On Defeating Nationalist Guerrillas by William Pfaff

On Defeating Nationalist Guerrillas

William Pfaff
Paris, January 2, 2009 -- A persisting conundrum of democracy is why good men and women do so much evil in the name of good. Why do people who are obviously intelligent repeatedly do things that one would think defy common sense?
This seems most pronounced in international relations and foreign policy, where part of the explanation undoubtedly is that comparatively few people are interested in the affairs of any country but their own, yet because the subject is important people profess opinions that derive from irrational prejudices or ideologies or half-baked ideas. It is also a matter of possessing a gift or sensibility for other people, an instinctive interest in foreigners and in why they behave as they do, even when one doesn't like what they do.
I bring this up because of a book just out whose title is "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Road to War in Vietnam." The author is Gordon M. Goldstein, and his role in this needs to be explained. In 1995 Bundy, then 76, who had served in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations as national security advisor, was challenged by the controversial memoirs just published by his fellow-member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, ex-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He had concluded that on Vietnam "we were wrong, terribly wrong."
Bundy had published his own orthodox memoirs, saying that we had been right. Otherwise he had remained silent. The McNamara confession inspired him to reexamine his own experience.

This is where Gordon Goldstein enters. Bundy hired him as his research assistant. But as James G. Blight of Brown University tells the story, in a recent review article in the online magazine Truthdig, the two – Goldstein was half the age of Bundy -- became true collaborators as Bundy struggled with his own memories and written record in the light provided by the younger man about the events of a critical period in American history. Bundy died in September 1996.

With the agreement of the Bundy family, Goldstein now has published his book about the unfinished Bundy book. Blight describes it as an account of Bundy's "personal, historical and even moral quest" for the roots of his own mistakes and culpability. While these were undoubtedly hard for Bundy to confront, they do not seem hard to identify, and they are relevant today. Bundy's notes and record confirm that JFK would not have enlarged the war. He repeatedly said to colleagues that a guerilla war cannot be won by foreign troops, even in large numbers. Eventually foreign troops go home. The guerillas stay. No lasting "victory" is possible for the foreigners.

By early 1961 Kennedy had a dozen times said he would not send combat troops. Bundy refused to believe that Kennedy could "let South Vietnam go."

This was an ideological position. It was also a matter of national (or even personal) self-esteem. With it, Bundy subsequently convinced Lyndon Johnson to enter the war after Kennedy's assassination. In my view, there was also an unspoken form of political and social blackmail that Bundy exercised over the new president.

Johnson feared that if he withdrew from Vietnam, as a country politician from Texas, vulgar and populist in instincts (the man who passed the civil rights legislation that lifted Jim Crow from American blacks!), he would be savaged for his foreign policy "cowardice" and lack of sophistication by the "Harvard crowd" who dominated the foreign policy establishment. This fear was justified.

Goldstein quotes tapes made of meetings by Kennedy with Bundy, McNamara, and JFK's military advisor, Maxwell Taylor, on October 2 and 5, 1963. McNamera and Taylor were just back from Vietnam.

They recommended that one thousand of the 16 thousand U.S. military advisors be withdrawn in the following two months, with most of the rest removed by the end of 1965. Bundy asks why. McNamara says, "We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way to do it." JFK agrees, and gives the orders. Bundy disagrees.

Forty-seven days later Kennedy was dead and Johnson president. In February 1965, Bundy recommended "sustained reprisals" (meaning bombings) against North Vietnam. Within a month U.S. Marines arrived in Vietnam. The U.S. had joined the war.

Bundy had always been the best of the best: top in preparatory school, at Groton, professor of government at Harvard and then the youngest ever dean of faculty even without obtaining a doctorate. He had been a staff planner of the invasion of Europe as a soldier. His mother was a Boston Brahmin and his father a diplomat.

America had to "win" in Vietnam because America always wins. America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and its other elite universities. America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

Goldstein's decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war. He answered, "the endurance of the enemy." Goldstein writes: He didn't understand the enemy "because, frankly, he didn't think they warranted his attention."

This book came out within days of the American announcement, made under Barack Obama's influence, that the United States next year will double the number of its troops in Afghanistan. This book would have made a good Christmas present to the president-elect.

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This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com

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