Vietnam Revisited

Afghanistan is Vietnam’s historical echo.  As a nation, we learned nothing from our tragic venture in Southeast Asia.  So, we repeated its failure in Afghanistan.

After World War II America emerged as the world’s premier military power.  Affixed to the nation’s global self-image was a messianic view reflective of Judea-Christianity.  Here it is:

• America is God’s chosen people
• America is a people led by God
• America is a people who play a messianic role in God’s plan
• America’s mission is to establish God’s kingdom on earth

What this view meant was that America was invincible and could do no wrong as long as she kept her covenant with God.  In keeping with this view, we put In God We Trust on our coins.  We added One nation under God to our national allegiance pledge.  We required politicians to say So help me God as they took office and made their pledge to the constitution.  And any politician who did not end major speeches with an appeal to the blessings of this God on America was in trouble.  We viewed ourselves as God’s holy people.

Over the past sixty years, the Judea-Christian driver of that concept has gradually faded and morphed into a form of arrogant patriotic super nationalism –   although we have not dropped the God-phrasing.  However, this driver was still strong when we began our original support of the corrupt dictatorship of South Vietnam as it struggled with the committed nationalists of North Vietnam. It started in the nineteen fifties with minimal support from President Truman and gradually escalated under the leadership of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon into full-scale war.  It ended officially on April 30, 1975.  But it really did not end. Not counting the human losses, in today’s math, it cost over one trillion dollars plus over 226 billion dollars annually awarded in compensations to veterans and their families – a staggering financial toll for a lost war with no positive outcome.

The 5^th century Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu’s Art of War is considered the basic primer on the rules that govern warfare.  Here they are:

• Choose Your Battles
• Timing Is Essential
• Know Yourself, Know Your Enemy
• Have a Unique Plan
• Disguise Your Plan
• The Best Way To Win Is Not to Fight At All
• Change Represents Opportunity
• Success Breeds Success
• No One Profits From Prolonged War

We ignored (6) and broke all the others in Vietnam and particularly five of the most critical: (1), (3), (4), (5) and (9).  To summarize, the US had no dog in the fight while the North Vietnamese had both an adamant and vicious one.  Supposedly, we were there to stop the aggressive influence of the Chinese communists in southeast Asia and Vietnam was the key. In reality, the Vietnamese and Chinese were long-standing historical enemies with many of the Vietnamese heroes having repulsed Chinese invaders.  The North Vietnamese were primarily nationalists that favored communism. They were mortal enemies of the Chinese. America failed in Vietnam because, as God’s chosen people, we believed we could ignore the rules of warfare.

We learned nothing from the Vietnam War other than that our military generals and our presidents were willing to lie to us citizens in support of their bad decisions.  But I am wrong.  We did not even learn this lesson.  Civilian leadership has yet to comprehend that America’s military leadership continuously relies on the notion that it is never responsible for the losses of war.  Their view is that civilian leadership is inevitably responsible by not giving military leadership sufficient time, troops, or firepower to win. 

We have spent twenty years not learning the lessons of warfare in Afghanistan.  George Bush deliberately lied to congress and the American people in order to get the approval of Congress to go to war with Iraq.  Democratizing the Iraq nation was supposedly a major goal which, itself, was a total failure.  And we slipped side-ways into Afghanistan.  But history had already shown that Afghanistan was a conglomerate of totally corrupt medieval and military fiefdoms that had defied all historical progress.  Both the British (three years) and the Russians (nine years) had already failed in their attempt to capture this country in disastrous wars.  But we are America. We continually repeat our failures in history because we learn nothing from these failures.

It is bad insights and bad advice from failed learning that caused Biden to initiate such a poor and costly withdrawal plan.  He should have known better given his prior experience of our involvement in the Vietnam war.  But he depended on those for advice who have learned little, if nothing, from our warfare history.

Aside from the physical losses, we went into debt over a trillion and a half dollars during this war. And nothing of actual nation-building was accomplished – only billions of dollars funneled into the bank accounts of corrupt foreign leadership and the American military-industrial complex. 

Again, the issue is the ignorance and folly of educational failure. America should require that every elected official in the federal government be given a copy of Sun Tzu’s book with the clear expectation that it will be read and discussed with colleagues along with the constitution.  And why not a law that requires Congress to review how any proposed war fits its strategies before voting?   Maybe this would sprinkle a bit of humility and caution over the arrogance that has caused us to lose every major war we have fought since WWII.  The Messiah has not done well in the world nor the arrogant super nationalist.  Perhaps they have no place in the guidebook of the leadership of a wise democratic nation.

Robert

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