Losing Vietnam All Over Again

Jeff Huber, a retired Navy commander, posts at Larisa Alexandrovna's blog.

http://www.atlargely.com/2008/05/losing-vietnam.html

Losing Vietnam All Over Again
by Jeff Huber


“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.” -- Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968

The most delusional meme of post-modern U.S. military culture is that America lost the Vietnam War on the home front. Nothing could be further, quite literally, from the truth. America lost Vietnam half a world away from the home front—in Southeast Asia, where it fought what has become the template for superpower entanglement in third world wars.

Yet many of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s most avid backers believe—or claim to believe—that America’s military can somehow achieve the “victory” in Iraq that eluded it in Vietnam if only the public gives it enough opportunity. These true believers have asked us for a seemingly endless string of six-month extensions, chances to get it right this time, until they sound like sulky children at bedtime who just want “five more minutes, Mom.”

False Hopes and Friedman Units

In a recent New York Times article titled “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” David Barstow noted that some retired officers who covertly echoed the administration’s pro-Iraq war propaganda on the broadcast news networks “shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.”

This was especially true of Paul E. Vallely, a retired Army two-star who was a FOX News military analyst from 2001 to 2007. A former commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group, Vallely co-wrote a paper in 1980 that introduced the MindWar concept (.pdf available here). According to Vallely, the failure in Vietnam was caused by the effectiveness of enemy psychological operations (PSYOP) and because “our PSYOP failed.” Vallely said that American PSYOP was insufficient to “defend the U.S. populace at home against the propaganda of the enemy,” and that, “Furthermore the enemy PSYOP was so strong that it—not bigger armies or better weapons—overcame all of the COBRAs and Spookys and ACAVs and B-52s we fielded.” In short, according to Vallely, “We lost the war—not because we were outfought, but because we were out-PSYOPed.”

- snip -

To this day, I hear bitter Vietnam veterans say, “If we’d only had another eighteen months…” Another eighteen months? We were militarily involved in Vietnam for well over a decade. By late 1966 the war was costing $2 billion per month, and by the end of 1968 troop levels in Vietnam had risen to over a half million. The military had all the time, personnel and materiel resources for Vietnam it could possibly have wanted, and yet some would have us believe it could have won if it could only have had another eighteen months, or six months, or three months, or maybe just five more minutes.

Poppycock. The likes of Walter Cronkite did not lose Vietnam. The likes of men named Johnson and McNamara and Nixon and Kissinger and Westmoreland lost it. And if the likes of Paul Vallely had their way, and had been able to use the media to bolster our “national will to victory,” we’d be losing in Vietnam still today.

A Hole to China

I’m a few years older than Osama bin Laden, so I didn’t really know him at King Abdul-Aziz University. We don’t attend the same church and our kids don’t play on the same soccer team. I don’t need to know much about the guy, though, to realize that he is probably the greatest strategist of the 21st century. I don’t have to be a world class strategist myself to have a pretty good idea what he wants to do or to figure out that he has access to the same information I have access to, and given those two things I can certainly imagine what I would think and do if I were in his position.

If I wanted to take down the United States but didn’t have an air force or navy or army to do it with, I’d find a way to get it entangled in another disaster like Vietnam. In September of 2000, I would have read the neoconservative manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses (I would have downloaded the .pdf file here) by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and understood that if they gained power in the U.S. they would invade and occupy Iraq on any pretense. When their hand-picked candidate won the 2000 election on a technicality, I’d put the wheels in place to give them the “new Pearl Harbor” they were looking for, and come September 11, 2001 I’d have told my people “Let’s make magic happen.”

Then I’d sit in the countryside in prayerful meditation and watch as the American people bought their leaders’ Vietnam guilt trip in six-month installments and squandered their country’s might and wealth into a sand dune until it was all gone.

MORE

Let's see now. Vietnam is at peace, it's an economic ally, and it's gradually easing from communism into capitalism. Tell me how conditions could be any better than they are now if we had stayed and continued fighting?

We never lost any large scale battles in Vietnam. We suffered terrible losses because we had stupidly and illegally enterred the war in the first place via the "gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave the President power to send troops to war without consent of congress.
This "attack" on 2 US destroyers was later found to be created by the US to justify inserting combat troops in country.
We lost what we lost because of extremely inept Generals and very poor officer leadership (NOT true in all cases-many were first rate) and too many levels of interference with field commanders by outside agencies-running a war using politics not tactics as a means of making decisions in the field. Many of our people were killedwhile the politicians and appointed assholes as far away as DC dithered and decided wrong, but too late in any case.

If there is ever a book written on bad decisions, our part in Vietnam should be chapter 1.
of what you read of the Vietnam war now is Vietnamese probpaganda-their BS is as bad if not worse than ours.

FWIW, I am glad to see them doing well, and wish them continued success, and freedom someday.

mark
(US Army 1968-71)

he is still full of Bull Crap!

Isn't that incredible? I think they believe they won the ground war but lost the infowar. So this time, they embed reporters (with suspicious numbers of deaths of non-embedded reporters) and the MIC controls most of the few media outlets. Of course, on the ground, they're still losing. But somehow that's a lesson they can't learn, in their minds the technological might of the U.S. just can't be defeated. When reality and their preconceptions clash, reality falls (except in the long run, of course).

(Meanwhile, what has the peace movement learned? Have they worked to prevent a co-oped leadership? Did UFPJ take NY Central Park in the cause of peace with their hundreds of thousands of marchers?)

by Neil Sheehan. I highly recommend it.

We lost Vietnam because we were on the wrong side, were tone deaf to nuances in culture, and indiscriminately bombed everything in sight because it was easier than diplomacy or actually facing viet minh soldiery creating in the process a self-renewing well of opposition. We herded people into razor-wired slums called 'strategic hamlets' because it was easier to keep an eye on them there...shit we've done just about everything wrong in this war that we screwed up in Vietnam just to give the same crowd (and a few too young or chicken to stick their necks out at the time) another chance at that 'five minutes more'.

The Vietnamese just wanted to be rid of the French and the skewed landowning and wealth systems that the French enforced.. Even Ho Chi Minh said (in the 40's and 50's)that even though his dream was a communist country, a free capitalist democracy was fine with him in the interim. He was willing to work with the US. But we were too busy propping up the carcass of a dying European regime and red-baiting to listen. 50,000 men might still be living and thousands more whole and hale if we had. And that's just 'our' side.

Edit to add: Our racism and sense of western 'cultural superiority' made it as easy to make those mistakes then as it does now.

John Paul Vann is one of the more peculiar characters in the cast of clowns on our side of that bad war.

I really didn't know anything about it, it was in a free pile outside the local used bookstore. I've had a hard time reading it because I have to stop every few pages because I am overwhelmed with anger, fear, dread, etc. I was born in '63 and that part of the war was a bit of a blank that has needed to be filled in. Glad to know the right book found me :) .

The Vietnamese, and a large portion of the rest of the world, thought differently...just as they do now.