullshit.

Ref: http://www.history.army.mil/books/AMH/AMH-28.htm

2) Page 687 pinpoints the failure of the South Vietnamese Army:

"Such losses were all the more serious because operations in Cambodia and Laos had illustrated how deeply ingrained in the South Vietnamese Army the American style of warfare had become. Nearly two decades of U.S. military involvement were exacting an unexpected price. As one ARVN division commander commented, "Trained as they were through combined action with US units, the [South Vietnamese] unit commander was used to the employment of massive firepower." That habit, he added, "was hard to relinquish."

Translation: There's a big difference between calling up a carpet bombing B52 strike on the radio to strike the enemy at a distance versus engaging in a firefight at close quarters.

Posted by Don Williams | May 17, 2008 3:06 PM

Also, one thing conservatives seem unable to appreciate about American arguments that we should have stayed or could have won is that the Vietnamese reaction is generally "Yeah, whatever." They don't even bother to get offended.

When I interviewed Gen. Hien for that piece, he didn't seem at all riled at the claims Sorley was making. He just thought they were completely wrong. The North Vietnamese seem never to have had much doubt that they were going to win this thing sooner or later -- in contrast to the Americans.

Posted by Matt Steinglass | May 17, 2008 3:06 PM

The next time John McCain brings up Vietnam, ask him about his FATHER's involvment in the illegal and unconstitutional Operation Menu --the Covert bombing of Cambodia and the massive coverup of the truth from the US COngress.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu

Some Money quotes:
--------------
Nixon and Kissinger went to great lengths to keep the missions secret. The expansion of the American effort into "neutral" Cambodia was sure to cause serious debate in Congress, negative criticism in the media, and were sure to spark anti-war protests on American college campuses. In order to prevent this, an elaborate dual reporting system covering the missions had been formulated during the Brussels meeting between Nixon, Haig, and Colonel Sitton."
----------------
The system
First, the number of individuals who had complete knowledge of the operation was kept to a bare minimum. All communications concerning the missions was split along two paths - one route was overt, ordering typical B-52 missions that were to take place within South Vietnam near the Cambodian border -

the second route was covert, utilizing back-channel messages between commanders ordering the classified missions. For example: General Abrams would request a Menu strike.

His request went to
[[[ NOTE!!!! ]]]]]]]
Admiral John McCain, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), in Honolulu.

McCain forwarded it to the Joint Chiefs in Washington, who, after reviewing it, passed it on to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (who might consult with the president). The Joint Chiefs then passed the command for the strike to General Bruce K. Holloway, Commander of SAC, who then notified Lieutenant General Alvin C. Gillem, Commander of the 3rd Air Division on Guam.[17]"
---------------
"For four years Menu remained unknown to Congress, the media, and the American public. That situation changed in December 1972, when Major Knight wrote a letter to Senator William Proxmire (D, WI), asking for "clarification" as to U.S. policy on the bombing of Cambodia. Knight, who had become concerned over the legality of his actions, had complained to his superior officer, Colonel David Patterson. He then received several bad efficiency reports, which ruined his career, and he had been discharged from the Air Force.[26"
---------------
"For the next eight days the committee listened to the testimony of administration officials and the Joint Chiefs, who tried to justify their actions.

The committee uncovered excuses and deceptions that were perhaps more alarming than those occurring simultaneously in the Watergate hearings.[27]

The Menu revelations raised "fundamental questions as to military discipline and honesty, of civilian control over the military, and of Congressional effectiveness."[28]

It was basically agreed, both by Congress and concerned military officers, that the deception employed during Menu went beyond covertness.

According to Air Force historian Captain Earl H. Tilford: "Deception to fool the enemy was one thing, but lying to Congress and key members of the government, including the chief of staff of the Air Force and the secretary of the Air Force, was something else."[29]

Posted by Don Williams | May 17, 2008 3:11 PM

Something that also needs to be pointed out re War Hero McCain is that his service-- and his father's service -- was in the US Navy.

Unlike the Army and Marines, The US Navy has not taken serious casualties in the past 60 years.

Compare Army and Marine death rates in Vietnam with the Navy's for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#United_States_Armed_Forces

a) Army death rate: 1 out every 114 person
b) Marine death rate: 1 out of every 53 person
c) Navy death rate: 1 out every 718 person

Yes, McCain caught a bad break and I regret his years in the POW camp. But his war was much different from that of the Army or Marines. And few veterans returned home and found a wealthy heiress to marry.

Posted by Don Williams | May 17, 2008 3:35 PM

Chomsky claims that the US won the Vietnam War, by devastating Vietnam so thoroughly that no one was willing to volunteer to be the next Vietnam.

I'm pretty sure countries don't actually "volunteer" to be the targets of U.S aggression.

Posted by James Gary | May 17, 2008 3:58 PM

Good post.

Posted by Korha | May 17, 2008 3:59 PM

"If you zoomed back in time to 1963 or 1969 it would be taken for granted that the purpose of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam wasn't just to "win" in some abstract sense."

That's the exact point - in Vietnam then as well as in Iraq now. Once we are at war, McCain, it seems, has an irrepressible compulsion to win it and is willing to lose sight of the larger, more important goals. That might be the right attitude for a soldier, but it would be disastrous in a statesman or a president. McCain has had nasty things to say recently about Obama's purported fitness to be the commander-in-chief. What his comments reflect in reality are his own deficiencies as a presidential candidate.

Posted by Independent | May 17, 2008 6:34 PM

Left utterly unexplored by Matt: what possible effect it could have had on SVA morale (nationwide) to have its ally gradually pulling out, as the ally of the other side remained steadfast in their support.

This is asinine. The material support provided by the U.S. to the South Vietnamese both in armaments and man power far surpassed anything the North Vietnamese got from their backers for well over a decade.
By the "shit their pants" theory of geopolitics, one would think the North Vietnamese would have surrendered long before 1975.

And of course, it was easy for the allies of the North Vietnamese to remain steadfast in their support precisely because their support cost them so little. This is one of the primary lessons of the Vietnam war and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet in 2008 some on the right have yet to learn it. The combination of obstinacy and stupidity leads one to despair.

Posted by WillieStyle | May 17, 2008 6:57 PM

At the risk of sounding prosaic, I'd like to note that there are some pretty important differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, particularly in terms of sectarian divisions and the potential for regional spillover.

Some contemporary historians - most notably William Duiker - have estimated that, if an election were held in 1955, Ho Chi Minh would likely have won 80 percent of the vote. So, the United States was fighting against a population that was largely sympathetic to the NLF.

The political cleavage in Iraq is far different and far more dangerous.

That's not to suggest that McCain is correct in his assessment of Vietnam or that we should remain in Iraq; in fact, I think it probably it means the opposite.

I'm merely pointing out that Iraq is a far more complicated situation and any comparison to Vietnam is probably a bit of a stretch.

Posted by Jeremy Biggs | May 17, 2008 8:35 PM

Communism collapsed as a worldwide movement in spite of our withdrawal from S. Vietnam. Makes me wonder just what McCain thought we would "win" if we had stayed.

Posted by kafka | May 17, 2008 8:57 PM

"I'm merely pointing out that Iraq is a far more complicated situation and any comparison to Vietnam is probably a bit of a stretch."

While it is certainly true that Iraq has more complicated internal issues, it is not too much of a stretch to compare it with Vietnam.

The fundamental comparison is that COIN operations cannot be conducted by foreign forces against indigenous populations in support of an unpopular local government. It simply cannot be done.

When Bush attacks Iran, that will be a more direct Vietnam comparison, because there will be little internal division among Iranians in opposing the US. Iran will wage a Fourth Gen War against the US in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Gulf and the world.

I believe that some members of the IRGC in Iran are actively looking forward to such a war, because they intend to follow the Vietnamese strategy of bleeding the US to death militarily, economically, and geopolitically over ten years or more. Despite the devastation that the US will undoubtedly wreak on the Iranian social and economic and military infrastructure, Iran almost inevitably will win the war, just as North Vietnam was virtually guaranteed a win given the basic error the US made of being in the war at all.

People who think the Iraq war was a disaster haven't seen anything yet. The Iran war will be at least two to four times bigger than either Iraq or Vietnam, and cost the US two to four times more than either Vietnam or Iraq in terms of manpower, money, and loss of geopolitical credibility.

The Iraq war has already overshadowed Vietnam and lasted longer than WWII. The Iran war will be far worse, lasting ten years or more, and costing an estimated $20-40 billion per month. The total cost of the Iraq war is estimated to be at least $3 trillion. The Iran war will probably cost $12 trillion.

A war with Iran will almost certainly lead to the complete collapse of the economy of the United States and conceivably a collapse of the US government itself before it's over.

And there's nothing anyone can do to stop it at this point because the US electorate no longer has any control over the political process or the US state - if it ever did since Revolutionary War days.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 17, 2008 9:51 PM

It can't be said enough - especially considering Obama's surprisingly weak response to Bush, when he all but pledged himself to Bushian parameters for negotiating with Iran, which is a big wash - that getting out of wars requires more than moral indignation - Americans, who are citizens of a predator nation that has done very well out of wars, have to be convinced by carrots. In this case, the carrots are pretty juicy - the savings of 200 billion dollars a year, plus, when just the hint of negotiating with Iran hits the media, the plummeting in the price of a barrel of oil. Of course, the media morons would be shocked if Obama made such a shift, who are the same morons who are shocked that we haven't privatized social security, since the arguments they were faxed by some subdeb GOP front look so good. It is in foreign affairs that you get the curious situation that people set themselves up as experts purely on the basis that they are, supposedly, more morally sensitive. Look, for instance, at an ignoramus like Chris Hitchens - why would anyone care what he has to say about Iraq? His ignorance about the history of Iraq, or about military strategy, or about economics, is evident in everything he writes. His career depends on being able to be morally outraged. One notices, however, how little attention the press give to those who want to write about, say, economics on the basis of moral outrage - there, of course, we supposedly come down to brass tacks.

Of course, the pursuit of an insane foreign policy based on hair trigger aggression and a complete blindness to the long term does benefit quite a number of people. For instance, the millions in the defense industries who owe their careers to being indirectly on the federal dole - surely there should be a rule of thumb, a law, that the more a person is on the federal dole, the more reliably he will be against "big government" and for perpetual war. They may be morons, but their stupidity is happily coincident with the source of their income.

Anyway, it is crucially important for Obama to make very plain the suicide in letting Bush set the parameters of foreign policy for the next president. Hopefully, he will get used to the Bush slam and be harder next time. He must connect this, always and always, with the price of gasoline. Time to put that in high gear.

Posted by roger | May 17, 2008 11:56 PM

I'm merely pointing out that Iraq is a far more complicated situation and any comparison to Vietnam is probably a bit of a stretch.

Vietnam only looks relatively simple in hindsight. Looking at it from the perspective at that time, it's an absolute mess. You know in hindsight that the various South Vietnamese factions and individual generals could be grouped together as "the generals", but at the time you would've been debating Duong Van Minh versus Nguyen Cao Ky. You know in hindsight that the Buddhist Movement didn't really amount to much, but at the time you would've been debating whether they could present a real alternative to the government. And so on.

Posted by brooksfoe | May 18, 2008 3:55 AM

Again, it's the Scooby Doo theory of war & foreign relations -- "and we coulda done it, too, if it hadn't a been for them meddlin' [Congress / liberals / stabby-back pacifists / Democrats / hippies / whatever]!"

And we did suffer for the "loss" of South Vietnam: that revanchism drove a hell of a lot of the Reaganite lunacy and the notion that all was the fault of the dirty hippies, delusions under which we have suffered for 30 years.

Posted by El Cid | May 18, 2008 7:36 AM

I'm pretty sure countries don't actually "volunteer" to be the targets of U.S aggression.

Somebody needs to fund those armys and/or rebel groups to be the targets of US aggression. And the US made spreading communism a very expnsive undertaking for China and the USSR.

Posted by Dervin | May 18, 2008 10:03 AM

Yeah, but it would have been a lot, lot cheaper and easier for the U.S. to have simply backed Vietnamese independence from France and gained a unified, nationalist, and mildly socialist regime than to support France's colonial war and move to then support a pathetic pseudo regime in a murderous war which led to the death of millions and delivered a severe blow to many U.S. interests and its own economy.

And such independent, U.S. and Western allied socialist / social democratic regimes around the world would have undercut the Soviet and Chinese regimes' power more quickly than decades and decades of a Cold War. After all, the Soviet's main argument for their tyranny was that there was no other option. Had we given them another option, the blow upon them would have been tremendous.

But then, that's a counter-factual, and we all know how much dignified historians hate counter-factuals until it's time to blame liberals for stabbing some glorious war in the back.

Posted by El Cid | May 18, 2008 10:20 AM

And since South Vietnam did fall to the Communists, we can say truly and definitively and without recourse to any hypotheticals that the hawks were totally wrong.

A very slight contrarian view on this: It could also have played for time, the mid 1960s being rather different than the mid 1970s. The Domino Theory could well have been correct, but arrangement of dominos got disrupted to prevent the Communists from getting to Indonesia, the Sino-Soviet split had plenty of time to widen, Mao was about to disappear off the stage, Brezhnev was firmly in power and not getting any younger, etc. In short, a sternly fought defeat might well have made the Soviets and potential clients look at SEA and go "Gosh, we won that proxy war but who the hell wants to do THAT again?" The Soviets also knew about the big problems in their own established empire much more than we did; it wasn't until the failure to apply the Brezhnev Doctrine in Poland and the quagmire of Afghanistan that we started to notice. In short, it's Chomsky's argument flipped on its head.

Another point: A friend of mine who spent twenty years in the Marine officer pointed out that the 1975 invasion was essentially a rerun of the 1972 invasion, which was defeated using ARVN troops and US firepower (air, arty, naval). He noted that the big military problem ARVN had was that it was built on the US model, and that the US military always assumes---rather, works very, very hard to be able to assume---a large advantage in firepower. Of course, firepower provision is a highly technical skill that's not easily transferred. When it was gone, ARVN literally didn't know what to do.

Posted by Crimfan | May 18, 2008 11:05 AM

"Somebody needs to fund those armys and/or rebel groups to be the targets of US aggression. And the US made spreading communism a very expnsive undertaking for China and the USSR.

Posted by Dervin | May 18, 2008 10:03 AM"

Except when we supported China's backing of leftists in places like Cambodia and Burma after we leaned their way against the Soviets.

Crimfan, even if the 1975 invasion had failed, there probably would have also been a 1977 invasion, a 1979 invasion, etc.

"The Domino Theory could well have been correct, but arrangement of dominos got disrupted to prevent the Communists from getting to Indonesia, the Sino-Soviet split had plenty of time to widen, Mao was about to disappear off the stage, Brezhnev was firmly in power and not getting any younger, etc"

I'm not sure how communism in Vietnam would have threatened Suharto. Communist consolidation over Indonesia would have probably have been extremely difficult, especially considering the main actors would likely have been ethnically Chinese and rather unpopular with the majority of Indonesians. The Sino-Soviet split was rather wide by the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In addition, part of the reason we had to lean so heavily on the Chinese side was that we lost so much time and political capital fighting in Vietnam that we weren't in a position where we could more effectively play Moscow and Beijing off of each other instead of having to pretty much look the other way (or help through back channels) China's meddling in Cambodia and Burma, which helped Marxists a whole lot worse, crazy and bloodthirsty than Ho Chi Minh ever was. The only real event that would have made acting later rather than sooner would have been Lin Biao's failed coup attempt in China, which shook Mao up and made him readier to engage the US. However, waiting for a deux ex machina, or a pony, is never good policy.

Posted by Reality Man | May 18, 2008 11:38 AM

Just remember, the highlight of McCain's military career was losing his airplane.

Posted by spencer | May 18, 2008 12:17 PM

We started losing the Vietnam War in 1919, when Ho Chi Minh went to the Versailles Conference to try to get President Wilson to live up to his Fourteen Points and support independence from Vietnam.

Then Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France in 1945, basing his declaration on our Declaration of Independence. Instead of living up to the Atlantic Charter's statement that all peoples had a right to self-determination, we backed the re-imposition of France's colonial government even though the Viet Minh had fought with us against the Japanese that occupied Vietnam.

Then we didn't learn from France's defeat in the Indochina War, where the US provided the bulk of the funding and equipment.

Then we blocked the nationwide elections called for by the 1954 Gevena Conference that ended the Indochina War because we knew the Viet Minh would win.

Then we got deeper and deeper into Vietnam without understanding that nationalism was much more important than Communism. By the time the first US combat troops arrived in 1965, the Viet Minh had been actively fighting for independence for thirty years and weren't going to give up until they won. Ho Chi Minh said, "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." They did win, and they suffered losses that were much more severe than that.

Posted by croatoan | May 18, 2008 12:32 PM

Reality Man wrote:

Crimfan, even if the 1975 invasion had failed, there probably would have also been a 1977 invasion, a 1979 invasion, etc.

Sure, and the US Air Force and US Navy would still be there to blow the crap out of them in their long Soviet-style tank columns. I'm not saying any of this is moral or whatever, just that it might well have worked.

Timing is everything. I read Sorley's book before the Iraq mess and remember the thrust of his argument was essentially that the right tactics showed up about four years too late. It's funny that his book ended up getting buzz about two years into the Iraq war... same problem. The big battalions conventional war guys got to beat the stuffing out of a lamed opponent. But no plans for the immensely harder occupation and counter-insurgency were made. As my Marine officer friend said---before the war started---this is going to turn into a tar baby, because of the aftermath.

As to the Indonesia thing, recall that Suharto knocked over Sukarno in 1965. It wasn't that long before that someone deeply sympathetic to communism was in power and I'm quite sure this was in the minds of decision makers in DC. We really have to be careful about hindsight bias and assuming that Suharto's success (at least at keeping Indonesia from going communist) might well have been predicated on the Vietnam War breaking the momentum of communist advance in SEA, i.e., a local failure turned into a regional success. I simply don't know and, because it's a counterfactual, no one will. The Korean War, after all, was fought in no small part to prevent Japan from going communist. The Korean War was not a success in the sense of rolling back communism (not that that was the eventual goal), but it did generate a South Korea free enough that disaffected young men can become addicted to StarCraft and die in front of computers rather than getting shot in the head by Dear Leader's thugs while trying to escape to China to find food.

Posted by Crimfan | May 18, 2008 2:38 PM

"Sure, and the US Air Force and US Navy would still be there to blow the crap out of them in their long Soviet-style tank columns. I'm not saying any of this is moral or whatever, just that it might well have worked."

That assumes we would be there forever. On a long enough timeline, even the McCains of the world would get tired of it and want us to pull out. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, were right on the northern border and had captured the nationalist label while the Southern government was unpopular with its own people.

"As to the Indonesia thing, recall that Suharto knocked over Sukarno in 1965. It wasn't that long before that someone deeply sympathetic to communism was in power and I'm quite sure this was in the minds of decision makers in DC. We really have to be careful about hindsight bias and assuming that Suharto's success (at least at keeping Indonesia from going communist) might well have been predicated on the Vietnam War breaking the momentum of communist advance in SEA, i.e., a local failure turned into a regional success."

That assumes that Vietnam would have been useful as a base for the Soviets (Vietnam's main backer once the Sino-Soviet split became even deeper) to project power. However, the Soviets never really ever found a way to do this effectively with one of their client states. Suharto wasn't exactly squeamish about killing ethnic minorities over possible communist sympathies and I doubt that the Vietnamese would have amassed significantly more sympathy than ethnic Chinese did when Suharto killed a lot of them. The small number of communists in Indonesia had stronger ties to China who ended up declaring war on Vietnam not too long after. The fact that Indonesia is scattered across so many islands would make it even harder for Vietnam, the Soviets and ethnic minority communists (who would probably only have detailed local knowledge of a handful of places) to consolidate power or even hold power somewhere without overstretching and collapsing. In addition, there is a big difference between being sympathetic to communists and becoming a tool of the Soviet Union. After all, the leaders of Prague Spring were ideological communists who were against the Soviet line. Last of all, it was the Vietnamese communists who ended up overthrowing the worst communist regime in history, the Khmer Rouge.

All of this is rather besides the point anyway, considering how despite Vietnam going communist we won the Cold War and Vietnam is now an economically liberalizing trading partner.

Posted by Reality Man | May 18, 2008 3:22 PM

Oh, as I am arguing that timing is everything, I am very much in agreement that the time to have won the Vietnam War was 1945. The US betrayed its anti-imperial ideals when it let the French come back and then propped up the colonial regime. The terms Ho Chi Minh had offered were sensible and just---a credible path to independence by 1960, not unlike the path the Philippines had been put on before World War II---but got rebuffed.

Posted by Crimfan | May 18, 2008 3:24 PM

i think sorley forgot that even before the tet offensive, mcnamara had already concluded that the war was lost.

Posted by dj spellchecka | May 18, 2008 3:25 PM

"Oh, as I am arguing that timing is everything, I am very much in agreement that the time to have won the Vietnam War was 1945. The US betrayed its anti-imperial ideals when it let the French come back and then propped up the colonial regime. The terms Ho Chi Minh had offered were sensible and just---a credible path to independence by 1960, not unlike the path the Philippines had been put on before World War II---but got rebuffed.

Posted by Crimfan | May 18, 2008 3:24 PM"

Good point. It is rather revealing how the "protesters = traitors" crowd tend to forget how our policies in Vietnam were very much an extension of the French colonial effort. Ho Chi Minh was much more ideologically Stalinist towards the end of his life than he was in 1945.

Posted by Reality Man | May 18, 2008 3:32 PM

I wouldn't really call Ho Chi Minh a "Stalinist' even towards the end of his life. Authoritarian, yes, but qualitatively different than Stalin or Mao. For example there is credible evidence that torture in Viet Nam happened under the influence of Chinese-Maoist factions in the ruling party and against Ho's express orders. In fact Ho Chi Minh famously cried in regret when he went on national radio and apologized for his government having used torture.

Posted by Hector | May 18, 2008 7:33 PM

If Sorle's analysis is wrong then Elliot's work is not right either!

1st question: was there any battle (except Xuan Loc) occured in 1975 but withdrawal of the RVN armed forces ? General Le Ngoc Hien should know about this one-sided fighting in his "Great Spring Victory".
2nd question: with more than 1/2 a million troops, the Americans cannot win the war in Vietnam. How on earth that someone now is asking the South Vietnamese could win it alone ?
3rd question: is there any difference between the fact that the Americans went to war in Europe in WW2 and then in VN in the 60s ? Furthermore, the US troops stay a longtime in Korea even after the Korean war ended, why ?

Anyone can answer these questions should know better.

Posted by Philippe | May 19, 2008 3:31 PM

Aneone can answer the following questions should know better about the Vietnam war:
1st question:
Was there any battles occured in 1975 in Vietnam but the withdrawal of the RVN armed forces. General Le Ngoc Hien should know about one-sided fighting in his "Great Spring Victory".
2nd question:
With more than 1/2 a million troops, the American cannot win the war in VN. How on earth that someone is now asking that the South Vietnamese could win it alone ?
3rd question:
Is there any difference between the fact that the Americans went to war in Europe in WW2 and then in VN in the 60s? Furthermore, why did the US troops stay in Korea a long time even after the Korean war ended ?

Posted by Philippe | May 19, 2008 3:42 PM