Huntsman’s Disqualifying Distortion About Vietnam
“When it became clear to the Chiefs that they were to have little influence on the policy-making process, they failed to confront the president with their objections to McNamara’s approach to the war,” McMaster wrote. “Instead, they attempted to work within that strategy in order to remove over time the limitations to further action. Unable to develop a strategic alternative to graduated pressure, the Chiefs became fixated on means by which the war could be conducted and pressed for escalation of the war by degrees. They hoped that graduated pressure would evolve over time into a fundamentally different strategy, more in keeping with their belief in the necessity of greater force and its more resolute application.” (p. 328)
In other words, the Joint Chiefs, loathe to rebuke their civilian leadership, and distracted by efforts to protect and promote their respective branches, accepted the status quo and tried turn it into something viable. They abdicated their responsibility.
What emerges from Dereliction of Duty is a direct contradiction to Jon Huntsman’s irresponsible, off-handed reinforcement of the media narrative about the war.
Had Johnson actually listened to the advice of his generals — essentially that war is war and must be fought to win — the outcome would certainly have changed, likely in ways that did “serve our interests.” Instead, the commander in chief dawdled, prevaricated, and forced thousands of young men to lay down their lives for his domestic political objectives.
Huntsman’s ignorance, or distortion, of history, should disqualify him from consideration for the Republican nomination. His failure to gain traction after months of campaigning is a tribute to the good sense of the American people. Perhaps the triviality of his continued presence in the field explains why the moderator and the other candidates allowed his remark to pass without a probing question, or a much-deserved rebuke.
But if Republicans hope to reverse the decades-long leftist narrative about this, and so many other topics, they can no longer allow such moments to pass.
When we draw such erroneous lessons from history, we don’t merely diminish the service of fallen heroes, we put at greater risk those who wear the uniform today, and those whom they protect.
I was 17 in 1967 and my recollection was of a congress divided between doves and hawks (liberals and conservatives) with the doves having the majority. They were constantly pressing for moderation ostensibly in fear of having too much force anger and provoke the Russians or Chinese to enter the war against us. As I recall, the debate as reported in the MSM was in the congress, not the Dept of Defense.
I was 21 in 1967 and enlisted right after college.
I didn’t get to Vietnam until 1968, but one of my abiding memories of ’67 was of me and my co-basic trainees having to walk over “anti-war” (actually, pro-VC, pro-NVA) protesters who were, OWS-like, lying down trying to block the entrance of the induction center, in Albany, NY.
I’ll never forget our exasperated Smokey, yelling at us “Try not ta step on ‘em — fer f***’s sakes, don’ step on ‘em or we’ll never hear the end of it!”
(And by the way, LBJ and Westmoreland were getting nowhere slowly, until Nixon and Abrams came in and won it. All, of course, to be shamefully and criminally p***ed away by the Democrat “Watergate Congress” of ’74.)
You meant to say, “until Nixon came in and gave it all back to the communists; the NVA and the Cong.”Read what LibertyShip had to say. He knows what he is talking about. Nixon was a poor excuse for a human being; let alone a president.I think of him as a white Obama.
A white O’bama? What could that be? Like a jumbo shrimp? A sane Ron Paul? Get this: there are genetically different peoples. They are different!!!! Different from other peoples; different from us. Sometimes these differences are associated with different skin pigmentation. Sometimes not. Dark skin doesn’t cause differences in intelligence or an inablility to control impulses, but it is a marker for these genetic traits. Everybody ought the read “Big Story” by Doug Oberdorfer(?). All you need to know about VN.
Yes, Nixon was a “poor excuse of a human being”. But to his credit, he ordered a massive resupply to Israel during the October War of 1973 – against the counsel of his “Jewish” Secretary of State who believed an Egypt that had “retrieved their honor” together with a desperate and more pliant Israel were the needed ingredients for his “peace” initiative.
That’s simply a falsehood against Nixon. Nixon dramatically improved the status of the war in Viet Nam. “”President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” program that began in late 1969 enjoyed great success”
http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/wsj-vietvictorswrong.html
General Giap. He was a very famous, knowledgeable general in the North Vietnamese army. He’s published his memoirs and here’s a pull quote: “What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender. It was the same at the battle of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it. We thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice that your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefield. We were ready to surrender. You had won.”
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/206912-north-vietnamese-general-america-lost-vietnam.html#ixzz1exv1QErz
Nixon failed in other areas, but his command of Viet Nam in the political environment he inherited was commendable.
This is a foul and untrue slur against Nixon. Given the hand he was dealt his strategy of Vietnamization was successful
the Tet offensive was a massive military and political defeat for the communists, who had wrongly expected the South Vietnamese people to rise up and support the offensive. In addition, President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” program that began in late 1969 enjoyed great success.
http://www.jameswebb.com/articles/wsj-vietvictorswrong.html
The North VietNamese were almost beaten…
general Giap…a famous, knowledgeable general in the North Vietnamese army. He’s published his memoirs and here’s a pull quote: “What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender. It was the same at the battle of Tet. You defeated us. We knew it. We thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice that your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefield. We were ready to surrender. You had won.”
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/206912-north-vietnamese-general-america-lost-vietnam.html#ixzz1exv1QErz
Nixon did not win it. He just wanted to make sure that South Vietnam didn’t fall on his watch:
Kissinger’s Vietnam pledge to China
By Calvin Woodward
The Associated Press
27 May 2006
WASHINGTON — Henry Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that the United States could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam after a withdrawal of U.S. troops, even as the war against the communist North Vietnamese dragged on and deaths mounted.
As President Nixon’s envoy, he told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, “If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.”
Kissinger’s remarks were included in a collection of papers from National Archives released Friday by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, a research group that obtained them through declassification requests.
The papers consist of some 2,100 memoranda of Kissinger’s secret conversations with senior officials abroad and at home from 1969 to 1977 while he served under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as national-security adviser and/or secretary of state.
Nixon deserves some credit for bringing in Abrams, and allowing the military to fight the war more effectively. But at that stage political support for the war had collapsed, and he was just buying time, so Kissinger could sign a peace that got out prisoners back, in exchange for selling out the S Vietamese.
I agree that both LBJ and McNamara never had a plan to win, and bullied the Joint chiefs into accepting a losing strategy. But I also blame the joint cheifs for accepting a plan like that with no public protest, and I particularly blame Westmorland. If they had any guts, they would have threatened to resign, en mass, and tell the nation that McNamara was intending to fight a war that with his plan could not be won.
Yes, “as reported in the MSM”.
If you were around and reading the newspapers then (and I was, having been born in 1958), it was obvious from the editorial pages that the MSM was absolutely on LBJ’s side, viewing the “illegal war” in Vietnam (they frequently called it that) as a distraction from LBJ’s real mission as President- “creating social justice” through his Great Society plan, which they viewed as the second phase of JFK’s “New Frontier”. They frequently compared both to FDR’s New Deal, except that they maintained that LBJ’s iteration would somehow be more of a “fair deal” than FDR’s original or even JFK’s elaboration. (Yes, the New Frontier was basically FDR carried to the next stage, domestically speaking.)
The MSM also had a love affair with McNamara and his “whiz kids”, whom they viewed as the “best and brightest” of JFK’s administration, who LBJ had wisely continued to employ to run the “military-industrial complex” instead of letting it run amok on its own. Little teeny errors, like trying to use the F-111 as a fighter rather than a bomber, sending supersonic F-105s in behind subsonic B-66 “master bombers” at 400 knots right into the optimum engagement envelopes of the SAM-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile batteries around Hanoi and Haiphong, or using ball powder in the ammunition for the M-16, thereby jamming up the whole production, they glossed over. None of the above-cited colossal errors in judgment could possibly be McNamara or his kids’ fault, because they were Just So Incredibly Smart.
LBJ got a free ride from the MSM from November 23, 1963 to the Tet Offensive of spring 1968, precisely because he was seen as continuing JFK’s (and, by extension, FDR’s) policies. When Tet went off, the MSM first blamed the U.S. military for not seeing it coming- and then declared the war lost rather than admit that Tet was an inevitable result of LBJ, McNamara & Co.’s failure to pay attention to what the soldiers on the ground were telling them.
I might add that the sudden eruption of the anti-war movement from a fringe group burning draft cards to a major force on the Left, reaching a crescendo with the Democratic Convention in Chicago (26-28 August 1968), blind-sided the media as much as it did LBJ’s clique’.
In spite of the existence of the Students for a Democratic Society from mid-1967, The Student Coalition To End The War In Vietnam from fall of that year, and their alliance with groups like the Weather Underground by spring of 1968, exactly no one in the news media or the Johnson administration saw the openly violent anti-war movement coming.
The only threat to the existing (corporate-progressive) power structure they saw on the horizon from that end of the political spectrum was the Black Power movement that evolved from the mainstream civil rights movement. They noticed the Black Panthers- barely- but completely overlooked everyone else. Their definition of a civil-disorder threat was Watts in 1965, not people waving placards with “Peace” signs on them, and threatening to blow up military recruiting stations, university ROTC centers, and eventually just everything they could conceivably set a bomb under, if we didn’t Get Out Of Vietnam Right Now.
Prior to 1968, the MSM and LBJ’s team saw the “anti-war left” solely as a subset of the hippies; on the fringes, and ineffectual enough to be safely ignored. They expected that group to continue to behave like the rest of the hippies, i.e. that they would restrict their “civil disobedience” to getting stoned and screwing each others’ brains out in parks. Not that they would start throwing Molotov cocktails and chanting, “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
By the time Nixon arrived in January of 1969, the only question left was not if our government was going to abandon South Vietnam, just how fast it would bail.
The military, as always in that war, had no input on the decisions. As such, they did the only thing they could do; they saluted and carried out their orders.
clear ether
eon
Eon, the “anti-war” (actually, as I said earlier, not so much “anti-war” as pro-victory for the NVA/VC) movement didn’t “blind-side” anyone, (least of all the MSM), in ’68 — large and frequent demonstrations were already at full-bore in ’65, with 10,000 protesters showing up in D.C. in March of that year, and for the most part the MSM was cheerleading the whole uproar, then as now, right from the beginning.
You were seven years old in ’65, but I was already a sophomore in college, and trust me, “academia” throughout the country was already in a huge froth back then, in ’65. Here, check it out:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html
What you say is true, but largely irrelevant to what I said.
The organized (note that word) anti-war movement didn’t really get that way until early-to-mid ’67. And even then, it was still mainly confined to the campuses. It’s not that it didn’t exist until ’68- it’s that until then, it wasn’t on the Johnson crew’s and news media’s radar.
If the movement had been noticed by Washington in ’65, and/or had been able to exert political pressure at the level it did in ’68-’69, odds are the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would have never made it to the floor of the House or Senate.
A friend of mine who is a PoliSci expert (and Army vet) pointed out to me that two big enabling incidents that increased the profile of the anti-war movement in the spring of ’68 were the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King (one of its most widely-recognized leaders at that time) and Robert F. Kennedy (who had already gone on record stating that as POTUS, he would seek a “just peace” in Southeast Asia). People began asking why they’d been killed, other than the obvious reasons (James Earl Ray being a racist, and Sirhan B. Sirhan being afraid that RFK would be more pro-Israel than LBJ).
Many came to the conclusion that their opposition to the war had something to do with it. IMHO, that’s erroneous; Ray and Sirhan didn’t care squat about Vietnam. But perceptions have power, even if they’re based on faulty conclusions. That alone probably made the anti-war movement a subject for public notice that it hadn’t previously been.
Just because something exists is no guarantee that it will be noticed. And people can draw the wrong conclusions from events.
cheers
eon
If you will allow for spiritual–or psychological–forces as circulating in Society as simple eddies, as perhaps “Squeaky” From, Ray and Sirhan–and, many others of our more recent “shooters”–perhaps you will allow also that, always, there exists the mentally weak individual whose psychological antenna picks up the wrong current, and acts it out, or some distortion of it, . . .
eon (in your reply to #1), you have NAILED it!!!! In ’67-’68, I was a deployed army capt’s wife living the year with my active duty stateside army general father and I vividly remember my father’s distress upon seeing ’38 weaponry from the Soviet Union being shipped in to Haiphong Harbor…while we Americans sat idly by…because of downright pathetic war strategy determined by McNamara (whose military credencials were ‘past pres of Ford Motor Co’.)
Everyone: reread eon’a comments. He’s right!
Thank you. And thank you and your family for your service.
cheers
eon
That mention of arms being shipped into Haiphong harbor rang a loud bell, I was living in Hong Kong then (working for Civil Air Transport) and remember the shipping pages of the South China Morning Post (English) listing the ships of British registry calling at Haiphong.
This is not to say that British registered ships were carrying in arms to Haiphong, the manifests were not mentioned; my point is that a lot of curious activity was going on that never was reported properly ( as far as I can tell) in the American media.
Specifically, I recall reading the Asia Edition of Time Magazine that I subscribed to and got a differing “feel” or impression about the VietNam, South East Asia theater than by reading the local Hong Kong papers, or even the Far Eastern Economic Review in our office.
These posts here are bringing back forgotten impressions.
The problem with bombing Haiphong Harbor was that laser-guided smart bombs did not become available till 1970. A wholesale bombing of Haiphong Harbor with dumb bombs carried an enormous risk of bombing Soviet ships, killing their crews and sending the ships to the bottom.
McNamara was rightly concerned about how the Soviets would react to this.
We were trying to fight a war against a Soviet client state, without having to escalate to fight against the Soviets themselves.
Nice summary, except for one item–the Tet Offensive was militarily a U.S. victory, but propagandically speaking, a defeat, thanks to the misreporting by the U.S. MSM.
In particular, that beloved father figure, Walter Cronkite.
NEW BUSINESS: http://riolimbaugh.blogspot.com/2011/11/dereliction-of-blurbin.html
Since I seem to be on a violence-profession kick, allow me to neorecommend a golden oldie as well, http://riolimbaugh.blogspot.com/2011/11/across-havoc-of-war-great-general.html
Happy days.
Good presentation. Along with Adm. Sharp’s books, and those of Harry Summers, Adm. Stockdale, and Orrin Deforest, should be required study for all Presidential candidates. GBUSA
Another book: Supreme Command by Eliot Cohen, which specifically covers this issue.
Well done but pointless article. Huntsman’s campaign is going nowhere and deservedly so. This is just one more good reason to not vote for him. Sad to say, though, but I bet that if you quizzed the rest of the field in the GOP – and for dead certain sure if you also quizzed the guy currently in the White House – about Vietnam and what actually happened there (rather than the leftwing mythology that until fairly recently dominated the written “history” of the war), most of them would be just as clueless as Huntsman. Newt might do okay on such a quiz given his academic background, but that’s no sure thing. The rest would just regurgitate the crap they’ve heard on CSPAN and from all the other lefty media outlets and publishing industry for the last 30+ years. Cain would probably have to ask if you mean North or South Vietnam (yes, that’s a cheap shot and one that Cain thoroughly deserves). Anyways, Huntsman’s goose was cooked long before this statement, so meh (shrug).
But don’t you think Huntsman is very handsome, movie star quality? He clearly has the best hair of all the current candidates. I learned as a youngster that in America looks count more than intelligence and wisdom.
And having a properly creased trouser leg. Don’t forget that.
I’m sure Huntsman would be the right guy to nominate…if the only people allowed to vote were those inside the Beltway in DC. If the rest of the country gets to vote, not so much.
Huntsman is a fool. Too much but here goes….
Johnson and the Congress and the Joint chiefs threw away the Armed forces capabilities on silly PR campaigns disguised as war fighting. Actually believing that once the North Vietnamese knew we were “serious” they would fold up their tent and go back north. Asinine to think of, but they were serious then as many think the same now in regard to world terror and Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan today.
Johnson was an arrogant politician who thought he knew it all and who had run roughshod over a multitude of little men in Congress and the party before becoming an arrogant ill informed VP and Pres. MacNamara was a corporate rube who knew PR and how to design and sell consumer items but little about force or war. (Though he did make the partial right decision about the M-16 which was the alternative to the Ordinance Department’s usual dithering C.F. on the rifle programs.) The Congress then as now was marginalized by their ineffective debate stemming from their almost universal cowardice in regard to making honest decisions about the war. Kids lives were reduced to simple meaningless numbers reeled off like sports scores at the daily briefing; as if 1 VERY DEAD American 19 year old kid was an acceptable loss if we could also report 50 VERY inflated essentially fake VC kills.
Major disappointment in the situation was that the arrogant but inexperienced civilians ran the Armies effectiveness and morale into the ground with silly strategic decisions that had a negative effect on our ability to defeat an honestly weak but effective and increasingly strong light infantry army. A virtual sanctuary for the NVA caused by the silly PR aspects of the war and the cowardice of our leadership was the final deciding factor. We fought the war on their grounds and won every major engagement but lost the ongoing PR campaign that the Administration decided was so important.
The rubes in the White House took critical decisions away from the Armed forces and even strayed into tactics when they dictated how/where engagements and bombing missions should be timed and enacted and staged. The chiefs left their constitutional duty in default and refused to resign instead of getting kids killed for, at best, poor reasons.
Some of this was due to the Armed forces pampered prince syndrome by the remnants of the old army cliques and their ineffective toadies; or similar folk who thought THE RING meant more than ability, and who were BOTH in key positions to lick boots for promotion. These people who were not war fighters but instead were bench warmers who had spent most of their careers following and writing dishonest reports glorifying their bosses supposed skill and intelligence. Many of these ineffective leaders were only good at infighting in offices BUT took over many major organizations they were not qualified to run. Appointing such people to direct command over troops in the field at any level was honestly criminal. This was all part of punching their ticket to get promoted into even more responsibility they could not handle. Medal inflation was a part of this run for the gold by the Armed forces who instead of doing their duty to the country were busy collecting fake medals for their personnel packets IE: A Silver Star for once flying over a battlefield at 4000 feet in a command copter etc. and giving some vague and incorrect orders to infantry humping rucks far below in the green hell. This being followed by a quick trip back to air conditioning and a nice steak dinner with martinis while their toady (aide) put them in for the fake medal.
All in all the country was ill served by all three of the groups above.
Unfortunately the above seems to continue today in modified form.
The idiocy and, dare I say it, criminality, continues today. If wars, when absolutely necessary, are not fought with a ‘scorched-earth ferocity’ and the will to win it then we should not entertain such forays into petty squabbles.
LL you are so right. but as long as a DAMNED politician can use war as a campaign tool it aint gonna happen, I wouldn’t trust a politician in a shit house with a muzzle on. and we dont have any STATESMEN left,
I recall sometime during my first tour in ‘Nam, somebody asked a question to LBJ about the conduct of the war and he said “they can not even bomb an outhouse without my permission”. LBJ and his minions micromanaged us to a point that the leadership always appeared to be afraid to make the necessary decisions. Your comment about the $h*t house reminded me of that.
You’re right about LBJ’s statement. Here’s another example of the civilian stupidity in the war – early on, they directed the military to come up with a list of the top 100 targets for a bombing campaign ranked by their importance. The military complied. Instead of hitting the most important targets first, the military was directed to start at the bottom of the list and work their way up. The North Vietnamese were no fools. They knew their own vulnerabilities and saw what was going on. They took advantage of MacNamara’s and LBJ’s stupidity to build up their air defenses around their most vulnerable targets. Before long, they’d created some of the most heavily defended airspace anywhere on Earth and our losses were incredible as a result.
I know a retired pilot who worked in SE Asia as a mercenary from ’61 until ’68. He told me back in the 1990s that almost all of the lucrative construction contracts in SE Asia back then went to Raymond Morris Knuteson Brown and Root (I forget the exact composition) that is now more widely known as Halliburton. He also said that Lady Bird Johnson owned a lot of that company’s stock. According to this pilot, Johnson was making money hand over fist and had no incentive to try and end the war. If that’s true, that makes LBJ one of the most vile and corrupt men in US history in my opinion.
Both Denny and Lizardlips are dead on correct. In 1967 I was a 1Lt of Ordnance; today of course I am long retired. Back then I was horrified at the so-called medal-inflation when I saw US politicians who arrived in-country for a brief photo op, and brought with them a box of medals (commonly bronze stars, purple hearts, and even some silver stars) and literally handed them out at random (being careful to select the correct ratio of “minority” soldiers), while a photographer snapped re-ection photos. These medals quickly lost most or all their value to real soldiers. I also saw first hand what Denny mentioned about a Btn Cmdr flying high over a battle in Nam & then his exc putting him in for a silver star for “bravery”, while grunts and their company-grade officers died in the muck below.
My other comment is that the rules of warfare dictate that the worst possible way to fight a war is gradual escelation. A massive blow at the earliest possible time will usually knock an enemy out of the war since he is not used to the horror of it; the Nazis proved this in their first strike against the Netherlands. However when bombings of cities are slowly increased in intensity, the population will become used to them, and further bombings will increase their resolve to resist. This is what happened at London, Berlin, Moscow, Leningrad, etc, etc.
I want this clearly understood. I was not there. I am from a military family. A congenital disease kept me out of the service; I am unfortunately the first generation in my direct family line to NOT serve the country since the revolution.
In an age of global television and YouTube and the Internet, “scorched-earth ferocity” is no longer tolerable by democratic countries.
Scorched-earth ferocity will necessarily involve horrific collateral damage, just like it always has. But unlike wars prior to Vietnam, such collateral damage will now be broadcast into the living rooms of every American and everyone else on the planet. The public-relations backlash will be enormous.
In World War II, the Allies could get away with things like the fire-bombings of Tokyo and Hamburg and so on, because you didn’t have CNN/BBC/al-Jazeera news cameras on the ground in those cities, showing Americans and neutrals living at home what was happening to the civilians under our bombs: The incinerated corpses and mangled children and wailing mothers and so on.
(“Hi, I’m John Smith of CNN, and I’m here in Tokyo on this pleasant morning in 1944 with Miyoshi Nakamura, a housewife and mother of two living in this pleasant suburb. So, Mrs. Nakamura, how do you feel about the way the Americans have conducted this war against your country?”)
Thanks to global television and the Internet, the enemy is no longer faceless; and it’s hard to wipe out people that TV and YouTube reveal to be human beings too.
Thanks to global communications, starting with the Gulf War of 1991, war has changed its character. It’s become almost like a football game, in which you get to view BOTH sides from an equal perspective: Our civilians, their civilians, our army, their army, our casualties, their casualties.
Simple enough answer to the media types. If you’re in the war zone, and you aren’t embedded with US troops where your reports can be censored; then you are considered enemy illegal combatants – and subject to being shot by the first soldier who can lay some semi fire on to you. Somewhere along the line our media has forgotten who exactly is the ultimate guarantee of their Constitutional rights. Want to get out there and do propaganda for the enemy, than die with them.
sounds like you might have been there Denny. was in the Air Force in 61 got out in 65 and while they weren’t useing my AFSC 55151 in Vietnam they were sending a hellof a lot of my friends over on TDY tours. it started out as 30 day tours and escalated up to 90 dys then six months and then they finaly admitted we were at war. when a hell of a lot of guys could have told you that back in 62, in the early 60′s they were training Vietnamese pilots at eglin where I was stationed. in 1964 the first division used field three Duke Field as a stacing area for Vietnam,
Given the warm embrace the MSM has given Huntsman, I won’t vote for him under any circumstances.
Period.
I thought I was alone in catching that error during the “debate”.
But pity not only Huntsman, but EVERY American taught by teachers from the 1960s and after. They’re all — ALL — conservatives as well as liberals — completely brainwashed, as was the general public at that time, and as is the general public today.
Perhaps Huntsman read “The General Who Lost Vietnam” by Lewis Sorley, which is also worth reading.
I’ve read a few books on VietNam, though I’ve never read Gen. McMaster’s book. I would disagree with the characterisation of him as an acclaimed military historian, given that he’s only published the one book, what with running around Iraq winning the surge and so forth. He’s a good soldier, and my prediction for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs someday, but one book rarely makes one an acclaimed military historian.
I happen to think the argument that Johnson listened to (some) of his generals is correct. He listened to Westmoreland way too much. Westy, who is an honorable and decent man, isn’t much of a general, unfortunately. His WW2 experience was as an artillery group commander in an infantry division (basically he commanded all the artillery, 3 battalions of 105s and one of 155s) and that apparently taught him that attrition was a viable strategy in a war. Of course it isn’t, and it didn’t work. Ignoring the Joint Chiefs (who are more or less out of the chain of command anyway) isn’t as big of a sin as it sounds like.
Btw, Jim, where are you from? I’ve never met someone not related to me with the same last name…my email is Dnicho9164@aol.com if you’d like to compare relatives etc…
Thank you Scott for pointing this out and giving us the credit to recognize Gov. Huntsman is Irrelevantial…
Since the end of WWII our military has been used almost exclusively as a poker, rather than an instrument of war. An immoral use of man power to achieve political gains, is putting it mildly.
War has been reduced to almost complete ineffectiveness by a political strategy of winning hearts and minds through a series of bribes and military pin pricks. A politically twisted scheme of ‘Reward and Punishment’, with (no end in sight as Huntsman himself stated)! No end. No goal. No military victory. Victory will be hashed out at the table of diplomacy, not militarily, no matter how long it takes, even if it’s decades,no matter the price.
This is presented to us in the name of humanity, because military victory would be immoral.
Huntsman is a toad (can say that) had he any education in the matter he would have know that many of the top generals discussed resigning over the war. They didn’t but they certainly didn’t like it. Westmoreland was a dud, as a new book shows, but again he was the result of incompetent civilians rather than military culture.
I would seem that all he is doing is using the common coin rather than giving the issue either thought or study: goes great with MSM sauce.
Didn’t this actually start with the “police action” in Korea? Or was it waiting on the Elbe in the spring of 45? Then there was MacLelland. If you’re not going to fight to win, the men doing the fighting are being betrayed by their leaders.
I was also thinking this started in Korea….where we still babysit them.
Korea was perhaps the first war where the objective was to maintain the status quo instead of winning. The Soviets were backing the North Koreans and they’d detonated an atomic bomb in 1949. The Truman Administration and State Department feared a wider escallation if we actually won the war so they pushed for a draw instead of victory. In that, they succeeded. The war dragged on longer than necessary and the death toll was heavy on all sides. Meanwhile, men like my Uncle Paul were languishing (and many dying) in POW camps where the death rate was about 25% of all prisoners.
Ultimately, South Korea was defended instead of conquered. They’re now a very modern and prosperous country while the North is a cesspool.
At the end of the Civil War Major Anderson was returned to Ft. Sumter. Status quo antebellum.
Wasn’t it General Anderson by the end of the Civil War?
There has been one element to come from the McNamara mess: we now have the best-educated officers in the world. (If one cares to check, one would find that the typical flag officer has at least one graduate degree.) This resulted from McNamara’s Whiz Kids, typically B-school-type kids who believed that a guy without a graduate degree had nothing to say to them. As a result, DoD started sending young officers to graduate schools.
And now in the Obama administration, we have the same situation only this time with Ivy League faculty members. At 7%, this administration has the least business experience on any in the last 100 years; the previous low was 21%, also a Democrat administration.
The Whiz Kids and the Ivy League faculty members share another element: there is no penalty for their being wrong. They both were — and are — with monotonous regularity.
The civilian Public (primarily including politicians) lost the Vietnam War
Huntsman’s ignorance, or distortion, of history, should disqualify him from consideration for the Republican nomination.
On the contrary, the view that Huntsman expressed is a fairly common one, even among educated people (particularly of a younger generation). Indeed, the author of this article had to resort extensively to a book by an expert on this subject before he felt he could convincingly refute Huntsman’s statement for a lay audience. Doesn’t that in itself say something?
What’s more, Huntsman only made an offhand reference to Vietnam to illustrate a point about Presidential authority, and none of the other candidates knew enough to call him out on it. He definitely bested Romney in that exchange.
Look at someone like Herman Cain, who warned on CNN that China was “attempting to acquire” nuclear weapons, and thinks that one of the effective ways to deal with Syria is an oil embargo. Now there’s obviously someone whose ignorance should disqualify him from being President. But Huntsman? He’s the last candidate of whom one can reasonably say something like that.
Note also that no one here corrected the author as to exactly who beat who at Tet, and how the US really lost Tet.
Considering even the NVA acknowledged we won at TET, I would say your ignorance is showing,
My apologies to the original author; Eon messed up on Tet, the original author did not mention it.
The truth about Tet was not widely publicized until several decades after the fact, and many people, as Eon demonstrates, still believe what the news media said about it back then.
We are not discussing history, but an era I lived through, being a Viet Nam _era_ vet.
No one in the general population had any idea what was really going on anywhere. We had to rely on the news media, and they had their agenda. Not as fully and foully developed as now, but similar.
Actually, what I meant was that the media said we lost Tet. On the ground, we won it, and I know it. Anytime the enemy loses entire divisions destroyed on the battlefield, and ends up having to leave the field, he lost the battle.
But the news media didn’t play it that way, as you said.
Sorry if I was not clear on that. And thank you for being there.
cheers
eon
he wasn’t in VN…….
He said vietnam-era vet……..
which is someone who was in the military during that time, but not in-country, as in vietnam……….
the vfw, among others, changed their acceptance to -era vets………. because money is more important than real vets………
yes, I was in I corps (pronounced ‘core’) from sep 68 – oct 69
I corps was the northern most sector of south viet nam
The real reason his remark should not have gone unchallenged is because Obama is following right in LBJ’s footprints in using a decidedly civilian approach to military matters. He took office with two wars ongoing and has not ONCE taken his generals advice and done what they suggest. AND the Afghanistan exit strategy is not based on any military goal, strategy, tactic, or outcome – it is based solely on his desire for re-election. In that regard he is more like LBJ even, than Carter. Both of which were DISASTERS for this country.
Thank you, Scott. Someone needed to say that. Huntsman’s was a cheap soundbite that elided — and presented an inaccurate picture of — some of our most important history.
McMaster makes a sound case that the generals didn’t do everything they could have to oppose the disastrous course charted by McNamara and LBJ. But if you want to know who listened to the generals, try Richard Nixon.
Huntsman’s comment is closer to the truth than Ott would have you believe. Ott relies too much on McMaster’s book, “Dereliction of Duty”. For a complete picture, one needs to read Lewis Sorley’s “Westmoreland, the General who lost Vietnam”, “A Better War” and “Vietnam Chronicles, the Abrams Tapes”. Sorley’s thesis is that Westmoreland was given free rein to conduct the war in South Vietnam–that he was the worst choice possible as COMUSMACV and that LBJ and McNamara listened too much to Westmoreland and his repeated demands for more and more troops to conduct his failing strategy of search and destroy. It was not until Clark Clifford replaced McNamara that the flaws of Westy’s strategy were realized. Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland as COMUSMACV and ARVN troops were finally trained and properly armed to effectuate the clear and hold strategy that replaced the big unit tactics of Westmoreland.
It is true that LBJ listened too much to the generals and used them–especialy Westmoreland for his political purposes, but it was primarily letting Westmoreland have free reing with a failed strategy from 1964-68 that proved disastrous for the U.S. Had Abrams been appointed COMUSMACV instead of Westmoreland, the war would have had a much different outcome and 58,000 Americans would not have died there.
Brad
Captain, U.S. Army
1964-67
excellent post, Brad. I agree on every point. I understand that some want to use whatever weapon is handy to bludgeon Huntsman, but this particular point of attack is wrong headed.
I was a young fighter bomber pilot in Da Nang in 1965 and remember a different story than Huntsman told. In fact when he said it during the debate I screamed at the screen on my TV. My squadron was bombing in places that LBJ and McNamara claimed that we had no action. I remember when we were down to sending my F-4 Phantom out with only two 2.75 inch unguided rockets while Johnson and McNamara claimed that there were no ammo shortages! We normally carried two pods per wing with twenty rockets to a pod! I also remember interdicting supply lines on the Ho Chi Men trail with 1000 pound bombs because we had used all of the 250 lb. bombs up. That was a gross misuse of ordnance. The two of them lost any credibility they had and they also lost all respect from the fighting forces they were abusing. We were fighting a war with out hands tied behind our backs while these two liars told everyone at home how well things were going. I am not endorsing all military opinions but they mostly were a hell of a lot better than two politicians sitting in DC. Huntsman is a used car salesman.
Greetings:
What’s interesting to me is that part of former Governor Huntsman’s credentials is his ambassadorship to China which is now trying to expand its control over the South China Sea in order to have access to the oil believed located there. The very same oil that leftists used to insist that the USofA was after during the Viet Nam War.
Similarly, the performance of the Joint Chiefs during the Johnson Administration is a tribute to the Congressional approval process and the willingness of our general and flag officers to kowtow in order to acquire that coveted (next) star. When was the last time you heard about a general or flag officer resigning because of a policy dispute? They have proved themselves willing to sacrifice their honor and their men on the altar of political appeasement.
You’re right, 11B40, about the general political pusillanimity of flag officers (generals and admirals).
In fact, this is why the best Army and USMC officers — the ones with real cojones — usually stop at Lieutenant-Colonel. Beyond that, survival (never mind promotion) depends mostly on politics and ass-kissing.
Jack, (and 11B40)
It’s nothing new;
In the movie Patton, there is a secen in which Patton is meeting with a group of Generals regarding what was at that time the Leading Edge of the Battle of the Bulge.
In the Real meeting there was Beedle Smith, Omar Bradley, Ike Eisenhower, and a host of others who all shared the same single distinction. While being his superior officers, they had all at one time been a subordinate of George Smith Patton III.
When Patton declared he could engage Bastogn with Three Divisions within 48 hours they all thought he’d lost his mind. The only reason they approved his plan was that they had NO OTHER OPTIONS.
What the Movie fails to explain (because it was more a Whitewash of Bradley than a Bio of Patton) is that the Three Divisions arrived in 36 hours.
Many Historians beleive that this was Patton’s declaration to the Generals in that meeting, “You may be the better Politician, I am the Better General.”
I think the classic line is when Bradley tells Patton “You don’t know when to Shut Up.” In other words, “You don’t know when to Kowtow to the political interests and ignore the unimportant things like winning the war.”
Historical Note: Operation Market Garden was a FLOP!
Market Garden wasn’t a flop – try disaster.
General McKiernan. He used a roundabout means of resigning, but basically he was protesting orders. All the rest was so he could keep his rank and retirement, and not go to Leavenworth. He had to thread the needle to do it. He knew what he was doing. Also a good General.
Huntsman, is misinformed. You made a great point in describing the rest of the Republicans not correcting him on his wrong information. As a Vet myself, I remember all the “college kids” telling me what a goon I was and spitting on me when I cam home. I am very grateful the country is not treating the new Vet’s like this. Jan Fonda and John Kerry were both “cowards”. The article proves we should not vote for any of the current crop of Republicans.
Get rid of ALL of them…….You cannot do any worse with a complete new bunch.
Charles,
When you came home there were only 2 ways for the general public to know what was really happening;
1) CBS, NBC, ABC
2) NYT, WaPo, LAT
Radio and all local papers were just regurgitations of those two.
It was very easy to feel isolated in your thoughts at that time. I remember during the Reagan administration believing myself to be the only person to think that everyone was being Hypocritical regarding ‘Arms for Hostages’.
My quote to most people were, “You kept screaming for the President to DO SOMETHING about all the hostage taking, now he’s done something and your angry exclaiming – Well, we didn’t say to do that.” (Remember it was Arms for Hostages for several months BEFORE it became Iran/Contra.)
It wasn’t until a friend walked into my house and told me, “Hey John, there’s this guy on the Radio who talks just like you do,” in 1991 that I learned I wasn’t alone. (he was referring to Rush Limbaugh.)
I digress…
My point is, people know they aren’t alone anymore and they aren’t going to let a minority voice get away with dishonoring the military the way they did when you came home. Most people who supported you (and they were a Silent Majority) had no way to know that they weren’t just Silent Individuals in a sea of Liberalism.
Today we have means to gather and learn that we aren’t alone – See the Tea Party vs. Occupy for a real view of how things have changed. The Occupy movement is every bit as big as it was in 1967, but the Tea Party had no means of coalessing in 1967.
Little by little the MSM ability to convince people HOW they SHOULD think is loosing ground, hence their Blatant attempts to Lavish Praise on the current occupant of the White House in spite of what everyone can see with their own eyes at home.
I distinctly remember the media reports early on (1965 – 1967) referring to Viet Nam being “The Professor’s War,” in which the United States was going to fight a “Smart War.”
I remember thinking at the time that their description of the strategy was similar to training a dog with Negative and Positive reinforcement based on the actions of the NVA.
I’m not sure too many Generals were of the mindset that you ‘Train’ your enemy in a war.
Maybe that’s why it was a Police Action, so we could treat the war as a Law Enforcement issue.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Years ago I read a book called “The Tunnels of Cu Chi” by Tom Mangold, et. al. In it was an interview with a woman who was part of the Viet Cong who fought and lived in the tunnels. If I am not mistaken, in the interview she stated that they had taken such a beating from the B-52 bombings that they were on the verge of surrendering. Fortunately for them, politics apparently ended the bombings before they had to give up.
I think had the military been given more free reign to actually win instead of having to rely on political officers (whether in the military or in the government) we might have won the war. However, there was just too much pressure from the left and the media (and I have to wonder, how much of that pressure was bought and paid for by the Soviet Union and the Communists).
“…McNamara and his assistants in the Department of Defense…were arrogant,” McMaster wrote. “They disparaged military advice because they thought that their intelligence and analytical methods could compensate for their lack of military experience and education. Indeed, military experience seemed to them a liability because military officers took too narrow a view and based their advice on antiquated notions of war.”
I’m sure that, looking back on it, Johnson should have taken General Curtis Emerson LeMay’s advice about “Bombing Vietnam back into the stone age,” although there is some dispute as to whether or not LeMay really said that. But think about it. That is almost exactly what Nixon did with his massive “Christmas Bombings” and the North Vietnamese quickly signed the peace treaty after that. Once the North Vietnamese actually saw that there was a president willing to follow the military’s advice of using crushing force against an enemy, they folded like a cheap tent. One can only imagine what would have happened if Johnson had followed LeMay’s advice as far back as 1968, during the Tet Offensive. One can only imagine.
One can also imagine what would have happened if George W. Bush did the same thing to Afghanistan back in 2001. According to “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq” by Michael Scheuer, Bush could have done the same thing. We had the targets all lined up since the end of the Clinton administration, all we needed was the will to drop the bombs. But did we do it? No, we had to find a “Kinder and gentler way” to fight a war, as if there is any. The goal of warfare is to win, and the faster, the better. Listen to the Generals. THAT is what they get paid to do. Obama is NOT listening to the generals about either Iraq or Afghanistan. Any bets on how those two wars are going to turn out in the long run?
We should have turned Afghanistan to glass. It would have save us and the world a lot of grief.
Slightly off topic, but oh so right.
Most likely it would have touched off a world war that would continue for the next 500 years.
And given the numbers–1.3 billion Muslims vs. 350 million Americans–it would necessarily escalate into global nuclear war. Pakistan would jump any American installations they could attack; we would jump Pakistan; China would jump us.
sinz54
Most likely it would have touched off a world war that would continue for the next 500 years.
And given the numbers–1.3 billion Muslims vs. 350 million Americans–it would necessarily escalate into global nuclear war. Pakistan would jump any American installations they could attack; we would jump Pakistan; China would jump us.
Oh bull. No possible way you can conduct any kind of realistic foreign policy, when all you can think of is that your enemies might object to it.
As for the Muslims, Winston Churchill’s quote about the Germans comes to mind. “The Hun he is either at your throat, or at your feet”. Smashing Afghanistan flat was not going to bring the Russians – who not only hate the Muslims Afghans, but the Muslim Chechnyans(?) – in to help them. as long as we agreed to look the other way while they did the same to the Chechnyans(?) and the Chinese to the Uighurs(?). It also has the added benefit of scaring the crap out of the Muslim population of the world – “Strong Horse” and all that.
Oh. Good. Grief.
We have a President who said we have 57 states, and you get in a snit over the role of unspecified generals during the Vietnam era?
You probably believe that BS that Rachel Maddow spews about Herman Cain, too.
valerie,
News flash for ya, We all thought Mr. 57 states, Tire Pressure, Corpse Man, marched in Selma at 4 years old before he ever went there, etc. etc. etc. was UNQUALIFIED too.
Finding Huntsman unqualified for this lunacy is NOT inconsistant with that, nor is it in any way shape or form an endorsement for Maddow
“If my sons did not want wars, there would be none.”
~ Gutle Schnaper, Mayer Amschel Rothschilds wife
Wars are fought to enrich the elite. Simple as that.
More like Fool on the Hill,
Wars are fought to avoid the slavery that follows for the looser.
There are two Age Old Lies that you clearly buy in to;
1) “It takes two to fight.”
Wrongo du Maxami.
One not fighting back will still get the snot kicked out of him.
In 1935 the British public in a Peace Vote voted 11 Million to 1/2 million not to go to war. (How’d that work out again?)
2) “War is evil.”
No, people are evil. War is an event, it is impossible for an event to be evil.
War is like having your body cut open.
If done by a mugger to remove your wallet, it is evil.
If done by a skilled surgeon to remove an inflamed appendix, it is not evil.
The trauma to the body is the same.
The recovery is the same.
Only the intent of the person makes it good or evil.
When you make the war itself evil, you remove the responsibility from the people, and actually make a war more likely.
The Opposite of war is NOT Peace,
The Opposite of war is SLAVERY!
Well said, and saved to disk. Thanks.
Hear hear!!
Use Huntsmans ignorance of history to disqualify him, but do not use the fact that the others did not rise to object to disqualify them?
Hmmmm.
In the years right after the Viet Nam War ended, I heard a bitter vet insist that Lady Bird had a lot of stock in Bell Helicopter. I’ve done a half-a search into this and found no corroborating evidence. Many of you really know your history. Any of you ever heard that accusation?
Huntsman isn’t qualified to run as a Republican candidate for only one reason…he’s a liberal progressive Democrat right down to his toes. He’s no different than Shrillery or Obama in his beliefs. There was no misinterpretation of history it’s what he believes so that makes it true. Isn’t that how it works with liberals?
I agree with 13. Stan. Huntsman used the wrong example to challenge the “listen to commanders on the ground” mantra used by Cain and Romney.
I guess it never occurs to any of the GOP that Bush43 not only refuted the Powell Doctrine, but ignored and forced General Shinseki into retirement over his advice on force levels needed for the 2003 Iraq “War of Liberation”.
I assume Huntsman knows that any GOP candidate has to invoke Vietnam instead of 2003Iraq, the two wars that will continue to haunt and divide America for decades.
Afghanistan is always in a league of it’s own. No one ever wins when they fight the Pashtuns. Ever. Even Tamerlane was smart enough to stay north of Kabul.
Yes, this legacy of inconclusive, limited war did start with Korea. The perils of operating under a United Nations mandate.
“Afghanistan is always in a league of it’s own. No one ever wins when they fight the Pashtuns. Ever. Even Tamerlane was smart enough to stay north of Kabul.”
Tamerlane conquered clear down to Northern India. The sack of Delhi is legendary.
His method of dealing with opposition, was to raise hills of severed heads.
There is something to be said for his methodology.
Alexander the Great also conquered Afganistan pretty thoroughly, although back then it was not Muslim, but the mountains, and the resiliance of the population, were similar to today. Any nation can be conquered, if you want to pay the price. The problem in Afganistan was when it was winnable, it was shortchanged, in favor of Iraq. We didn’t surge in Afganistan until much too late, and then didn’t surge near long enough.
Huntsman’s understanding of Vietnam doubtless disqualifies him from serious consideration.
But before we reach back to that, let us consider that any soi-disant Republican who would work for this most partisan of Presidents is not the one to be standard-bearer for the Republican party.
And before reaching back to that, let us consider that Huntsman’s primary function appears to be the Spare Romney; should Romney be knocked out of the race, it will be Huntsman’s job to grab the fallen standard of Writhing Moderation, and lose gallantly with it.
Should all that mean nothing, ask yourself this one question: do you really want four years of a president who looks like actor Tom Ewell in a Kennedy wig?
I’m a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Vietnam war was completely avoidable. During WWII Ho Chi Minn fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese before we got anywhere near there and then joined with us as our ally. After the war Ho continued his struggle to free his country only now it was from the French, who had reclaimed it as a colony. At that time Ho was not a communist. He came to the United States and begged for our help in getting the French to leave his country. Unfortunately, we still considered the French our allies and turned him down. When he couldn’t get any help from the West, he then declared himself a communist and turned to Russia for the help he needed. They obliged and the fight was on.
Re: Perry1949… I recall pretty distinctly in my studies that Ho was indeed a communist having studied in Paris and spent time with them there during WWI and/or the 1920s. I acknowledge your point that handling him differently in the aftermath of WWII may have led to a different outcome in Indochina, but he was a communist nonetheless. In the bigger context of the Cold War and our desire to keep France in the fold with NATO, it’s not surprising that we wouldn’t choose Ho over de Gaulle.
An excellent, though overlooked resource is “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965″ by Mark Moyar.
Moyar went to primary sources for his book, studying Pentagon reports and North Vietnamese records. Much of the narrative regarding the Vietnam War is built on news media reports which we now know were skewed by a clever North Vietnamese agent.
Another good source is “Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent by Larry Berman” which chronicles his life.
Both of these books are called “revisionist” because they don’t support the common narrative. But at the same time it makes them more credible.
…..”Had Johnson actually listened to the advice of his generals — essentially that war is war and must be fought to win —……”
This excellent sentence should be applied frequently (I almost typed ‘liberally’) today in our continuing war against Islamic terrorism/aggression in its tenth year – that today, right this hour, is so politically incorrect to even mention.
I take this opportunity here to be politically incorrect.
In 1966, Michigan State and Notre Dame met in the last game of their regular football seasons (next to last for ND). Both were undefeated. Notre Dame was ranked #1, Michigan State #2. The score was tied 10-10 with a minute or so remaining. Notre Dame had the ball on their 30 yard line. And they ran the clock out with running plays, settling for a tie. (There was no overtime in college football then.)
Despite this blemish, Notre Dame preserved their #1 ranking.
Alabama coach Bear Bryant, whose team went 11-0, but was passed over by the AP and UPI polls, had this to say:
“I have a lot of seniors on this team. Some of them will be graduating and going on over to Vietnam, I suppose. When they get there, I just hope they don’t play for a tie.”
Would that LBJ and McNamara had heeded him.
Scott Ott,
Word. Thanks for posting this! Let’s hope Newt and Romney read it.
has anybody seen any indication that any of the candidates has read or knows about – Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History by
John David Lewis (Author)
Um…why are we even talking about this?
After the 4,635,932nd disqualifying statement from Huntsman, do we really need another reason NOT to vote for the man?
He’s a lying sack of dog crap stitched up in a human skin. Let’s start ignoring him please.
I have a copy of Mark Moyar’s “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965″ and it’s on my reading docket, but has anyone here read “Vietnam: The Necessary War” by Michael Lind? I’m not otherwise a Vietnam War buff, but Lind seemed to make a pretty convincing argument that, though he was ultimately responsible as COC, it may be a bit much to have expected LBJ to overturn the contemporary military culture that stressed pitched battles over counter-insurgency (continuing to employ MacNamara as SoD is another matter entirely).
The US military had trained for years to defeat the USSR on the plains of North Germany, they neither expected – nor did they desire – to be fighting guerillas in the jungles of Vietnam. Witness the foolishness of tanks and APC’s in rice paddies.
Glad to see McMaster get his due – he and Mark Moyar have seriously shaken the historiography of Vietnam. Too bad our politicians seem to have not read them.
An interesting side note is the growing reappraisal of Curtis LeMay, who was not the nuclear wack-job everybody thought him to be. In fact, it is worth noting that LeMay was the only chief to consistently challenge LBJ (costing him his career) and that Nixon’s policies were variations of LeMay’s original recommendations.
Still, it seems to me that a lot of people are sick and tired of comparing our current situation to Vietnam.
I saw a few posts saying ignore Huntsman. While I agree with the sentiment, the point of the article was not only that the guy with the foreign policy chops got it wrong, but that the other candidates did not call him on it… because they couldn’t.
Or maybe they just ignored him, not wishing to give him more airtime. I am pretty sure that Gingrich, with his PhD in History, and his demonstrated knowledge of war history in his writings, knew better. These are not debates. They are campaign ads. Everyone is fighting for face-time. No one wants to bother challenging the other guy and let him get more face-time.
So, my take is this: Huntsman, the JIRC, (Jackass-In-Republican-Clothes) got it wrong, and others either did not know or care.
Huntsman must have used David Halberstram’s 1972 “The Best And The Brightest”
as background research.
Halberstram’s recent book “The Coldest Winter” is in the same vein.
Greetings:
I just finished Mr. Halberstram’s “The Coldest Winter” and it seemed to me that the author was still a bit trapped in Viet Nam due to all his allusions to that subsequent war. I didn’t think much of the book overall because the military action were way too condensed or missing as opposed to the political. Those nasty old MacArthur-loving Republicans versus the altruistic Democrats.
For the political angle..read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Amnesia-Congress-Surrenders-Cambodia/dp/0825306329/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322461654&sr=8-1
I don’t think there’s much chance of Huntsman getting a nomination, but I’ve seen some gaping holes in his awareness before. It’s not so much his ignorance, which we all have in certain areas, as his cocksure attitude in making assertions that don’t stand up to scrutiny. He resembles Barack Obama and most other liberals in that.
“As H.R. McMaster wrote in his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, President Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of the war effort was characterized by marginalizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lying to Congress about troop levels, and pursuing Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s tactic of “graduated pressure,” which treated military force as a communication tool rather than a way to achieve victory.”
“Dereliction of Duty” refers to the dereliction of duty of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If you can find it, you may want to read the US Army War College Quarterly, Winter 1996-97 report on the Vietnam war which concluded by saying “Even had the United States attained a conclusive military decision, its cost would have exceeded any possible benefit. Vietnam was then, and remains today, a strategic backwater, and the US decision to fight there in the 1960s was driven by a doctrine of containing communism that in the 1950s was witlessly militarized and indiscriminately extended to all of Asia. Bernard Brodie observed in the early 1970s that “it is now clear what we mean by calling the United States intervention in Vietnam a failure. We mean that at least as early as the beginning of 1968 even the most favorable outcome could not remotely be worth the price we would have paid for it. The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.”
The Vietnam venture did seem like a losing proposition from the getgo, largely, for the reasons you cite, that any conceivable lasting outcome could never be worth the cost.
I’m beginning (only beginning ?) to think about the ongoing Afghan endeavor the same way.
Obama, crassly looking for political credentials, hyped it as “the good war” throughout his campaign for the presidency. But based on the tentative way he wages it, his long delay in supplying the troops his generals asked for, his announced withdrawl plans, those intent on absorbing Afghanistan back into the Islamist Borg can be patient.
“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF are gonna win!” Us useful idiots even got that one wrong. The Viet Cong were destroyed by Hanoi after Ho died. The Politboro did not share his affection for the NLF. Tet took the Viet Cong out of their tunnels and gave our soldiers masses of visible targets in the biggest failed insurrection in history. Not much left to contest Hanoi’s takeover after “liberation,” when the NLF was declared tainted by association with southern capitalism. The OWSies might take note with their grand enthusiasm for Obama Marxism. They won’t last the first purge.
McMaster wrote: “When the situation in Vietnam seemed to demand military action, Johnson did not turn to his military advisers to determine how to solve the problem. He turned instead to his civilian advisers to determine how to postpone a decision…Instead, the commander in chief dawdled, prevaricated, and forced thousands of young men to lay down their lives for his domestic political objectives.
Wait. That reminds me of someone. Someone more recent, someone in real time.
Give me a minute. It will come to me.
Huntsman’s ignorance, or distortion, of history, should disqualify him from consideration for the Republican nomination.
As for John Huntsman, he too often strikes me as the guy looking for the bon mot, searching for the glib, all-encompassing summation, the sound-good sound byte, never mind whether it’s accurate or not.
This whole “listen to the generals” thing has always been somewhat disturbing to me. Yes, by all means, the generals (or better those lower than the generals) on the ground know what is happening on the ground and their advice must be sought and to some extent heeded. However, the mission of our military is to fight wars. When is the last time that a general ever advocated drawing down or exiting a conflict? They don’t, that isn’t their mission and that’s why we have civilian control over the military.
Huntsman used the orthodox view of Vietnam to attack Romney. I have no idea if Huntsman knows better or not. It did seem effective though (at the time). Either none of the other candidates knew better, or at least didn’t have sufficient command of the facts to dispute it. As a political tactic, it doesn’t matter since Huntsman will continue to be a non-factor. From the perspective of historical accuracy, it does matter since it propagates the conventional Vietnam mythology.
At least Scott knows the facts, and felt it worthy to point out.
For those seeking a long form USA/Vietnam history, see Mark Moyar’s “Triumph Forsaken”, among others.
Very possibly, Huntsman’s comment was a reference to the 1968 Republican presidential primary campaign of George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father.
When asked in an interview about his shift in opinion on the war in Vietnam — he had been for the war and now he was against it — he replied that while in Vietnam he had been brainwashed by generals and the diplomatic corps (to favor the war); further research since his trip changed his opinion. (see the interview at http://youtu.be/fSdSiBehQpI).
Possibly, Jon Huntsman was hoping for a rebuttal — that the generals’ outlook was not so wrongheaded — so that he could bring Mitt’s father’s comments to the contrary into the campaign, seeming like (yet another) Romney flip-flop on an issue, albeit a historical one between father and son.
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