[Peace-discuss] "Lessons in Disaster", indeed

[Robert Naiman]

As I wrote in the piece (not in the part that I excerpted here):

President Kennedy was no dove. Kennedy was willing to violate
international law and Kennedy was willing to authorize the killing of
people in foreign countries who had committed no crime against the
people of the United States. What Kennedy was not willing to do was
commit U.S. ground troops to an unwinnable war in Vietnam. And he
wasn't willing to commit U.S. ground troops - as some of his advisers
were - in the belief that protecting U.S. "credibility" meant that it
would be better to fight and lose than not to fight. You don't have to
be a dove to understand what President Kennedy understood: putting
U.S. troops on the ground somewhere doesn't automatically make you
more powerful. Indeed, it could make you less powerful, because, all
other things being equal, a person with more options is more powerful
than a person with fewer options. And if military escalation closes
off opportunities for diplomatic and political solutions, it makes you
less powerful.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/lessons-in-disaster-if-ob_b_335444.html

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 12:59 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> Kennedy is not much of a model for Obama.  The major invasion of South
> Vietnam occurred in 1962, while Kennedy was president.
>
> Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandum 263, dated October 11, 1963
> (six weeks prior to his death), gave qualified approval to the
> recommendations of Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, who were greatly
> encouraged by the military prospects in South Vietnam and were “convinced
> that the Viet Cong insurgency” could be sharply reduced in a year and that
> the US–run war effort should be “completed by the end of 1965.” They
> therefore advised “An increase in the military tempo” of the war throughout
> South Vietnam (a "surge") and withdrawal of some troops in 1963 and all
> troops in 1965 —- if this could be done “without impairment of the war
> effort” and with assurance that “the insurgency has been suppressed” or at
> least sufficiently weakened so that the U.S. client regime (GVN) is “capable
> of suppressing it.”
>
> Once again they stressed that the “overriding objective” is victory, a
> matter “vital to United States security.” JFK approved their
> recommendations, while distancing himself from the withdrawal proposal and
> approving instructions to Ambassador Lodge in Saigon stressing “our
> fundamental objective of victory” and directing him to press for “GVN action
> to increase effectiveness of its military effort” so as to ensure the
> military victory on which withdrawal was explicitly conditioned. The
> president, Lodge was informed, affirmed “his basic statement that what
> furthers the war effort we support, and what interferes with the war effort
> we oppose,” the condition underlying NSAM 263, as consistently throughout
> the period and beyond.
>
> On November 1, 1963, South Vietnamese generals overthrew the Diem
> government, arresting and soon killing Diem: Kennedy sanctioned Diem's
> overthrow, in part for fear that Diem might negotiate a neutralist coalition
> government which included Communists, as had occurred in Laos in 1962. Dean
> Rusk, Secretary of State, remarked "This kind of neutralism ... is
> tantamount to surrender." (See the account of the killing of Diem in Tim
> Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [2007].)  --CGE
>
> Robert Naiman wrote:
>>
>> President Obama knows better than to agree to General McChrystal's
>> proposal for military escalation in Afghanistan. He read the book.
>>
>> On October 7, the Wall Street Journal reported that top officials of
>> the Obama Administration, including President Obama himself, had
>> recently read Gordon Goldstein's book on the path to U.S. military
>> escalation in Vietnam: Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the
>> Path to War in Vietnam.
>>
>> The Journal reported that "For opponents of a major troop increase,
>> led by Biden and Emanuel, "'Lessons in Disaster' ... encapsulates
>> their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged."
>>
>> Indeed, a central theme of the book is President Kennedy's
>> willingness, on the question of ground troops in Vietnam, to do what
>> President Obama has not yet done regarding demands for military
>> escalation in Afghanistan: stand up to the U.S. military and say no.
>> ...
>> As former Marine captain Matthew Hoh recently wrote in his letter of
>> resignation as a top U.S. official in Afghanistan,
>>
>> "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call
>> their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' "
>>
>> Now there's a great American patriot. Do what he says.
>>
>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/lessons-in-disaster-if-ob_b_335444.html
>>
>> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/27/122437/00
>>
>> http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/382
>>
>> --
>> Robert Naiman
>> Just Foreign Policy
>> www.justforeignpolicy.org
>> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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>



-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org