Tom Engelhardt is an astute critic of American warmaking, and this is his latest dispatch. He reminds his readers that we have no evidence that the Vietnam War taught us anything. I use "us" with common looseness, but it grieves me to have even that association with the warmaking policies of U.S. governments from John Kennedy to Barack Obama.
Would Kennedy have taken U.S. troops into Vietnam as his successor did? Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. thought not, and he knew Kennedy far better than I did. I remember asking the same question when I published my book, Vietnam and American Foreign Policy (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1968). It is one of history's "might-have-beens." I would like to believe Schlesinger is right. But I'm not so sure. In 1961 - the year of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion - Kennedy sent in an additional 3000 military "advisors" to join the 900 who had already been sent to Vietnam during the Eisenhower years.
I count John Kennedy among the three greatest American statesmen of the post-World War II era, all three of them assassinated in 1963 and 1968. (No, I do not regard that as a conspiracy; it was indisputably a tragedy.) But foreign and military policy were not JFK's strong suit, or at least they had not become so by the time of his death, any more than they appear to be for his gifted successor Barack Obama.
"The lessons of Vietnam" were often articulated, but never learned. The short American century may be over, as Andrew Bacevich writes in his current book of that title, but no one seems to have told the White House or the Pentagon.
"The 'lessons of Vietnam,' fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a 'free fire zone,' and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure."
The Obama administration has done many things of which we can be decidedly proud, but its continued pursuit of warmaking and the imposition of its terrible costs in human lives and treasure that could have been otherwise used is surely not among them.
I count John Kennedy among the three greatest American statesmen of the post-World War II era, all three of them assassinated in 1963 and 1968. (No, I do not regard that as a conspiracy; it was indisputably a tragedy.) But foreign and military policy were not JFK's strong suit, or at least they had not become so by the time of his death, any more than they appear to be for his gifted successor Barack Obama.
"The lessons of Vietnam" were often articulated, but never learned. The short American century may be over, as Andrew Bacevich writes in his current book of that title, but no one seems to have told the White House or the Pentagon.
"The 'lessons of Vietnam,' fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a 'free fire zone,' and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure."
The Obama administration has done many things of which we can be decidedly proud, but its continued pursuit of warmaking and the imposition of its terrible costs in human lives and treasure that could have been otherwise used is surely not among them.
