Lessons from Vietnam

I’m about 100 pages into David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, the 1972 account of how the U.S. got involved in the war in Vietnam. But, while the focus is on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ foreign policy, it’s so much more than that. Even only a sixth of the way through the book, its lessons are obvious, and similar to one of the lessons Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recounted in the documentary “The Fog of War” – namely, understand your enemy.

During the early 1960s, many in the Kennedy Administration were paralyzed by the possibility of being painted as pro-Communist. Further, they were so obsessed with the advancement of communism in Cuba and China that they tended to view the civil wars in Southeast Asia as a referendum on Western capitalism vs. emerging communism (maybe or maybe not backed by the USSR). They made their decisions based on that assumption, ignoring the basic concept of nationalism in Vietnam, Laos, etc.

Even McNamara admitted, long after ordering hundreds of thousands of Americans into Asia, that the U.S. misjudged the nature of the conflict – seeing Vietnam as a Soviet proxy rather than a nation fighting for independence from its colonial masters. I’ve never seen explored the racism inherent in U.S. policy from this period: the fact that western “experts” found it inconceivable that a population of nonwhite people could be willing and capable of fighting for their own freedom – oh, no, they simply must be Soviet props. And, 60,000 dead American soldiers later, we saw how that played out.

It’s not just academic for me, this decades-old war. In the wake of the Christmas Day attempted plane attack (which is apparently worse than the Richard Reid shoe-bombing attempt, the D.C. sniper, the anthrax mail attacks and even 9/11), I’ve been wondering about something I’ve been trying to articulate for at least a year, asking people who have far more foreign policy knowledge than I do – basically, I this really about us? Or are terror attacks on Westerners instead about extremists who use convenient targets to influence the establishment of Muslim theocracies in the Afghanistans, Saudi Arabias and Yemens of the world?

I absolutely believe that Al-Qaeda is evil and that we must keep fighting them. But… I’m not convinced that our foreign policy and military experts are truly looking at this conflict through our enemies’ eyes.