Tethered Swimming

“The fact is you don’t have to be able to read to enjoy The Springfield Review of Books.  Just look at these amusing caricatures of Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.” - Sideshow Bob

Iraq-Vietnam comparisons got Presidential approval last month; then on Wednesday I was reading the 11 October issue of The New York Review of Books and there was an excerpt from the soon to be published (post mortem) book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Journals: 1952-2000.  (Sadly it is not free on their website.)  The following is from an entry dated 21 January 1966 recounting a meeting he and a few other Johnson Administration advisors had with Robert McNamara on the sixth of that month:

McNamara said, as he had before, that he did not regard a military solution as possible.  The military advantages of the bombing, he seemed to feel, were marginal and were out-weighed by the political disadvantages….He seemed deeply oppressed and concerned at the prospect of indefinite escalation.  Our impression was that he feared the resumption of bombing might well put us on the slippery slide.  When I asked whether the North Vietnamese had increased their commitment in response to or independently of American action, he said flatly the first.

He defined his objective in South Vietnam as “withdrawal with honor.”  The establishment of a neutralist government in Saigon would meet that standard.

That was January of 1966(!), two full years before the Tet Offensive and Walter Cronkite’s famous statement that he believed that the war was unwinnable.  At that early date, seven years before the Paris Peace Accords would be signed, no less a figure that the Secretary of Defense had given up on a military solution.  That doesn’t mean that McNamara believed that the war was lost, but it shows that he knew even then that more boys and more bombs were not the answer.

Flash forward almost forty years and here we are.  American troops are caught in the middle of a civil war, the nominal government exists mostly on paper and would swiftly collapse without our military support, and no matter how many whiz-bang weapons and improved tactics we employ, tangible progress remains just out of reach.  Sitting on some hard drive somewhere there are probably comments by high ranking defense officials (military and civilian) that bear a striking resemblance to those of McNamara.

Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, Admiral William Fallon, and others in similar positions may or may not feel that way about the Iraq War.  We won’t find out until long after the fact, if ever.  They cannot be stupid though, they have succeeded at too many difficult tasks to be mistaken for idiots.  It is simply the way of the world that we cannot always say in public what we say in private, I respect and understand that.  But when there are lives on the line, thousands of still beating human hearts, it seems like honesty ought to count for more than decorum.

We fought most of the Vietnam War with our government knowing it was a doomed project.  Other than death and dismemberment the only lasting effect of our military engagement was to delay the eventual political settlement.  As it was then it is now.  As Slim Charles said, “We fight on that lie.”