Introduction
Israel is losing its protracted war with the Palestinians. It is losing this war for the same yet-to-be-understood reason why America lost its protracted war in Vietnam.
The United States, a superpower, did not lose the war against North Vietnam on the battle field. It did not lose the war because of the antiwar movement generated by America’s liberal-left academia and mass media. In fact, as late as 1968 polls indicated that a majority of the American people supported the war despite the horrendous loss in that year and in the preceding year of more than 1,000 Americans per month!
In his book Dereliction of Duty, military historian H. R. McMaster rightly concludes that the war in Vietnam was lost in Washington, D.C., it was lost even before the first American units were deployed in Vietnam in 1963. The disaster of Vietnam was primarily the result of the failings of President Lyndon Johnson and his principal advisers, above all Robert McNamara. In this article I will speak only of their flawed mentality, leaving aside their “arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest, and, above all [as McMaster concludes], the[ir] abdication of responsibility to the American people.”
What is especially relevant to Israel, however, is that this flawed mentality of the Johnson administration in the Vietnam War is the key to understanding why Israel, under the Netanyahu government, is losing the war with the Palestinians.
I. Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Vietnam War
Let us go back to November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was succeeded, of course by the Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Upon entering the presidency, Johnson inherited the Vietnam War and its competitor for fiscal appropriations the Great Society Program. If this were not enough, America was also engaged in the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union, a basic cause of US involvement the civil war between North and South Vietnam. Johnson feared that a takeover of South Vietnam by Russia’s client North Vietnam would be followed by communist subversion of Laos and Cambodia and much more of Southeast Asia. The US-Soviet conflict and Johnson’s commitment to Kennedy’s Great Society Program prompted LBJ to pursue a “guns and butter” foreign policy.
When Kennedy was assassinated, there were 16,000 American military “advisors” in South Vietnam engaged in counterinsurgency operations against the Vietcong, North Vietnam’s proxy. After being sworn in as president, Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963. Step-by-step, the war became Americanized. By 1968, over 550,000 American soldiers were inside Vietnam. As mentioned, in 1967 and 1968, Americans were being killed at the rate of over 1,000 a month!
America’s objective in the war was to secure the independence of South Vietnam. It was already evident in 1964, however, that the counterinsurgency against the Vietcong was not succeeding. The Vietcong could not be defeated unless the US made an all out effort to conquer the insurgents’ military and manpower supplier North Vietnam. This was Johnson’s objective. In fact, and contrary to precedent, Johnson and McNamara excluded the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the policy-making meetings of the National Security Council. The war strategy was formulated by civilians, primarily McNamara, whose influence on LJB was decisive. The strategy was known as “graduated pressure” or gradual escalation of US Air Force bombing of North Vietnam’s infrastructure. A word about McNamara is in order.
McNamara had served on the business faculty of Harvard University, where he taught the application of statistical analysis to management problems. When LBJ appointed him Secretary of Defense, McNamara assembled a group of academic and legal minds that regarded war not from a military and ideological perspective but from the perspective of economics and game theory. They attached no great significance to the fact that North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, was educated in Moscow. They assumed that the leaders of North Vietnam were ordinary rational human beings who, like themselves, thought in terms of cost analysis. Thus, if North Vietnam’s infrastructure were subjected to a gradual escalation of air force bombing, sooner or later the resulting losses would convince the communists their efforts to subdue South Vietnam was not cost effective. They would then agree to a negotiated settlement of the conflict. South Vietnam’s independence would then be secured, fulfilling America’s objective in the war.
Stated another way: McNamara acted on the belief that graduated application of military force would eventually lead the Vietnamese communists to a judgment about what is the most reasonable choice to make: either suffer increasing destruction of their country’s infrastructure or negotiate an end of the war. Since McNamara believed North Vietnam would choose the negotiating track, he discarded the traditional military precept of overwhelming force as unnecessary, wasteful, and inefficient.
There was, however, at least one general who spoke out against this war strategy. McMaster quotes a complaint of Lt. General Goodpaster, who protested to McNamara in the Fall of 1964: “Sir, you are trying to program the enemy and that is one thing we must never try to do. We can’t do his thinking for him.” The general’s complaint fell on deaf ears; the cost was horrendous.
As of April 1965, approximately 400 Americans had given their lives in Vietnam. By the end of 1968, some 58,000 Americans had perished while the US persisted in the Johnson-McNamara strategy of gradual escalation! It was left to Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon to extricate the United States from that inferno in 1975—an “exit strategy” followed by the loss of South Vietnam.
But I have yet to reveal the flawed mentality of the Johnson administration. This mentality may be deduced from LBJ’s April 7, 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University. What is more, Johnson’s speech was based on assumptions about the Communists which are virtually identical to the assumptions about the Palestinians appearing in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s June 14, 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University!
Johnson’s speech was an indication that the United States was overextended, that it was losing the war—a terrible thing to contemplate in the midst of the “Cold War” with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, while emphasizing his commitment to use military force to preserve the independence of South Vietnam, Johnson held out the promise of a comprehensive economic and public works development program for all of Southeast Asia. He promised North Vietnam a Mekong River development program that would “provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even [the Tennessee Valley Authority]” along with “revolutionary advances in medical care, agriculture, and education.”
The present writer, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was astonished by Johnson’s ethnocentric ignorance or arrogance. Johnson seemed to regard the communist leaders of North Vietnamese as dark skinned, bourgeois Americans. The former majority leader of the Senate thought he was dealing with Democratic and Republican politicians, coaxing them to support a controversial piece of legislation. Like a typical American capitalist, he seemed to believe that Ho Chi Minh could be bought, that Ho would forsake his communist ideology and objectives for pottage. It took less than twenty-four hours for Ho to reject LBJ’s export version of the Great Society. It must be pointed out and emphasized, however, that Johnson had succumbed to the fallacy of “mirror-imaging”—of thinking the enemy thought and felt as he did. This fallacy, to which egalitarian democracies are prone, spawned McNamara’s ideologically indifferent strategy of graduated pressure and thus led to America’s disastrous defeat in the Vietnam War.
II. Conclusion: Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli-Palestinian War
The same fallacy of mirror-imaging, the same ethno-centric arrogance or condescension, is also evident in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “economic” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian War. Like other bourgeois politicians, Netanyahu thinks he can buy peace from the Palestinians by an economic development program that will prompt these Muslim Arabs to abandon their bellicose Quran for the pottage of peace and commodious living.
Like other politicians steeped in McNamara’s economic or non-ideological mode of thought, Netanyahu’s proposed economic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian War is based on the demonstrably false idea that economics trumps ideology, including religion. I see here not only a superficial but also a defeatist mentality. Indeed, this mentality, which pervades Netanyahu’s government and prompts him to endorse an Arab–Islamic state in Judea and Samaria, signifies that Israel is losing the war with the Palestinians, just as America, under the same mentality of the Johnson administration, lost the war with the communists of North Vietnam.
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*Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, January 11, 2010.
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