http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/06/lessons_in_disaster
Why is the Obama administration reading up on its Vietnam history?
BY GORDON M. GOLDSTEIN
OCTOBER 6, 2009
There's an unofficial book club in the White House these days, George
Stephanopoulos reported late last month, and the manuscript in
question could not be more pertinent. As the Obama administration
rethinks its strategy in Afghanistan, officials are turning to Gordon
M. Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster -- an account of analogous moments
of decision in the Vietnam War. And though most historical
comparisons are approximations at best, the resemblance between those
crucial Vietnam inflection points and today are uncanny: Casualties
are rising, public opposition is growing, the host government's
legitimacy and effectiveness is in doubt, and the U.S. commander in
the field is calling for more troops to stave off defeat. Surely, if
Obama has a Vietnam moment, it will come in Afghanistan. And that's
precisely what Goldstein's White House readers might be trying to
avoid. Below follows an excerpt of one lesson they might learn, which
Goldstein calls "Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends":
--
In the spring of 1995, McGeorge Bundy asked me to collaborate with
him on a retrospective analysis of the American presidency and the
Vietnam War during his tenure as national security advisor to
presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. We envisioned the
book to be both a memoir of Bundy's experience with Kennedy and
Johnson as well as a reconstruction of the pivotal presidential
decisions about American strategy in Vietnam between 1961 and 1965.
But the project was fatefully interrupted. Bundy died of a heart
attack a year and half into our collaboration. A front-page obituary
in the New York Times called Bundy "the very personification of what
the journalist David Halberstam ... labeled 'The Best and the
Brightest': the well-born, confident intellectuals who led the nation
into the quagmire of Vietnam."
Although the McGeorge Bundy who reigned as a legend of the
establishment was reputed to be brisk, quick, calculating, and
overconfident, the retrospective Bundy of 30 years later -- the one
with whom I spoke so many times -- was in many ways the opposite:
patient, reflective, curious, and humble. In fact, on the question of
Vietnam Bundy appeared tentative and unsure -- maybe on some level
even mystified. Although he never said so explicitly, he seemed to be
as perplexed by the disaster of Vietnam as any of the historians who
studied the decisions in which he had been a central participant.
Three decades after his own role in the war ended -- he left the
White House in 1966 to head the Ford Foundation -- he was still
asking himself questions about its lessons. "What can we say is the
most surprising?" Bundy wondered in a fragment he composed on
February 3, 1996, as he and his wife Mary returned from a holiday in
the Caribbean. His answer: "The endurance of the enemy." It was a
dynamic of the war that fascinated him. Bundy marveled at the
leadership of the insurgency, its political strength inside South
Vietnam, the stamina of the armed forces of the Vietnamese
communists, and the social cohesion that bound these variables
together into an equation that allowed a small power, among the
poorest countries in the world, to triumph over the United States.
When I began working with him on our book project, Bundy was still
struggling to understand how the Johnson administration had committed
itself to a strategy that would devolve into a contest of endurance
Americans were destined to lose. Beginning in 1965 the United States
deployed considerable and escalating numbers of ground combat forces
in a protracted effort to grind down the enemy -- depleting its
numbers, breaking its will, and compelling its surrender or
negotiated settlement on terms favorable to the United States. That
strategy was, of course, a great failure. And Bundy later asked
himself, "Do we discuss whether we are in fact well-equipped to
conduct a war of attrition? I don't think that question is ever
presented to Lyndon Johnson in the whole of the year in which that
strategy is adopted."
--
It was June 14, 1965, and Johnson reached out to former President
Eisenhower for his counsel on the Vietnam War. A decision was looming
over whether to expand the U.S. troop commitment to the conflict.
Eisenhower advised not only supporting South Vietnamese forces in
action but also urged direct offensive action by American troops. "We
have got to win," he said.
Meanwhile, the debate among Johnson's advisors was growing. "In
raising our commitment from 50,000 to 100,000 or more men and
deploying most of the increment in combat roles we are beginning a
new war -- the United States directly against the Viet Cong," Under
Secretary of State George Ball warned President Johnson. "Perhaps the
large-scale introduction of American forces with their concentrated
fire power will force Hanoi and the Viet Cong to the decision we are
seeking. On the other hand," he presciently cautioned, "we may not be
able to fight the war successfully enough -- even with 500,000
Americans in South Vietnam -- to achieve this purpose." Ball
confronted President Johnson with lessons from recent history. "The
French fought a war in Viet-Nam, and were finally defeated -- after
seven years of bloody struggle and when they still had 250,000
combat-hardened veterans in the field, supported by an army of
205,000 Vietnamese."
Ball's dissent was aggressively countered by the administration's
hawks. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara strenuously argued that if South Vietnam fell, Thailand
would be lost, too. Rusk envisioned a wave of falling dominoes --
even India would collapse under the control of the Chinese communists.
The top U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland,
delivered a bleak report from the front. "The struggle has become a
war of attrition," he declared on June 24. "Short of decision to
introduce nuclear weapons against sources and channels of enemy
power, I see no likelihood of achieving a quick, favorable end to the
war. ... I am becoming more convinced every day that U.S. forces in
appropriate numbers must be deployed to permit the Vietnamese with
our help to carry the war to the enemy." The next day, guerrilla
fighters launched one of their most spectacular terrorist acts yet,
exploding a bomb in the My Canh floating restaurant and killing 44.
Against this backdrop of gathering anxiety, McNamara circulated a
draft memorandum that would set the terms of debate over further
escalation. He formally joined the Joint Chiefs in urging the
president to approve General Westmoreland's proposed expansion to a
44-battalion force in South Vietnam -- 34 U.S. maneuver battalions
and 10 third-country maneuver battalions totaling approximately
175,000 men. A major escalation of U.S. forces, he argued, would
force the insurgents "to accept a situation in the war in the South
which offers them no prospect of an early victory and no grounds for
hope they can simply outlast the US."
Gen. Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked
General Westmoreland directly if the escalation would be sufficient
to break the insurgency. The "direct answer to your basic question is
'no,' " he replied, admitting that the 44 battalions would not
"provide reasonable assurance of attaining the objective." Thus on
the eve of the largest and most fateful expansion of the U.S. ground
force commitment to Vietnam, the architect of that troop surge told
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it simply would not be
sufficient to achieve the stated American goal of persuading the
insurgency that its victory was impossible.
The stage was set for what should have been the seminal debate of the
Vietnam War. Ball seized on the inherent uncertainty surrounding the
44-battalion deployment and its implicit strategic assumptions.
McNamara had thrown his support behind an enormous expansion of the
American commitment. And General Westmoreland, the principal advocate
of the 44-battalion strategy, clearly conceded that the new American
combat commitment could not assure the achievement of its stated objective.
Where was Bundy positioned at this juncture? Frustrated by a
deteriorating relationship with President Johnson, he was on the
precipice of resigning as national security advisor. Ironically, the
national security adviser's differences with Johnson had little to do
with the substance of Vietnam policy.
For Bundy, icon of the establishment and the administration's
fiercest debater, silence in response to criticism of the White House
policy in Vietnam and Southeast Asia was untenable. The critics of
the war, Bundy recalled, "were feeling deliberately cut off from and
rejected by an administration with whom they were trying to
communicate in good faith." So although he knew that Johnson would be
infuriated, Bundy agreed to appear on a one-hour primetime television
debate to be broadcast without commercial interruption by CBS News on
the evening of June 21. "I informed him after the decision had been
made and told him I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't do
it," Bundy explained in a 1969 oral history.
What Bundy never said but should have retrospectively acknowledged
was that his decision to go around Johnson's back to appear on the
CBS Vietnam debate was tantamount to submitting his letter of
resignation. When he read in the press that Bundy had agreed to the
CBS debate, Johnson was enraged. LBJ told his aide, Bill Moyers, that
he should inform Bundy that the president would be "pleased -- mighty
pleased," to accept his resignation. Moyers did not act on the
president's instruction.
Johnson's resistance to explaining and defending the administration's
policy exasperated Bundy. If the new offensive were not "more quickly
decisive than we had any clear reason to expect," Bundy said, there
would be disturbing consequences when the public "looked back and
asked themselves if they had been led openly into this war or somehow
bamboozled into it." Bundy acknowledged that every president,
including giants like Lincoln and Roosevelt, sought to communicate in
a way that achieved the greatest political impact. Yet Johnson
aspired for more. The president had "this really quite funny internal
belief " that he could reshape facts to serve his interests. Johnson
believed that "if he could get it stated his way in the papers it
would be that way."
Although the national security advisor had reached the breaking point
in his relationship with President Johnson, neither man could afford
a public dustup, particularly as a major escalation decision loomed.
Just six days after appearing on CBS, Bundy was back advising the
president. "The commitment" to Saigon, Bundy explained on June 27,
"is primarily political and any decision to enlarge or reduce it will
be political. My own further view is that if and when we wish to
shift our course and cut our losses in Vietnam we should do so
because of a finding that the Vietnamese themselves are not meeting
their obligations to themselves or to us."
Bundy's support for the war was balanced with nuanced skepticism. On
the one hand, he dismissed critics who believed the United States was
now emulating the disastrous course France followed in Vietnam.
Still, on June 30, Bundy confided his concerns about the Westmoreland
plan to Secretary of Defense McNamara. Bundy challenged the
assumption that conventional combat forces would be effective in
containing the insurgency. "I see no reason to suppose that the Viet
Cong will accommodate us by fighting the kind of war we desire."
Moving to "a 200 thousand-man level" of support, Bundy warned, was "a
slippery slope toward total US responsibility and corresponding
fecklessness on the Vietnamese side."
The impact of Bundy's critique, however, was largely vitiated by the
fact that it was directed toward McNamara rather than the president
or the broader team of advisors responsible for strategy in Vietnam.
So as the two stark choices confronting Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam
crystallized -- the 44-battalion plan advocated by Westmoreland and
McNamara or the withdrawal option espoused by Ball -- a third course
was proposed. It was the so-called middle way envisioned by Bill
Bundy, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific
affairs and McGeorge's brother, who proposed a force level of 18
battalions and 85,000 men. "In essence," he explained, "this is a
program to hold on for the next two months, and to test the military
effectiveness of US combat forces and the reaction of the Vietnamese
Army and people to the increasing US role."
Anticipating Johnson's response to the three options, McGeorge Bundy
wrote to the president, advising him to choose between the two levels
of escalation, rejecting Ball's suggested pullout. Bundy had a
reputation for skillfully aborting dissent when he deemed it
necessary, and he was a practiced expert at maneuvering for advantage
among competing bureaucracies. Bundy had, for example, previously
undermined the secretary of state. "He is not a manager," Bundy
advised the president about Rusk in early 1965. "He has never been a
good judge of men. His instincts are cautious and negative. ... the
Secretary has little sense of effective operation."
Johnson, meanwhile, continued to reach out to key constituencies,
probing where the balance of opinion could be found. Just minutes
before meeting with his senior Vietnam advisors on July 2, the
president consulted Eisenhower. "Do you really think we can beat the
Vietcong?" Johnson asked. Eisenhower advised Johnson to proceed with
a troop buildup as soon as possible. "We are not going to be run out
of a free country we helped to establish," Eisenhower declared.
By July 14, with a decision yet to be made, McNamara departed for
South Vietnam. His mission, Bundy retrospectively concluded, was to
negotiate a deal with the U.S. military commander in Saigon on the
minimum size of the forthcoming escalation. Johnson's overarching
priority was to achieve agreement, absent a fractious debate, on a
course of action that would sustain South Vietnam from collapse but
not disrupt his legislative agenda in Congress.
Political stagecraft -- creating the appearance of deliberation when
a decision had already been made -- was the presumptive purpose of a
White House meeting Johnson convened on the morning of July 21.
Addressing the administration's war council, McNamara concluded that
the United States had only three strategic options, two of which
would leave the United States in a deplorable geopolitical position.
President Johnson could choose to "cut our losses and withdraw under
the best conditions that can be arranged -- almost certainly
conditions humiliating the United States and very damaging to our
future effectiveness on the world scene." Alternatively, Johnson
could hold steady at roughly the current level of 75,000 troops, but
that would leave the United States terminally weakened and "almost
certainly would confront us later with a choice between withdrawal
and an emergency expansion of forces, perhaps too late to do any
good." The only viable choice, McNamara argued, was a substantial
expansion of offensive U.S. military pressure against the Vietcong
and Hanoi -- supplemented by vigorous diplomacy. Such an approach, he
predicted, "would stave off defeat in the short run and offer a good
chance of producing a favorable settlement in the longer run,"
although it would also render "any later decision to withdraw even
more difficult and even more costly than would be the case today."
McNamara was vague, however, in delineating the causal logic of his
proposed strategy, positing the escalation not as the military means
to a military objective but simply as an end in itself. Preliminary
discussion among the president's advisors seemed to anticipate that
McNamara's recommendation would be accepted.
President Johnson, eager to project a ruminative state of mind,
arrived after 40 minutes of discussion and unleashed a wave of
questions ranging from the existential to the logistical. Then he
asked, "Is anyone of the opinion we should not do what the memo says?"
This was Ball's cue to register his dissent. "I can foresee a
perilous voyage," he said, "very dangerous -- great apprehensions
that we can win under these circumstances. But let me be clear, if
the decision is to go ahead, I'm committed."
Rusk regretted the failure to act earlier. "We should have probably
committed ourselves heavier in 1961," he said.
Henry Cabot Lodge, who would return as the U.S. ambassador to South
Vietnam at the end of the summer, bemoaned the dysfunctional nature
of the regime. "There is no tradition of a national government in
Saigon," he said. "I don't think we ought to take this government seriously."
When discussion resumed that afternoon, Ball was given the floor to
present his challenge to the Pentagon escalation plan. "We can't
win," he contended. "The most we can hope for is a messy conclusion."
Continuing to prop up the Saigon regime, he also warned, was
tantamount to "giving cobalt treatment to a terminal cancer case."
Ball proposed that the United States devise a political strategy to
stimulate a withdrawal of its military forces from South Vietnam.
"The worst blow," Ball replied, "would be that the mightiest power in
the world is unable to defeat guerrillas."
Bundy refused to engage Ball's counterargument, once more invoking
the credibility imperative. "The world, the country, and the
Vietnamese would have alarming reactions if we got out," he said.
Achieving victory was apparently less important than the perception
of pursuing it. "There will be time to decide our policy won't work
after we have given it a good try," Bundy insisted.
"We won't get out," Ball retorted. "We'll double our bet and get lost
in the rice paddies." Reviewing Ball's prediction three decades
later, Bundy conceded: "He's right."
What struck Bundy most in looking back on the discussion of July 21,
1965, he told me, was a quality of unreality to the deliberations,
because Johnson had already communicated his approval of
Westmoreland's 44-battalion strategy to McNamara on July 17. The
essential decision had already been sealed. Johnson "wants to be seen
having careful discussions," said Bundy.
One of the consistent themes of Bundy's Vietnam counsel as national
security advisor was his support for deploying military means in
pursuit of indeterminate and primarily political ends. Bundy wanted a
military commitment that evinced U.S. credibility even if it did not
hold real promise of winning the war.
The adoption of attrition as the de facto U.S. military strategy was
determined, in part, by the absence of other viable options. And by
that metric, U.S. forces did in fact succeed in imposing severe
losses on the insurgency. The United States presumed that a crossover
point would be reached, when the accumulated pain of war would compel
the insurgents to relent. But in practice this coercion strategy
simply created an endurance contest. In that competition it was not
the will of the Vietnamese communists that was broken. For each year
of combat from 1965 to 1973, Bundy observed, the United States
inflicted far greater casualties on the enemy than it absorbed. Yet
despite this dramatic disparity, it was the United States that
withdrew its forces "home without victory." As Bundy starkly
confessed, "We had followed a losing strategy -- one that led us not
to success but to the acceptance of failure. Attrition is a brutal
measuring stick," he affirmed. "Its use is not advertised and its
authorship not eagerly claimed."
How far would Bundy have gone in holding himself accountable for the
lack of rigor that characterized the evaluation of military strategy?
Bundy was often bluntly critical of himself, and he was equally
critical of Johnson for authorizing a muddled military mission. He
proclaimed his "deep conviction" that in the pursuit of a flawed
strategy in Vietnam, "the decisive errors were those made or approved
by the president as commander-in-chief."
When in 1995 he finally decided to address the unresolved questions
of the Vietnam War, Bundy registered a starkly different point of
view from his years in power. He called Vietnam "a war we should not
have fought" and conceded that "on the overall issue -- are you for
the war or against it, in 1965 and after, the doves were right."
Bundy would therefore try to explain "the ways in which the executive
branch continuously got that great choice wrong -- not because it
wanted the long, hard war it got, but because it would repeatedly
reject the hard alternative of 'losing to the Reds.'" Bundy in
retrospect had embraced a quality he had lacked when in high office
three decades earlier. He had finally learned humility.
--
Gordon M. Goldstein is a scholar of international affairs who has
served as an international security advisor to the strategic planning
unit of the executive office of the United Nations secretary-general
and as a Wayland fellow and guest lecturer at the Watson Institute
for International Studies at Brown University. He is the author of
Lessons in Disaster (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2008),
from which this excerpt is adapted.
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