The Fog of War, Part 2
By Connie Corcoran Wilson
Picking up from the first installment, last week:
But the
President from Texas (LBJ), after John Kennedy’s assassination, said,
“You can have more war or more appeasement. I always thought it
was bad to make any statements about withdrawing,” remembering that,
when McNamara and Kennedy had discussed such conciliatory actions, in
previous cabinet meetings where he had been present, he did not agree,
but remained silent. Now, with LBJ in the driver’s seat, the new
President pushes through the Tonkien Gulf Resolution, which gives
complete authority to one man, the President, to take the nation to
war.
McNamara
relates how, on August 2, 1964, the destroyer Maddox was attacked in
international waters by North Vietnamese patrol boats. “We didn’t
respond,” he says. Two days later, on August 4, 1964, skittish sonar
operators reported 9 torpedoes fired at the Maddox at 12:22 p.m. and,
again, 97 minutes later, reported additional attacks, as charted by
sonar. Years later, says McNamara, it emerged that, “Our judgment that
we had been attacked that day (on Aug. 4, 1964) was wrong. We hadn’t
been,” quickly adding that it was true on August 2, however. From this
poor judgment regarding the August 4th attacks emerged stepped-up
bombing raids on North Viet Nam. Says McNamara, “We were wrong, but we
had in our mind a mindset that led to that action. And it led to
such heavy costs,” agreeing with the narrator that “we see what we want
to believe.” All this ancient history sounds so current, and makes the
saying, (roughly paraphrased) “If we do not study history and learn
from it, we are condemned to repeat it,” seem very timely, indeed.
McNamara
related a heated conversation with the man who had once been President
of North Vietnam, which occurred many years after the conflict: “We
(the North Vietnamese) were fighting for our independence. You were
fighting to enslave us.” That was the viewpoint of the North
Vietnamese: that the United States was attempting to follow in France’s
footsteps as a colonial power. The North Vietnamese leader insisted to
McNamara, “We weren’t the pawns of the Chinese or the Russians,” (a
popular opinion of the day, expressed often as “the domino theory” of
Communism in that part of the world) saying that his men were fighting
to be independent as a nation, and that they “would have fought to the
last man”, since they viewed the conflict entirely differently than we
(the United States) did. (McNamara’s Point #1).
More and
more, these remarks remind of our current chaotic conflict in the
Middle East. In Vietnam, the devastating effects of a misjudgment on
August 4th led to a policy known as “rolling thunder” which meant that
two to three times as many bombs were dropped on North Vietnam as had
been dropped on all of western Europe during World War II.
In Iraq,
the poor intelligence (or deliberate duplicity) fed to the American
public and Congress regarding “weapons of mass destruction has led to
our current situation. And the current Administration has certainly
played right in to the hands of Osama Bin Laden (as noted in Richard
Clarke’s book “Against All Enemies”) in giving many rogue Muslim
states a reason to unite in a “holy war” or jihad against us. As
Richard Clarke says in Chapter 10, page 244, “Although Bush had heard
about Al Qaeda in intelligence reports before the attack, he had spent
little time learning about the sources and nature of the
movement. His immediate instinct, after the attacks, was,
naturally, to hit back. His framework, however, was summed up by
his famous line, “you are either with us or against us” and his early
focus was on dealing with Iraq as a way of demonstrating America’s
power. I doubt that anyone ever had the chance to make the case to him
that attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and
strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement.
Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of advisors who
alone are the people whose views he respects and trusts. Any leader
whom one can imagine as President on September 11th would have declared
a ‘war on terrorism’ and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary by
invading. Almost any President would have stepped up domestic
security and preparedness measures. Exactly what did George W. Bush do
after September 11th that any other President one can imagine wouldn’t
have done after such attacks? In the end, what was unique about George
W. Bush’s reaction to terrorism was his selection as an object lesson
for potential state sponsors of terrorism, not a country that had been
engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq.
It is hard to imagine another President making that choice.”
Clarke
goes on, “Others (Clinton, the first Bush, Carter, and Ford) might have
tried to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, what led fifteen
Saudis and four others to commit suicide to kill Americans.
(*McNamara’s Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.) Others might have
tried to build a world consensus to address the root causes, while
using the moment to force what had been lethargic or doubting
governments to arrest known terrorists and close front
organizations…..Such efforts may or may not have succeeded, but one
thing we know they would not have done is inflame Islamic opinion and
further radicalize Muslim youth into heightened hatred of America in
the way that invading Iraq has done.” (p. 245, “Against All Enemies by
Richard Clarke).
On March
6, 1965, when sending more troops (to Vietnam) is being debated,
McNamara says, “The psychological impact of ‘the Marines are coming’ is
going to be bad.” We hear LBJ saying, “My answer is yes, but my
judgment is no,” regarding the additional involvement of 10 battalions
of 45,000 men. McNamara is heard to say, “In the back of my mind I have
a very definite limit on commitment,” adding that he wanted to send no
more than 5 battalions, which would have represented 25,000 additional
soldiers.
We hear
LBJ saying, “We’re not getting out, but we’re trying to hold on to what
we have,” and, later, “This is a nasty little war that has turned in to
a nasty middle-sized war. But America wins the wars she declares. Make
no mistake about that!”
The final installment of Connie Wilson’s “The Fog of War” will appear next Monday on Blog for Iowa.
Copyright
2004 by Connie Corcoran Wilson, M.S. You may reproduce any or part of
this article, as long as you give proper attribution, and you may read
more of Connie Corcoran Wilson’s writing by ordering her book “Both
Sides Now” from the web-site www.ConnieCorcoranWilson.com.
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