Does Charles Santayana’s dictum ((“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Life of Reason Vol 1.)) apply to the United States in Afghanistan today? In Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, Gordon M. Goldstein examines the role of United States national security advisor McGeorge Bundy in the US war on Viet Nam. (Not a “Viet Nam War.” Why do the media — and even academia — insist on naming acts of aggression against a country with the name of the country aggressed, thereby distracting from the name of the aggressor and the act of aggression?) Lessons in Disaster is laid out as six chapters/lessons from the debacle of US government policy in southeast Asia.
Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
By Gordon M. Goldstein
Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Holt Paperback (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9087-1
ISBN10: 0-8050-9087-8
The prism for Lessons in Disaster is US national security advisor McGeorge Bundy. Bundy had his path in life cleared by a childhood of privilege, “a scholarly blank cheque,” awaiting teaching positions, government jobs, and sinecures.
Intellectualism, arrogance, and hubris are ascribed to Bundy. Personality aside, Bundy was one of the architects of the policy that led the US to military defeat in Viet Nam with the cost of tens-of-thousands of US military and millions of Vietnamese lives.
Goldstein relates how it began with the US bankrolling the French colonization of Viet Nam. However, the French suffered ignominious defeat.
Refreshingly, the book talks openly about US meddling in the affairs of foreign countries as if such knowledge were axiomatic. Discussed, for example, are the CIA-engineered overthrow of government in Guatemala and the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs disaster (for the Kennedy administration).
The fight in Viet Nam was ideological; it was a fight against communism, predicated in the belief of a simplistic domino theory that if one state fell to communism, then the others would follow. Goldstein does not discuss whether ideology is a legitimate casus belli.
There is a contradiction in this warfare waged for ideology. Starkly stated, it was the resort to violent means to establish capitalism over communism. Capitalism, in pure form, is billed as laissez faire, free and open competition in the marketplace. However, if in the marketplace of economic theories it is that capitalism is superior, then the marketplace would be expected to opt for it over communism. Consequently, waging war to defeat another economic order appears to indicate an admission of doubt as to the supremacy of capitalism as an ideology.
Bundy admits to “a fundamental absence of realist analysis” pushing the US into the disaster of Viet Nam. The military applied the pressure, and US president Lyndon Johnson agreed to the eventual Americanization of the war. The president can be advised/pressured, but he is the decider.
The “ultimate threat” pushing the president, writes Goldstein, is not military defeat; it is electoral defeat. Bundy advised “firmness” in Viet Nam because “… we do not want the record to suggest even remotely that we campaigned on peace to start a war in November.”
Presaging the pretexts of today, Bundy is quoted as wondering, “I’d like to know what would happen if we dramatized this as ‘Americans Against Terrorism’ …”
Goldstein is critical of the intellectual Bundy. He poses many questions, “Why was Bundy so engaged in planning a Congressional resolution to be deployed before the election but so inactive in contingency planning for military options after the election?”
Why did Bundy not critically analyze the domino theory?
What about the false premise that by “inflicting pain in measured increments” the “communist insurgency” (Goldstein lapses into imperialist speak, identifying resistance fighters as “insurgents,” hinting at the legitimacy of foreign-imposed regimes) could be contained. If what the Americans posit is true, then this proposition should run both ways. It invites tit-for-tat. The Vietnamese fighters might equally well entertain the notion that if they inflicted enough pain on the Americans that they might leave. General William Westmoreland seems to have grasped this in viewing it as a “war of attrition.”
Another example of imperialist speak is when Goldstein writes of Johnson considering “retaliatory airstrikes” against the North Vietnamese. In order for the Americans to retaliate, the Vietnamese must have initiated the war, and this they certainly did not do against the US. Goldstein matter-of-factly reveals the Tonkin Gulf incident to have been manufactured by president Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
Bundy writes of a “latent anti-Americanism.” He does not write of a latent anti-Vietnamese-ism among Americans who implement a “strategy of coercive military force” — that is, the killing of Vietnamese — to impose a US-favored government and economic order on the Vietnamese.
Goldstein acknowledges that there was an American proxy regime in South Viet Nam.
Bundy’s mistakes were many and very costly for the US military. He did reflect on the “war” and would acknowledge “the inability to grasp ‘how the enemy would take it and come back for more.’”
Bundy had staunchly advocated continued aerial bombing during which time there would be no negotiations.
Goldstein cites Tran Quang Co, the first deputy foreign minister for Viet Nam, in revealing how critical aerial bombardment was to national morale in North Vietnam: “Never before did the people of Viet Nam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years that the U.S. was bombing us. Never before had Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s appeal — that there is nothing more precious that freedom and independence — go straight to the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.”
There is discussion whether president John Kennedy would ever have put American troops on the ground in Viet Nam. The evidence presented leads this reader to assume he would not have. Nonetheless, he is quoted, “But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get people to reelect me.”
Lessons in Disaster gives an insightful glimpse into the government mindsets that lead to war; however, the real value in Goldstein’s book is in drawing lessons from history and applying them to today.
The object in Goldstein’s book is, obviously, to avoid disaster; however, the present commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, is considered a “disaster” himself. ((See “Robert Fisk — Obama is a Disaster,” Youtube. ))
Channeling Bundy, Lessons in Disaster starkly states that the president is the decider. It makes clear that US military involvement in Asia is a losing proposition. What are the US ends in Afghanistan? It is obviously not to establish democracy, as the Afghan elections under foreign occupation demonstrate. The decision to increase the number of US military personnel in Afghanistan is Obama’s decision. Following the American military defeat in Viet Nam, the US was afflicted with Viet Nam Syndrome. President George Bush Sr was exuberant at kicking “Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” However, to kick the syndrome required uniting a world military force against a developing country “occupying” a tiny emirate in the Persian Gulf.
The second stage of the Persian Gulf Slaughter has been a different story. Many have written of a quagmire, as Viet Nam was described for Americans. It is now over six years since Iraq was aggressed and occupied. The situation remains unstable as the recent spate of bombings in Iraq evinces. ((I have already argued that Iraq is a lost “war.” Kim Petersen, “Desperately Seeking Victory in a War Already Lost,” Dissident Voice, 25 December 2005. ))
In October 2007, presidential candidate Obama said:
I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.
Needless to say, the troops are still in Iraq. Now Nobel Peace [sic] laureate Obama is ramping up the military effort in Afghanistan. He proffered his reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan being a just war.
Obama would do well to read Lessons in Disaster and reconsider — if not the implications for his own future electoral chances and legacy — then, at least, the implications for the lives of millions of humans impacted by warfare. He might also ponder Albert Einstein’s solution: “Warfare cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished.” (( “Albert Einstein — A Man for All Seasons,” Pomegranate Calendars in cooperation with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987.))