From James Carroll’s House of War, a history of the Pentagon:
The very week of [Strategic Air Command’s General Curtis] LeMay’s retirement [in February 1965], President Johnson ordered the commencement of Operation Rolling Thunder, the air war against North and South vietnam, which began — in secret from the American public — when warplanes struck a target defined as an ammunition dump, but which would develop into the most comprehnsive sequence of air assaults ever conducted. Even so, as events would show, Rolling Thunder would not be LeMay’s idea of a bombing campaign, which would define both its failure and its tragic virtue. The bombing of South Vietnam would be notable for its unrestrained destruction, an obliteration of the country we cad gone to war to defend. But in the North, out of fear of bringing the Soviets or Chinese in, restraints would be imposed: bombs would not be dropped on harbors in which Russian ships sat, nor too close to the Chinese border. Instead of bombing to destroy and win, the air war in North Vietnam, from the outset, would embody the “bargaining” and “game theory” of the nuclear philosophers whom LeMay disdained. By now they returned his disdain with contempt. . . .
Vietnam was a showcase of the intellectual exercise, force applied to coerce a political settlement rather than to destroy the enemy. “Gradual escalation” was supposed to compel by inflicting intolerable pain while preserving the “hostage value” of what had yet to be destroyed. What the new breed of theorists did not imagine, as their highly rational campaign was launched, was that for this enemy, the only possible settlement presumed its own utter destruction. The Vietnamese Communists . . . could not be coerced but only killed. . . .
LeMay, of course, personally led what Carroll calls “the single most destructive military action in history,” the firebombing of Tokyo, and he directed the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Johnson gradually yielded to pressure from the Air Force and its congressional patrons for more and more bombing, until by the summer of 1967 more tonnage had been dropped on North and South Vietnam than in all of Europe during World War II. By August 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had changed his mind about the value of the bombing, and testified to a Senate subcommittee:
He firmly repudiated the Joint Chiefs’ proposed new target list and ridiculed the idea that more bombs dropped from airplanes would do any more to undercut the fighting spirit of the Communists than eighteen months of savage assaults had already done. Citing intelligence analysis from the Defense Intelligence Agency . . . McNamara insisted that the bombing campaign was not moving the enemy closer to negotiations, much less to yielding. There was little reason to believe the bombing was seriously inhibiting the enemy’s capacity to wage war. “I submit to you, I am secretary of defense and I am responsible for lives and I am not about to recommend the loss of American lives in relation to those targets.”
Matthew Yglesias reminded us recently of Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” In war, as in politics, you have a goal, and you are willing to do certain things to reach that goal — pay a certain price — but not others. One way to lose a war is to get into a situation like the U.S.’s in Vietnam, in which your enemy is willing and able to pay a higher price to reach his goal than you are to reach yours. McNamara realized this in 1967. Plenty of people realized this in 1963 or earlier, but not people who worked in the Pentagon. And many people refused to make this analysis until 1973 or so.
It’s instructive to compare the Air Force generals’ calls for more bombing in Vietnam to the attitude emanating these days from Army generals and politicians like John McCain that the Iraq war could be won if we just had more troops. If we were only willing to pay a higher price, the argument goes, we could win the war — just as we could have won in Vietnam with a greater resolve, without all those peaceniks.
But the lesson of Vietnam is not that more resolve could have won the war. Nothing short of the use of nuclear weapons, probably, would have made the Vietnamese Communists stop fighting, and that would have been no kind of victory for the United States. The lesson of Vietnam is that some wars are unwinnable, and that the sooner you realize you’re in an unwinnable war and cut your losses, the better.
What would it take to get the various armed resistance/guerilla movements in Iraq to stop blowing up U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians? Would we have to dismantle Basra, Mosul, and half of Baghdad brick by brick and round up the entire population in camps? Use tactical nukes to clear Sadr City? Send in another 150,000 troops? Another 500,000? In what sense would any of these options count as victory?
I remember once 20 years ago talking to a brigadeer general about Viet Nam. He said “The point to war is to break the enemy’s will. The thing we learned in Viet Nam is that it is impossible to break the will of the Chinese. They have far more people than you do and will always be able to replace whomever you kill.”
Your quote here reminds me of that ‘ . . .could not be coerced but only killed. . .’ This whole thing is to strange and sad because the killing of this enemy only reinforces the rightness of the cause as they see it.
Holy War.
Ironically, last night I was sitting in an international relations seminar discussing the realist theories of Hans Morgenthau, and the failures of US policy in Vietnam. I don’t know if you’ve ever read him, but I find that he has one of the more interesting minds of any political theorist. On the US policy of containment during the cold war he writes:
Superstition still holds sway over our relations within society. The demonological pattern of thought and action has now been transferred to other fields of human action closed to the kind of rational enquiry and action that have driven superstition form our relations with nature. As William Graham Sumner put it, “The amount of superstition is not mush changed, but it now attaches to politics, not religion.” Numerous failures of the United States to recognize and respond to the polycentric nature of Communism is a prime example of this defect. The corollary of this indiscriminate opposition to Communism is the indiscriminate support of governments and movements that profess and practice anti-Communism. American policies in Asia and Latin America have derived from this simplistic position. The Vietnam War and our inability to come to terms with mainland China find here their rationale.
Of course, the “demonological pattern of thought,” which Morgenthau speaks of, brought on discussion of our policy to attack “evil doers” wherever they may be.
I agree with your assessment on Iraq; we are combating instability with more destabilizing measures, and, as in Vietnam, we have pitted ourselves against an enemy that will never cede to our domination. Oh the “white man’s burden.” Perhaps colonization wasn’t such a good idea after all.